Burst Media

BURST MEDIA is one of the older extant online ad networks and a survivor of the past several years' string of bankruptcies and fusions, Burst Media serves as a dependable, if not stellar, ad sale outsourcing option for small to medium-sized ”specialty content” web sites. Burst’s asserted emphasis is on higher-paying ”site-targeted” ad placements, and publishers who succeed in selling site-targeted ads through Burst generally speak highly of their success in that regard. Those who do not receive targeted ad placements may scrounge through a mid-sized multi-format mixed bag of remnant ads at low CPM and CPC rates. Unfortunately, many site publishers find that they receive nothing but these remnant ads year after year, leaving Burst a fairly low-paying alternative in the higher echelons of online ad networks.

More information about them, from the website:

Burst Media represents thousands of independent web publishers. Through a select group of vertical channels, built around areas of specific interest, Burst connects advertisers with audiences across the web's most dynamic communities in a social, engaging way.

Burst offers 468x60 banners, 120x600 and 160x600 skyscrapers, little 125x125 button ads that no one ever seems to buy, 728x90 leaderboards, as well as popups and popunders.

Let’s see what Burst have to say about themselves:

"BURST! Media is the only Internet advertising network exclusively dedicated to supporting the vital business and creative interests of specialty-content web publishers. Specialty content on subjects as varied as personal finance to online gaming and entertainment draws audiences advertisers need to reach....

While other advertising networks have focused on targeting with technology, we've focused on what's really important to advertising professionals - the devoted, passionate audiences who regularly interact with online content they really care about. Through the use of customized advertising solutions and effective ad-management technology, BURST! delivers more than 2 billion monthly advertising impressions, across 477 content channels, for its more than 2,000 specialty-content web sites."

In keeping with this emphasis on "specialty content", Burst sites are listed in a large, heirarchical database of categories from which advertisers can choose various targeting options: run of network, category-specific, specific site, geo-targeting, and others.

Heading Burst, we find G. Jarvis Coffin III, former Director of National Advertising for the Los Angeles Times. Prior to that, Mr. Coffin held posts as Vice President of Sales at Business Week and Director of Northeastern Sales for USA Today. Coffin’s sales and advertising background may have something to do with one of Burst’s weakest points, usability of its user interface (see below), as compared to the other members of our Big Three, both of which are run by folks with solid grounding in the technical side of it all.

User Interface

The Burst user interface, to put it simply, needs improvement, at least from the publisher point of view. Slow, clunky, unattractive, and a little buggy, it appears that Burst has simply tried to strap on with duct tape each new feature they’ve come up with over the years to an existing, already inadequate structure, rather than do what they should do, redesign the whole thing from the ground up. That said, the interface does provide all the functionality essential to any serious publisher: the ability to select and deselect ad campaigns individually or by various criteria, such as pop-ups, gambling, etc.; the ability to ad default ads in each ad format (although here they appear to have not properly differentiated default ads by site for publishers who have more than one site with Burst, which is both confusing and counter-productive).

Intrusive ads can be capped on a site-by-site basis, from none through unlimited. Burst imposes its own caps as well to limit impressions of a specific ad to a specific IP address.

Default Ads

As mentioned above, defaults ads, or ”Personal Campaigns” to use Burst’s terminology, are available in all formats, but only one set per publisher account, which is a little silly if a single publisher has numerous sites with Burst and wishes to display different default ads on the different sites, a fairly natural desire. Defaults can be in the form of static clickable images or iframed html pages, allowing total flexibility to the publisher.

Reporting

Statistics are updated at the paleolithic rate of once per day. There is a long wait – up to an hour or two – each time their databases drag and crunch raw stats into usable, viewable statistics, during which one cannot even get access to older data. Big flaw. Presentation of statistics is also quite awkward, and a far cry from the excellent, rapid, and timely banner statistics offered by Tribal Fusion and Fastclick. Sales stats are also presented at the gross, rather than net, rate (in most places), which forces publishers to mentally compute their actual take based upon their contract every time they view the numbers. One would think it would be a fairly simple task to simply include the correct computation in the statistics pages.

Payment Terms

Payment terms have degraded with dreary regularity over the years to the current Net 90, meaning that if an ad runs in January, you can expect to be paid for it in April or May. Contract terms are as follows:

Contract type / Rates

Month-to-month Non-exclusive: Contract Rate is 50%. Publishers earn 50%, and BURST!'s revenue is 50%.
One Year Exclusive: Contract Rate is 55%. Publishers earn 55%, and BURST!'s revenue is 45%.
Three Years Exclusive: Contract Rate is 60%. Publishers earn 60%, and BURST!'s revenue is 40%.

Summary

Impressions required: 5,000 monthly impressions

CPM/CPC levels

Geo-targeted pop-unders up to around $4.00

Banners around $0.50 - $1.00 CPM or $0.10 - $0.75 CPC

Site-targeted rates presumably higher

Sites on Network: 2,000

Reach: 2 billion monthly impressions

Media formats

468x60, 728x90, 120x600 and 160x600 skyscrapers, optional interstitial, capped pop-up and pop-unders

Rich Media: Yes

Overall Rating: RECOMMENDED, but not glowingly

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