Where's the best place to learn about online advertising?
More specifically, say I wanted to do an analysis similar to that done by First Round Capital. What should I read if I want to learn, e.g., what is a reasonable eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions; I had to google it), or what CTRs to expect, etc. etc.?
The single best way to learn about online advertising is to run a Google AdWords campaign for a few months. You will learn more than you ever wanted to know.
One way to do this is to find someone with an info product (software, etc) you wouldn't have moral qualms selling, signing up as their affiliate, writing yourself a landing page, and then driving traffic to it in AdWords. You're not doing it to make money: you're just playing a more educational, more expensive version of WoW. (I advertised my very, very niche product for less than $3 a day for over a year, while teaching myself how online advertising worked.)
Note that you'd quickly find out that "reasonable eCPMs" and CTRs are very, very dependent on what the market and context is. I know some advertisers who are freaking overjoyed that I pay them $1 CPMs. (They sell me "remnant inventory", i.e., it is traffic that we expect to have such low performance if it were meat it would be the parts of the cow we grind up to feed other cows with.) That is under a tenth of what you'd expect for the best traffic (US-based, first pageview) on a fairly successful tech gadget blog.
More specifically, say I wanted to do an analysis similar to that done by First Round Capital. What should I read if I want to learn, e.g., what is a reasonable eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions; I had to google it), or what CTRs to expect, etc. etc.?