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August 27, 2004

Sell Side Advertising is Problematic, what we need is PremiumSpots

Posted by Adam Viener

Another Corante contributor, Ross Mayfield of Many2Many, recently wrote an interesting article entitled "Cost per Influence" where he postulates about a model in which companies would pay publishers based on their ability to influence a sale. Recently John Battelle did a great job summarizing and expanding on the idea that Ross put forward in his article "Sell Side Advertising"

John speaks of a model where companies would place their ads out on an open market and publishers / bloggers, would come by and pick up these ads and run them as they wish. The tracking tools would be part of the ads, so that advertisers would know where their ads were running and how they were performing.

To be honest I am not sure this gives the advertisers any more control over the distribution of their ads, plus it ads a level of payment complexity that would be very hard to overcome.

I do agree however that the Adsense model where advertisers have little control over where their ads appear is problematic. I think sell side advertising would make this problem even worse.

What we need is PremiumSpots.com (a fictitious company, domain is for sale if you like my idea ). PremiumSpots.com would contract with premium service providers and enable the better publishers to let people bid specifically on specific spots on their site. So if I was running and add for Web Hosting Services, I might pay $50 per click on the registration page of a domain name service provider after a customer has just purchased a .com address. If this company was just running Adsense, they would get lumped in with all the rest of the companies and may not even show up as relevant for Web Hosting at all in the current model.

This PremiumSpots idea would maximize revenues for publishers and enable advertisers to find the best and most influential spaces to place their ads as opposed to the current run of network style of contextual advertising.

Once you had a large number of companies offering PremiumSpot advertising, these spots could be bought by categories or site by site by the advertisers.

What do you think?

Please note, all ideas postulated by the editors of goyami and the corante staff are for sale at a reasonable price. All rights reserved. :-)