Lead generation still lags at most media companies

Folio: published its latest survey on e-media trends at publishing companies, and I’m surprised to see that lead generation still lags as a revenue generator. Only 25% of publishers reported that they earn money from lead generation. That’s too bad, because lead generation offers advertisers real ROI that leads to sustainable e-media revenues.

The top category? Banner advertising. Not surprising, but the fact is that banner ads are the least profitable form of e-media. From the Folio: article:

Banner advertising was also cited as the least profitable e-media revenue stream, with 32 percent of respondents saying they see profit margins of less than 10 percent from banners.

There are several reasons we like lead generation, but here are the top few:

• It scales beyond impression-and-click constraints. No pageview inventory constraints to worry about. With tools like AccelaWorks, you can monitor the performance of all your advertisers’ campaigns, and optimize as necessary.
• Publishers can charge significantly more for it, greatly increasing profitability.
• Advertisers, seeing real value for their ad dollars, are much more likely to renew.
• You can make a lot of money with low-trafficked sites; we’ve seen sites with 35,000 unique monthly visitors bring in $700K to $1 million per year. Those kinds of dollars are simply not possible with banners!

The best way to monetize through lead gen is to offer lead generation throughout a publisher’s entire portfolio of offerings, including Web sites AND newsletters, all in a single platform.