Growing Demand Blog

An article recently ran on MediaPost about some work we are considering in the area of pay-per-click advertising services for our popular health and fitness site, LIVESTRONG.COM.  While it is still early days for us, I thought it made sense to provide a little additional context about the opportunity that we are beginning to explore.

LIVESTRONG.COM is proving to be a very interesting vertical destination for socially-oriented, health conscious consumers.  There is an amazing amount of traffic associated with people recording what they are eating, the calories they are burning, and the nutritional value of five hundred thousand food items. In fact, people have tracked their consumption of hundreds of millions of food items and pairings.

We are getting early positive signals from consumer packaged goods marketers that this audience and content is extremely interesting from a targeted advertising standpoint.  As an example, if somebody has tracked that they just consumed a breakfast bar, it is easy to imagine a brand marketer that makes a vitamin-rich breakfast drink would value the opportunity to appear in this context. The possibilities are nearly endless.

As a result, we are soliciting feedback from marketers around the development of a performance-based advertising service that would connect them with this audience. We believe vertical advertising strategies like this are an important part of the future of new media, and it compliments a lot of the work that we are already doing with branded advertisers around display ads, sponsorships and deep content relationships.

If you are a brand marketer with an interest in helping shape this offering, we’d love to hear from you.

Does this mean that Demand Media is developing a paid search platform to deploy across our network?  Of course not. We have longstanding partnerships with Google and Yahoo that are very successful for all parties. They have the sheer volume of advertising relationships and distribution required to be successful with horizontal paid search and contextual matching platforms like Google AdWords, Google AdSense, and Yahoo Sponsored Search.

The important take away is this:  between the reach and impact of our partners, and the innovation of the Demand Media team, I like our chances to develop innovative forms of online advertising that are appreciated by consumers and brands alike.