Wednesday, April 23, 2008

SOAPnet.com Becomes Ad Network

Walt Disney Co. recently announced that its sparsely popular website, SOAPnet will become an ad network for 45 smaller web sites. The agreement reached will allow it to distribute content on the other sites as well as sell advertising on their behalfs. SOAPnet joins the overcrowded space of over 300 other ad networks already in existence. Because of the intense complexity and overlapping of these networks, media buyers are bound to get confused. Some believe that it will result in major consolidations very shortly.

Ad networks are a boon for sites with very light or slowing traffic, but that need to sell significant chunks of ad space. Forming these networks allows the bigger sites like SOAPnet to sell ads on other sites and meet their revenue targets. Unfortunately with so many ad networks competing against each other to sell the same ads, competition is heating up revenues are slowing. Like the parent sites, the networks themselves are beginning to fail.

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