The Exit Strategy

One of the things that is totally unique to online advertising is the "exit strategy." Is this important? Does it affect price & performance?

Julia Kim from Harvard postulated that “Information resources can be bundled by substance, format, and/or process to be information products and services.” For example a “magazine” has news & entertainment substance, printed on a paper format, whose process is that you turn pages in a linear sequence. For the most part the “ad page” is no different in format and process than an editorial page, and it’s substance may be valued higher than the editorial in certain categories.

Compare this to pcworld.com which presents news & entertainment on a monitor screen whose process is to navigate by clicking, scrolling, opening and closing pages. You have a choice of how to leave.

I was reading PC Worldand thought the page was very cluttered.

I counted 170 total links. Of these 4 were traditional display ads (2.35%), 20 text links (11.8%), and 2 display promotion ads for the magazine (1.2%) for a total “commercial exit share” of 15.3% total or 0.59% per link.

I’m the first one to call this Abbott & Costello math, but a 0.59% share of links would certainly coincide with a similar and small ad CTR.

What would happen if the only way to click out of the page was via an ad? Why shouldn’t the typical magazine mix of 55/45 editorial/ad mix hold on the internet?

Rather than an iCPM, or time-on-page metric, how about SOX: share of exits.

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