Will AdSense Be the "Huge Deflator" of Exchange Hype?

For all their promise, it seems ad exchanges generally produce only pennies on the mille for many online publishers.

Niki Scevak is the founder of Homethinking, a real estate/home seller matchmaking site, and a sometimes analyst for Jupiter Research. After receiving a newsletter bulletin from Right Media crowing about its 13 percent growth in impressions (to 6.4 billion in August) and revenue ($2.2 million in publisher payments), he crunches the numbers for Right Media versus AdSense monetization on his own site and comes up with the following.

“Basic adsense [sic] on the site does $8-10 CPM and the advertisers on other networks who do participate in the exchange managed about 10-20 cents in the brief time I ran the trial.”

But he’s not ready to give up on exchanges yet: “It’s a great concept. Just nowhere near ready for prime time and for the moment Google, on a direct response basis, is always going to be the top bidder, which may turn out to be the huge deflater of recent exchange hype.”