Here’s some more evidence of how bad things are… The average price of a display ad was 27 cents in Q3, a nearly 50 percent drop from Q407’s 50 cents, according to Pubmatic, which sells software optimization tools to ad networks and has been surveying prices for the past four months. In Q1, the company said the average price of a display ad was 37 cents, while from Q2’s price was 34 cents, said Pubmatic, which bases its PubMatic AdPrice Index (PDF) on a survey of roughly 5,000 websites mostly in the U.S. Some of the other findings in its survey showed:

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—Display ad pricing has generally trended downwards across website sizes and verticals.
—All categories moved down from last quarter, with the exception of Technology which stayed flat.
—Social nets are still the lowest priced category, with sports coming in a close second, at 21 cents and 25 cents, respectively.
—Entertainment had the biggest drop of all verticals, falling 42 percent to 33 cents in Q3 from 57 cents in Q1.
—Small-sized websites’ inventory was more than triple the value of larger sites in Q3, with values of 61 cents and 18 cents, respectively.