Our Heroes: Culture Pundits (pt 1.)
Intro: I visit Bad at Sports often, and a couple years ago I noticed something - a really big ad on the right side of the screen. I never noticed ads — I have, what they call in the industry, “banner blindness”. But these 300 wide by 250 pixel spots… you couldn’t miss ’em. And now I see that they have flash, so now not only are these big ads, but they move, they can even be mini-movies.
These ads not only got my attention, but got me to believe that web advertising could work. The Brooklyn Museum was exhibiting Yinka Shonibare, an artist I liked who’s name I could never remember — until the Culture Pundits spot. Then, after seeing it 18 times I remembered his name just fine, learned how to spell it, and it kept his work front of mind. As soon as I got the wordpress template for our magazine, my first question was about how to fit in the 250 X 300 pixel ads.
Yinka Shonibare (300 x 250 pixels)
The group behind this podcast didn’t rustle up that advertiser. Nor it is Google AdSense. It’s through a partnership with a company called Culture Pundits. I’ll let them explain who they are and how it works in their own words.
What is Culture Pundits?
Culture Pundits is a carefully curated network of 27 leading cultural
websites and blogs covering visual art, literature, architecture, film
and design, as well as important cultural topics in the news. It is a
joint production of my consulting company Tristan Media LLC, and
Mathes Grant, a creative consultancy co-founded by Tom Schreiber. Our
goal is to develop long-term relationships with a group of quality
sponsors. We don’t call ourselves and ad network, and we prefer the
word sponsors instead of advertisers.
What gave you the idea for Culture Pundits?
I have run the arts calendar ArtCal (now ArtCat) for five years, and
wanted to find some revenues to pay writers and editors that did not
involve displaying ugly flashing ads on my site, or often irrelevant
Google ads — dentists, etc. I also wanted to find a way to spread
the word about a great group of culture writers and bloggers that I
know and read.
When did you start? How did you start? Did you approach sites?
I proposed it in March 2007, and that’s when Tom Schreiber got in
touch with me. We launched in August 2007 with ArtCat and 9 other
sites. I approached people I knew that I wanted to be part of it, and
over time others asked to be a part of it, and many of those were
approved.
How is it working?
We eventually reached over 40 sites, and offered a complex range of
advertising possiblities — different sizes, targeting specific
geographical areas, specific sites, etc. That became too difficult to
manage given the prices we were able to charge, so in May 2009 we
switched to a simplified sponsorship program with about 25 sites. We
now have a single sponsorship size on all sites — 300×250 pixels.
Sponsors can buy a share of voice across all sites in the network in
increments of 10%. That means if you buy 10%, you are seen for 10% of
page views on each site.
What are the challenges you encounter?
The biggest challenges are getting the word out there about this
pretty amazing set of sites, and also managing the financial and
bill-collecting side of it with such a small staff. It’s really just
me and Tom running the whole show, although people from some of the
sites help with things like press releases and copy on the Culture
Pundits site.
What, technically, is involved for the partner? (a plugin? An ad
feeder?). Does it have to be wordpress?
Our sites run on various blogging platforms. They just have to put in
some JavaScript code to display the sponsorship space.
How big (in traffic) should a partner site be?
We have a few sites with only 10,000-15,000 page views per month, but
those are certain sites we want to be part of the network regardless
of traffic. The sites we have added over the last year have all had
at least 50,000 page views per month.
How can sites apply? What are some of the criteria to be a member?
We don’t have an application process. If a high-quality site with
good traffic comes to us via a recommendation from a current member of
the network, we will consider them, but we are not actively adding
sites at this time.
How (vaguely) do you calculate revenue for a member site?
The network takes a 40% cut of the revenues to pay for the ad server
sales commissions, plus the time involved in running the financial
side of things. The remaining 60% is then divided among the sites
based on their share of traffic for that month. For example, if the
total Network payout for a single month comes to $10,000, and a site
represents 10% of the network traffic, they you will receive $1,000.
We make all payments to our publishers via PayPal.
