NetAudioAds: bad idea

In the last two weeks I’ve received several emails from people saying they represent a new advertising company and they want to advertise on some of the sites I run. The emails are all vague about the types of ads and don’t tell me who the company is. Something about the pitch just seems slimy. When I ask about the ads, I find out they’re audio ads—5 second audio clips that play when your page loads.

Today I dug a little deeper and figured out what’s going on. There’s a reason the sales pitches all seem like they’re trying to get me to try scientology or get into the home cleaning products business. The ad company has set up an MLM scheme to get affiliates to promote their services for them.

The ads are a stupid idea. They’re short audio ads that play on the first pageview from a visitor. The samples are things like "Taco Bell. Open late." There’s no interaction required by the user, they just play automatically. That’s annoying.

But it’s okay, they say. They’ve run the page on 550,000 web pages with minimal complaints. Talk about a useless statement. 550k pages is a tiny sample of the web’s size. There’s nothing mentioned about the traffic to these pages—are these low-traffic sites catering to MLM types? Then of course they don’t get complaints. And since the ad code doesn’t insert any link back to the company, how is a reader going to find them to complain anyway?

If you’re measuring your ad effectiveness based on how many complaints you get, you’ve already got a problem.

Let’s look at their economics for a moment. The revenue share they offer is 25% per impression, with additional 5% commissions on your your downstream affiliates' ad revenue. What publisher in their right mind is going to join an ad network that only pays 25%? Ad networks that respect their publishers only keep a small management fee. They typically pay out 60%-80% of the ad spend.

They’re claiming to pay the site owner a $2.50-$7.50 CPM, although it’s not clear they’ve actually sold any advertising yet—their site talks about a Feb 1 launch date and says they can’t determine actual CPMs until then. At those CPMs and the rate they’re paying publishers, they’re charging advertisers $10-$30 CPM. That’s a big number for an ad that doesn’t have any response tracking mechanisms, no real room for a brand message, and is running on random blog content.

At those CPMs, an advertiser is going to expect ads on high-quality content run by recognizable publishers with a good demographic match to the advertiser. NetAudioAds, however, is out recruiting MLM bottom feeders for publishers. One of the affiliates suggested that instead of running this on my main blog, I just create a spam blog on a free blog hosting site, put the ads there, and drive traffic to it. And for that they’re charging Taco Bell a $30 CPM?

I’m not sure they’re entirely honest, either. On the site that they’re using to sell advertising, the assure advertisers, "907 million people will be online today... 97% of these people [have] audio systems and they are waiting to hear your audio advertisements." Yet on the publisher site they tell you with a wink and a nudge that lots of people don’t have speakers or sound systems, but you’ll still get paid on those.

NetAudioAds says some shady things, doesn’t have an economically sound business model, and will drive your readers away.

(Note to the MLM trolls that will surely stop by now, feel free to comment and debate, but if you stick your affiliate link in the comments, I’ll delete the entire comment as spam.)