You have recruited many of your ‘Priority A’ sites and have also taken on a handful of inbound applicants that fit your network niche well. Hopefully you have been able to sign on a few charter advertisers to begin running ads on the network to help growing and nurturing the community. Of course the key to keeping your publisher partners happy is to give them love (aka wealth, celebrity, influence).
Being an active Network Builder over the past few months, you have been focused on identification of the top sites, both in quality and traffic. You have really focused on getting these sites set-up into your network ad systems, installing a network logo or badge with a link to the network storefront, and even begun to drive some endemic traffic from your site to other sites in your network.
Of course you will continue to grow the network over time, and probably will have more and more inbound inquiries as you build out the network. But it is time to take the next step in being a true network operator. Many people ask ‘What is the difference between a network builder and a network operator?’ There really is not much difference, as you will always be building your network regardless of how much of the market you lock up. There will always be new sites and extensions on your focus into additional sub-niches.
Once you have signed these sites up onto your network systems, the next step is to sell the network. To sell the network in this competitive market you really have to work through a handful of important next steps.
Selling a network is slightly different than selling a site, or even a handful of sites. You are going to be bidding on some of the same RFP’s and working with many of the same advertisers, but at a much bigger scale. You are in the big leagues now, and you should act like it. When the tiers of an RFP bid are $20K, $80K, and $250K, you should be looking at the $250K bid as you now can bring a significant part of the web audience within the target market to your advertiser partners.
To make this happen, the first step is making sure you are measuring your network and publishing to size through the audience measurement services. There are a handful of audience measurement services, but the premier services are comScore Media Metrix, and Nielsen NetRatings. The agencies use either or both when they are working with their clients to find the best brand ad campaign solution. These two are really the only two that matter for you right now. We will talk about other measurement options in a future post.
You need to have your site and network sites measured within these services. You need this not only for your sales team to be able to showcase the total reach and value of your network, but also for the agency to run analyses on your network versus other sites and/or networks they are trying to reach.
The agencies need to rely on these independent sources of data, as it allows them a neutral approach to compare your network versus their other options. Though you probably think these services numbers are too low, it is because you are comparing them to your weblogs, which are too high. There is a happy medium, but we will get into thsat discussion later.
So in order to get your network to show-up as an option for agencies to run their Reach and Frequency analyses off of in the Media Metrix and NetRatings toolsets, you need to work with these two services to ensure they are defining your property correctly.
The quickest way to ensure you are measuring your network correctly is to have each of your network member sites sign-over their traffic to you in a TAL (Traffic Assignment Letter). These letters are used by the measurement services to ensure the traffic for the sites that are in your network are counted under your property and so that agencies and brand managers can analyze the value you bring.
The way this works is, you send a copy of each TAL to each of your network member sites. They will then define the website/s that they want to sign over to you to roll-up to your property. Each of the sites that signs over traffic, be it a full website or part of a website, will still be able to see their own traffic within the Media Metrix and NetRatings reports, but they will be under your property.
The measurement firms want to know this is a legit assignment/relationship. Traffic assignments will be considered if the companies that are involved fall into any of the following categories:
- Can provide documentation that they have a strategic partnership or business agreement
- Share content between the network operator and the sites
- Have co-branded pages such as shared content or badges
- Host pages for the company involved
- Provide documentation that they have transferred their traffic as part of a business deal, partnership, or advertising network affiliation
The traffic can be assigned at the URL level, for example sports.yahoo.com/Chicago can be assigned to your Chicago Bears network, while Yahoo retains credit for the rest of their sports channel. The traffic for the Bears will be subtracted from the Yahoo! topline within sports and overall, and will be transferred to your network.
Now, most times the traffic that is being signed over is midsized websites and blogs that are willing to sign over all their traffic, in these cases they will just enter in their blog website address, such as blog.knowvertical.com, knowvertical.com or even knowvertical.typepad.com. The traffic that falls under these hosts or domains will be signed over to your network property.
When working with the sites as they sign over their traffic, you should make them aware that this is not a permanent thing. They can always take the traffic back or give it to someone else. The one risk is each of the NetRatings and/or Media Metrix reports are a snapshot in time. This is the reason for the signed document. If the traffic is signed over from July – November 2008, the traffic will always be signed over during those periods in the syndicated reports and it will be a historical snapshot.
If the sites you are working with are worried or need more understanding of what this means and why it is necessary, the main message to communicate to them is that this will help sell their site to big name, high value brand advertisers. If they want to understand what the impact is overall, the real answer is the only impact is within Media Metrix and NetView reporting.
Within each of the audience measurement reports the traffic assignment will actually roll the sites that you are working with into your overall property definition. Thus the unduplicated reach will be calculated along with the demos, impressions and engagement metrics. The sites that are in your property will still be able to be reported out within the reports, thy will just roll-up into your property.
The outcome of a report will look like this:
Vertical Network Name 8,450 Million UV
Site A 2,104 Million UV
Site B 1,758 Million UV
Site C 1,002 Million UV
etc…
So as long as the sites are big enough to break out and report within the audience measurement reports, they will still be able to run the reports on their own sites.
The best time to get your partner sites to sign over their traffic is early in the discussions. You may want to attach the assignment letters to your network agreement forms that they are signing when they join. You can then work with comScore and NetRatings to ensure you are receiving all the credit for your network.
One other note that you should consider. Before having all of the traffic assigned to your network, you will want to make sure you have established a relationship. Make sure there is a badge on the site, you are doing some form of content/link sharing; include the site in a network directory; and make sure your ad tags are up on their sites.
Oh yes, and one other thing. Make sure the sites you are including in your network, and in your traffic, make sense for your vertical. This is what agencies will look at, and if one site is a bad fit, it could skew the overall network metrics.
You can download the traffic assignment letters from comScore and NetRatings or contact each for their most recent documents and/or procedures.
NetShelter, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is focused on the technology space. The NetShelter network has been credited as one of the first true vertical advertising networks. The network is comprised of over 150 websites and blogs focused on the technology space.
The vertical ad network currently enables advertisers to buy site specific combinations of 27 top branded technology websites. Some of the sites within the NetShelter Network include: SitePoint.com, DeveloperShed.com, TechGenix, Geek.com and Techeblog.com. 
