There’s lots of stats on the Messagespace site. So I’ve just spent the evening looking through the list of Messagespace advert publishers according to Messagespace, all 35 of them, looking for more stats.
Just out of curiosity, like.
And what did I find?
On the 35 publishers there were:
- 45 advert spaces
- 36 visible adverts for Messagespace.
- 1 publisher had 2 visible adverts served by Messagespace (advertising Messagespace) also had 10 other Messagespace codeblocks, but not showing ads on the page (I don’t know why, I didn’t look that closely)
- 3 publishers listed on the Messagespace site had no adverts showing or any Messagespace code in the source code
- the two magazines were advertising themselves
- erm. That’s about it
I’m not going to do any percentages cos it’s late and I can’t be arsed now, but 36 ads for the ad server on 35 publishers with 46 ad spaces. What is it? Some sort of ad world Ponzi scheme*? How many of these 800,000 users** are gonna need the services of an internet advertising network?
The raw data (.xls) (it doesn’t tell you anything I haven’t already)
*I’m not implying there is something illegal is being done, but all those bloggers advertising the ad agency that’s serving them ads? Where is all this money coming from?
**A bit of a contentious issue is figures
Did you count any Commission Junction ads, which are often served through MessageSpace? (CJ often use odd domain names, but the WHOIS on them will always declare the CJ connection.)
I ask mainly because it simply wouldn’t do to undercount and – in between plugs for themselves – MessageSpace seem to be carrying a lot of CJ ads lately.
I didn’t count anything else apart from ads that were obviously Messagespace, an ad that had the Messagespace URL in my browser status bar when I hovered over it or messagespace codeblocks in the source code if there was nothing else.
I didn’t know about CJ, and as you say, I don’t want to run down a perfectly respectable, *ahem* professional business by undercounting their ads.