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A comment on Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google. Parent comment

Re:Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarante... by toast0 on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @09:46PM (#19620991)
Inventory is slots to put ads. AOL had the eyeballs, Google had the platform to turn eyeballs into money, better than AOL was doing by itself. Google provided a guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?) so that AOL would have confidence it wasn't bait and switch.

See also the Yahoo/Bing deal which didn't work out as well. Microsoft didn't end up actually hitting the targets, and convinced Yahoo to take less; and Yahoo also didn't reduce employee count anywhere near plan on searchy/advertising stuff, so they missed targets on revenue and cost and user experience.

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Re:Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarante... by nostrademons on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @10:34PM (#19621288)
"guaranteed rate (cpm? cpc?)"

It was guaranteed revenue IIUC, something like "If you do not make at least $150M from this deal, Google will pay you the difference." That makes the deal a no-brainer for AOL, but puts Google on the hook for any shortfall, which could have potentially ended up bankrupting the company.

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Re:Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarante... by toast0 on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @11:23PM (#19621531)
I couldn't find a great description of the deal terms. I did find mention that at least some of the guarantee needed to be paid up front. I suspect the guaranteed payment was contingent on some level of traffic though -- if AOL had turned off the placement, or lost a huge amount of users, then they probably couldn't keep the money.
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Re:Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarante... by C1sc0cat on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @06:26AM (#19623318)
Cost per mille or cost for 1000 clicks -its an old-school advertising term
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Re:Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarante... by reallydude on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @11:42AM (#19625784)
CPM = Cost per mill (cost per 1000 views)

CPC = Cost per Click (cost per 1 click)

These terms are widely used today.

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