New AOP research shows content sites overpriced versus social networks

New research commissioned by the AOP, and reported by Journalism.co.uk earlier today, shows that 

"...engagement and advertising responsiveness is strongest on original content sites compared to other site genres. Respondents are almost twice as likely to trust advertising and brands on content sites vs. social media sites".

Journalism.co.uk also highlights some detail from the report: "respondents were significantly more likely to trust advertising on content sites than social media sites, with 59 per cent trusting content sites compared to 34 per cent for social networks." 

Which is hardly good news for those original content sites which (at one remove) funded the report, given that as it stands they achieve CPMs almost ten times those achieved by social networks for what they appear to have just proven is only twice the value.

See, for example, Mary Meeker's excellent presentation from a couple of weeks ago, which shows social networks making $0.55 CPMs vs $2.69 at the portals and $5.63 for news and information sites; or comScore analysis from June which showed social networks at $0.56, general news sites at $6.14 and newspaper sites at $6.99; or analysis from Evercore Partners quoted on Reuters which has Facebook making $1, portals making $3. There is some (though in many categories surprisingly little) variation between estimates in the market, but the consensus is very clear - news, and especially newspaper websites, are achieving CPMs ten times those of the social networks. 

The AOP study polled 1,340 respondents via online questionnaire in October and appears to be a solid piece of research. It concludes that,

"...there are three key characteristics of advertising behaviour:  trust (consumers who particularly trusted the site brands they used, were more likely to trust the brands advertising on these sites - and more likely to respond to advertising on these sites); action (consumers were more likely to click on advertising links and/or purchase from sites they trust) and awareness,"

and of course draws the lesson that in all three categories content sites are better for advertisers than social networks. All very reasonable and perfectly likely to be true: but if content sites deliver only twice the trust, action or awareness, how long can they go on charging ten times as much for it?

(At time of writing AOP had not returned a request for comment.)  AOP came back with comments, which now appear on this new post.