The New BLUE BOOK Top 20 Ranking
In March, 2010, Revenue Performance surveyed over 1,000 publishers, advertisers, agencies and networks. The factors identified by the vast majority of respondents reflect the value placed on trust and reputation right now. Over 80% of respondents picked tracking accuracy and trust as the most important factors when choosing a network partner, with fraud prevention running a close third
Methodology
The BLUE BOOK Top 20 ranking is not a simple list of the biggest networks. Instead, it takes into account reputation, influence, clientele, reach and scale. An important part of the ranking process was a survey of over 1,000 industry figures carried out during March, 2010. In that survey we asked an open-field first question for the respondents favorite performance marketing network or exchange so there was no suggestion bias. On a subsequent screen we provided a list of around 40 networks for additional choices that were given half the weight of the open-text responses.
The first 2010 Top 20 ranking of the best performance marketing networks and exchanges comes after a tumultuous six months that have seen some networks driven to the wall and others merged, acquired, refinanced or reorganized. The overall effect has been of a “flight to quality” by many advertisers and publishers, in which reputation, trust and service have counted for more than ever.
The new Top 20 list shows this dynamic in action as bigger networks have become more popular with our readers. Affiliates are choosing larger networks because they want the confidence that they’ll get paid, merchants because they appreciate the advanced fraud prevention systems and technology in which larger networks can invest.