Jim Scheinman (Charles River Ventures), Seth Goldstein (SocialMedia.com), Scott Rafer (Lookery), Troy Young (VideoEgg), Murtaza Hussain (Peanut Labs, Inc) spoke at GSP West about monetizing applications on social networks.

Global advertising spend on the internet continues to grow rapidly. There are a whole variety of ways to monetize via advertising and transactions.

Application monetization networks like SocialMedia and VideoEgg have emerged to aggregate applications into advertising networks. To turn this into a big business, we need to get the brands to start spending more seriously to reach these audiences.

Marketers need to think about very new things when marketing in applications and games, such as where/when their ad gets shown within the application flow. Once the user is more engaged there is more likelyhood of getting the user to do things with advertising.

Murtaza observed that CPM can pay some bills, but real action is in virtual currency used that can be bartered for services and goods, both physical and virtual. Troy says that people can drive high media value they can make the money needed to drive revenues.

Seth observed that the best that Google has been able to do for Adsense is an effective CPM of $0.50, and that we need to do better than that to be successful.

What’s the new measure - revenue per active user according to Murtaza.  The ad network guys on the panel still focus on effective CPM.

(My note: This panel was very skewed to advertising.  There was very limited discussion of monetizing options beyond advertising.  Virtual transactions, lead gen all have much more potetial as CPM is not going to go up in my opinion.  Large publishers such as Yahoo have huge amounts of unsold inventory and it’s not going to get better as the world of content continues to expand faster than the amount of user’s discretionary time.  My bet is with Murtaza.)

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