Mumbrella’s audited traffic sees 58% growth
Mumbrella’s audience rose to a record high in February, new numbers from the Audit Bureaux of Australia suggest.
According to the ABA, Mumbrella delivered 737,081 page impressions during February. This was up 58% on the same period in 2011. Mumbrella’s previous high came in November when it delivered 710,394 page impressions.
The online audiences of most trade press titles in the sector including AdNews, B&T and Marketing magazine are not audited.
Campaign Brief’s audited traffic grew from 225,522 page impressions to 260,818, an increase of 15.6%.
Great work Tim & team….
Mumbrella!
“Digital naivety dooms the Finkelstein Inquiry”
And then YOU quote ALEXA?
Hi Devil’s avocaat,
I hate using Alexa. But other titles in the space aren’t audited and generally too small to be reliably picked up by the likes of ComScore and Nielsen.
In much the same way that an 18th century map of the world was better than no map at all, I feel similarly about Alexa.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Fair enough Tim,
It does seem very odd that sites written about advertising would not be audited themselves.
As they say, “No audit generally means no readers”
Tim, just a point of clarification. PIs are not a measure of audience but a measure of traffic. Average daily UBs isa good proxy for average daily audience. Fortunately there is a good correlation between the movement of the PIs and the average daily UBs which indicate that there has been no shenanigans to bring about such groth.
I also join the clarion call for all titles to be audited.
Bloody keyboard – apologies for the typos.
Interesting. So you have 700,000 page impressions.
You sem to have two paid ad slots per page. Assuming you are on a $10 cpm, does that mean that you gross around $15k a month in ad sales? Is that the only income to cover the costs of the business or is there something there that I have missed? I have excluded Mumbrella 360 which looks like you would have made a very very tidy profit on.
It just makes me wonder about viability. Lets assume that this is the most popular website in the B2B marketing category in Australia. And a massive success story that everyone looks to for leadership in the digital space.
So we all agree that the internet is the future of publishing and media.
It’s just that success doesn’t seem that, well succesful.
Maybe my maths is just hopeless.
Hi AB&GR’s LC,
You’re probably making an assumption on CPMs based on targeting consumers rather than a niche.
I can probably help you on a couple of points, based on info we have published elsewhere.
We actually have three ad slots – the leader board, medium rectangle and banner.
The leader board has a published rate card of $60cpm; medium rec is $70cpm and banner is $40cpm. Which adds up, in an ideal world for me, to a $170 cpm per page impression.
But of course we don’t necessarily sell out our inventory every month.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Hey Tim,
So lets assume from your $170 you need to subtract (and these are very rough numbers) 10% for agency comission, Say 5% for “load balancing & making sure campaigns are fair”, and another 10% for general saleperson shenannigans. (discounting, schedules etc etc).
taking 25% off leaves me with $127.50 per ‘000. And 700 times that is $89k a month. Or about a million in gross ad sales. On banner ads!
I doffs my hat to you. You and I have met several times. So I know you aren’t spending that cash on razor blades (or a new sports coat…)
Well done. With low overheads and an “internet EBIT” which we all know is worth 3 times at least the EBIT of any other business – You Sir are a millionaire.
All you need is a willing buyer!
You’re very kind, AB&GR’s LC.
If we sold out all 700,000 page impressions every month, a millionnaire I might be. (Mind you, it’s also worth mentioning that we do employ staff who not entirely unreasonably expect a salary …)
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Hmmm. That’s interesting.
If you sell 75% of inventory, and make (say) $50k a month in ad sales then you are on $600k gross revenue. Lets say you have $400k in costs, and net $200k. Internet bueinesses seem to sell for between 10 and 30 times ebitda, So that would value Mumbrella in the $2M – $6M range.
But what does this mean for the media industry as a whole? Can you double ad revenue and impressions fairly easily? It seems to me that there has to be a saturation point in the market? ie the number of pageviews and advertisers is relativley finite, so just how big is this universe?
If (for arguments sake) you completely kill campaign brief ad news et al. How much traffic is available? Looking at your graphs, in aggregate it looks like there is about double the amount of traffic that mumbrella currently gets.
So lets assume you end up in a monopoly position and are the absolute number 1 in the market. You are the Coles and Woolworths combined of B2B marketing. And your revenues double to $100k a month. Profit almost triples to (say) $500k.
What does the market look like then? Have we just replaced one industry (print) with another industry with far smaller profit margins, and a market only big enough to support one online product?
It just feels like the pie is not big enough to be shared around amongst multiple players. I mean for you or me a $500k profit is very nice and everything, but it also means that these enormous multiples being payed for online businesses has a touch of the crazy about it.
Say I payed $5M for Mumbrella. I would look at the business through a prism of how can I make this business at LEAST twice as profitable and ideally 5 times as profitable. For this to work I would need Mumbrella to earn $1M a year for a 20% return, or be hoping for some sort of massive upside. And it escapes me where that would come from from a purely online play.
Maybe it’s just that banner ads are not the future of online and I have it all ass about….
HI AB&GR’s LC,
Ive always thought of myself basically as being in B2B publishing. And somebody cleverer than me (I forget who, but remember their words) said that commercially successful B2B brands need a website, training, conference, awards, directory and a print product built around the brand.
Although our display revenue is very important, it’s about those other channels (present and future) too.
But valuation is relatively irrelevant. Somebody else clever (again, I forget who) argued to me that you’d be crazy to build a business in Australia purely with the intention of selling it because it may never happen. Far better to build something you’ll enjoy working on for years to come.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Awww shucks.
Couldn’t agree more. People who don’t enjoy their work or are have unprofitable businesses are the ones who spend their lives talking about an exit strategy.
But valuations are important in a more macro sense. I am fascinated by the disruption caused by online and how that will translate in the longer term. We are witnessing markets being markets in their purest sense, and it seems to me that the end game is massively granular with low returns. The amount of content on the web doubles every 12 months or so, but the number of advertisers and their spend doesnt keep up. Hence this almost inexorable slide in cpm’s to the point on consumer websites you are heading towards sub $1 cpms which will probably cover server costs at best. Supply and demand in it’s purest sense.
If the profit motive dissapears so does the motive for innovation.
And what is the end game to that?
There must also be a reasonable amount of international traffic. If included it would make the end game less granular.