Online Advertising
Since we are in the content business, advertising plays a large role in our revenue model. As we get to our new website, which I would guess is about half-way through the development stage, online advertising is something that we need to address. We have all been working together here to figure out how many ads to put on the site, where to put them, and things of this nature. It's fascinating to me since it is something that you kind of take for granted until you have to put it all together. There are things like where the ads will be placed and how targeted they should and can be. For example, should an advertiser be able to define what type of article their ad appears on, or should it be more general? We put a lot of thought into making sure that there is a balance between what our advertisers want and what we can reasonably provide. In the end, our ad system is going to be rebuilt by me in another month or so here, so we will be looking at another mechanism that will dish the ads out to the right places, rotate ads effectively, and also track the number of impressions and clicks that each ad gets.
Of course, this is relatively easy since it is a "traditional" online advertising method (how quickly things change). I wanted to touch on the future of online advertising as the web begins to shift to more video and interactive content. For example, we all heard about Google buying YouTube. Well, what happens now? Google is, above all, and advertising company. Yep, I said it. They are a search engine, but they make their money in advertising. So how do you get ads into videos? Is it going to remain about static ads that are on the screen when you want to watch your video? Are things going to move in the direction of directly injecting audio and video ads into web content? Not anytime soon, but that is the direction that I predict the web is going. Give it five years and I predict that the internet will be an interactive version of television, with a rich mix of text, audio, and video content. The question is, who will emerge as the king of advertising as Google has emerged in the last five years?
