kevin kelly on sell-side advertising
Kevin Kelly on sell-side advertising. Worth quoting at length and reading in full.
The simple idea is that you can craft a publication, or a reading/viewing experience, primarily by choosing and sequencing ads. Selecting the right cool ads – not merely cool content – is the attraction. Not just tiny adsense text ad boxes, but full page ads, or even commercials inside widgets. When I was part of the team making Wired magazine a decade ago, half the battle at launch was landing the right cool ads. We had to convince the advertisers to join (and pay) us. But what if we could just choose the cool ads we wanted, without having to ask permission? What if we could simply harvest the the best ads (measured by any metric we choose) and were paid for the ones we ran according to the traffic we brought to them?