Targeted Audiences vs Niche Content

Online advertising is experiencing huge changes nowadays. Marketers want to reach their potential customers online and want the latest technology to do it. But the fact is that 63% of the online advertising expenditure went to only five online properties in 2010: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL, according to Darrenherman.com. So, how to reach your audience on the rest of the websites? How to invest your money efficiently over the remaining 37% of online properties?

New technologies have emerged to solve this challenge: first ad networks, then ad exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, etc. All of them are looking to use RTB and Retargeting technologies to reach the right audience at the right time, delivering the right advertisement to them. The online advertising ecosystem views this trend as part of the solution to help invest marketing budgets all along the internet. They are trying to target audiences following browser cookies and defining consumer intentions through the rest of their online behaviour. Results are good and the sector is seeing how marketing budgets are making those technologies grow.

This reality is the consequence of the enormous growth of webpages with no quality content at all. But when there is good content and it is defined for a very specific topic, online advertising technology could still fail to deliver the right advertisiment if it is only based on RTB, retargeting and behavioural variables. As social networking is still growing, niche content will have a very important role in the consolidation of the online advertising sector. Marketers need to go back to basics and recognise that niche content can deliver better campaign results than the new technologies that have appeared to solve the problem of  the mediocre content of the last several years.

The internet is generating new quality niche content. Companies that focus on this specific business will have a competitive advantage in the consolidation of the online advertising market in the following decade. Even if we are talking about 37% of the pie, that is still a big piece of pie in this market.