• by Ross Fadner , September 19, 2008

Adify President Russell Fradin, speaking at the OMMA Global show in New York, had a news flash for the social networking industry: CPMs are the wrong metric for selling advertising on your sites. Why, because you have so many damn pages. Social nets find themselves awash in low CPMs precisely because they have hundreds of millions of impressions, most of which generate a small amount of traffic.

 

Both Eric Wheeler, CEO of 33Across and Margaret Clerkin, Executive Director of MindShare Invention, agreed. According to Clerkin, social networks aren’t even the right place to put advertisements. She said MindShare uses them to find influential people and monitor what they say about products. Social nets, rather, are more of a content/media play. So what should they be selling?