Most clicked on area of AOL News

We’ve been fairly quiet on the blog recently, but only because we’ve been so focused on our continued partner growth, new product pipeline and a few top secret projects…to be announced soon.

Over the past year, as our analytics have steadily caught up with the swift pace of our partner roll-outs, we’ve begun to gather more meaningful insight into the effectiveness of Sphere’s technology for our partners.  Fortunately, we continue to surprise ourselves with the results.  The slightly blurry chart below is a click-map from Omniture for an AOL News article a few weeks ago.  It shows that, on this article, three of the most popular five clicks were into the Sphere module.  This means that, in aggregate, Sphere was the most clicked on item on the page, by a fairly wide margin.  While this was a particularly strong performing article for our technology, Sphere consistently attracted one or two of the top five clicks.   This is tremendously encouraging because more people clicking into Sphere means more effective recirculation for our partners.   It also means that our algorithm is surphacing relevant results that people want to see.  And if that weren’t enough, it also means that many many eyes roll over the ad unit (for those partners who run advertising with us) leading to more opportunities for our advertising partners to get noticed.  We love finding new measurement tools when they show us results like these and we’ll share more in the weeks ahead.

BTF is where you find the action!

We’ve been preaching this mantra for some time,  but as web usage continues to evolve, the truthiness of our claims becomes all the more clear.  Below the fold (BTF) is where you find the action on the article page.  Heat-map studies support the intuitive logic indicating that online readers are focusing more of their attention in the main content well from the beginning of the article straight down the page.  It’s where readers bookmark, share, email, print and comment.  If you’re a reader interacting with the content in any sort of meaningful way, chances are that this is where you’re hanging out, which also means that these are the most engaged and aware of all readers.  The more one is interacting with the content, the more time they are spending below the fold.

Why do we care?  Because this is where Sphere lives and this is where we integrate ads with our content.  Online ad sales development has struggled to keep pace with innovations in content delivery and the evolution of web page design.   Today, the lion’s share of media is sold in three traditional sizes and placements – 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 box ad and the 160×600 skyscraper, which all live either at the top of the page or in the right column.  This is bound to change.  As you can see in the heatmap study (and as everyone intuitively already knows), there is a direct disconnect between where readers focus their attention and where the bulk of ads are sold on the page.  For this reason, the leading publishers continue to think up new schemes and ad formats to test.  Unfortunately, the most recent ideas have involved larger and larger ads, which more than anything else, are more and more annoying rather than more effective.  As my girlfriend likes to remind me, bigger is not always better:)  As the industry continues to search for that elusive golden egg, Sphere is packaging more tightly integrated content/advertising modules than ever before.  If you’ve been following this blog, you saw us roll out the 468×60 on LA Times.  It received such an overwhelmingly positive response from our fans (not to mention excellent performance and click-thru rates) that we’ve decided to add it into our core product mix.  DailyFinance and Switched are the most recent sites to go live with our integrated 468×60 and both were integrated about as seamlessly as I’ve seen advertising integrated anywhere online.  It’s virtually impossible for an engaged reader who is commenting, sharing, emailing or printing not to interact with this module and therefore, also the integrated 468×60 ad unit.  It’s safe to assume that a large majority of readers who reach the end of the article will see the ad.  We already know that our content links draw an average 1.5-2.0% click-thru rate so a good chunk of readers are hovering right there on top of the ad already.  In terms of reaching a reader in the midst of their interaction with the content, I haven’t seen many better options.  The 468×60 banner is not as popular a unit as it once was, but we’re confident that media buyers will see the value in both this tightly integrated package and in reaching the most engaged readers specifically where they’re spending their time on the page.  If you’re a media buyer and this resonates with you, please contact us at advertising [at] sphere [dot] com.

Tinseltown in Da Sphere: Welcoming our latest partner, LA Times

Today, we are psyched to announce the first fruits of a project that began last fall with a conversation that sprouted from an interview on NPR-WNYC.  Six months after that interview, we partnered with Tribune to power contextual content syndication on their 10 news sites – LA Times, Chicago Tribune, RedEye, Baltimore Sun, New York Newsday, Florida Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call and Hampton Roads Daily Press.  Barely one month later, after a beautiful collaboration between Sphere and Tribune’s LA Team, Sphere is now powering related content on every LA Times article, as you can see in the below example (clickable).

Along with recirculating related LA Times content on each article, we’ve also created custom indices for the LA Times of both their favorite LA blogs and local news sources as well as a custom “around the web” index of sites with whom they’ve chosen to share traffic.  Both are innovative ways to use Sphere’s technology to a publisher’s advantage.  We’ve also integrated a 468×60 IAB ad unit beneath the content in this module, creating a seamless and integrated experience.  This excites me because we’ve learned that when content and advertising are married in an effective and natural way, performance of both improve.

This is the first of several Tribune sites to launch with Sphere, so we have our work cut out for us, but a special thanks goes to Ron Parsons and his team at Tribune for driving this project from the very beginning.  On Sphere’s side, Troy, Kevin, Adam and, as always, Martin get the credit for making the magic happen and making the rest of us look good:)

Untapping Value “Below the Fold”

Sphere works with a number of publishers to display related content links from their archives. Typically, the results are displayed at the end of an article in a space commonly referred to as “below the fold”. While a bit counter-intuitive, displaying links below the fold is ideal. We’ve tested placement in a number of areas and the space immediately following an article yields the highest click through rates. While important data for our partners, it’s interesting as part of a larger conversation around the evolving viewpoint that “below the fold” is no longer the forgotten wasteland of Web 1.0 days. Milissa Tarquini wrote an excellent article titled “Blasting the Myth of the Fold“. All this has me thinking that advertising “below the fold” is much more compelling than ever before because:

1. This is where readers comment which engages readers at a very different level;
2. This is where readers participate in new engaging features like polling, video inks or finding additional content links;
3. There is little to no advertising there unlike above the fold where there is a lot of stuff happening and readers have learned to “tune out” ads;
4. The CPM for “Below the Fold” advertising is heavily discounted making the ROI very competitive or advantageous; and
5. Scrolling is also associated with web 2.0 design because big, clear text and “spacious”, “clean” content implies longer web pages.

Please share your thoughts with us.