• by Ross Fadner , March 17, 2004

Since it began offering its services to content providers' bottom line at no additional serving fee to advertisers, PointRoll has reeled publishers in right and left. In its latest coup, PointRoll today said it added the New York Times Digital, the digital unit of The New York Times Co., and its NYTimes.com and Boston.com properties, to its PointRoll Included network.

The PointRoll Included network consists of advertising tech-serving relationships with national and international publishers, portals, and networks including America Online, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, and Yahoo! The idea behind the network is to propagate advertisers' usage of PointRoll's rich media products both by making the cost of using PointRoll comparable to that of standard banner and leaderboard ads, and by simplifying the buying process. PointRoll's Included network gave advertisers incentives to use more rich media advertising; rich media was often viewed as cost-prohibitive by some advertisers.

Jason Krebs, VP-sales and marketing, NYTimes.com, says that NYTimes.com has worked successfully with PointRoll in the past, and that progressing to the next level was simply economical. "In the past we saw many repeat purchases of PointRoll," he says. "Then they came to us with a more economical equation that improves our bottom line."

Krebs observes that rich media ads like PointRoll's are beneficial to publishers, advertisers, and consumers. "We're thinking about the needs of our readers first and foremost. Certain forms of rich media ads are absolutely beneficial to our readers because it gives them more information within the banner," he says. He adds that advertisers are also served because readers don't have to leave the site to interact with ads.

Robert Levitan, chief marketing officer, PointRoll, notes that Yahoo! was the first major content publisher to enter the PointRoll Included network. "Before," he says, "all the major publishers accepted PointRoll, but it was never included in their media kit." Yahoo! joined PointRoll Included in July of 2002. Levitan says that the new business model was "honed and perfected by Yahoo!" in the fall of 2003.

PointRoll's ads are mini, stand-alone HTML Web pages, notes Jules Gardner, CEO-PointRoll. "Any technology you can use on a Web page can be used inside a PointRoll ad," he says. He says that the business model shift reflects the natural evolution of the PointRoll product and rich media in general. "The more PointRoll's ads are served up, the less dependent agencies will have to be on their ad server," Gardner says, adding that "ad serving from an agency perspective may cease to exist."

PointRoll's ad technologies consist of the floating BadBoy, the banner snap-out TowelBoy, and its most popular, the rollover FatBoy. PointRoll claims that 10 percent of consumers presented with a FatBoy rollover actually scroll over the ad for more information. Consumers who scroll over the ads interact with them for an average of eight seconds. Since PointRoll ads don't show up in a new window, pop-up blockers can't block them.

The addition of the NYTimes.com properties caps a successful week for PointRoll, which landed another big fish on Monday--CBSMarketWatch.com. "We're adding ten more vertical category leaders in the next month," Levitan says. PointRoll executives also told MediaDailyNews that a new advertising technology is on the horizon--one without any size restrictions--in the near future.

In cutting back the cost of its ad technologies both to publishers and advertisers, PointRoll has shown that it's willing to sacrifice revenue for exposure and ultimately, increased volume. But offering rich media at no additional cost could backfire. The rest of the rich media community could soon follow PointRoll in lowering costs to advertisers in order to generate increased sales and awareness for the interactive ad formats.