Being The Ad Network / 04.21.08
Over the past couple of weeks I have talked about the Vertical in one form or another. This is where a business controls all aspect of how they attain their revenue. In the online publishing world this means managing your own ads. In the past month there has been some moves by major players to not only drop ad networks so they can sell their own ads, but to also maintain their brand.
This week comes news of another ad network being start up by SixApart and some people believe that ad networks need to stop, but they are just the hot thing like social networks and blog networks before them. What really makes companies want to dive into them is that the revenue model is already established: sell ads, make money. To be honest why shouldn’t larger companies get involved? There is enough site inventory out there to go around and financially speaking wouldn’t it be the same cost to pitch two sites as it is to pitch two?
What is funny and disappointing at the same time is that after all these years of online activity we have come full circle to going back to the concept we said we could live without doing: selling ads. Is that the only way to make real money on the web and with this economic downturn is it a good idea to rely on it? I suppose if your model is providing content this is the way to go, just crazy to not see any innovation in revenue models like we say in technology.
It all goes to free eventually right?
Things are a little different now though because the ad networks are not only competing with each other, but competing with content providers that sell their own ads as well. This is why you might see a lot of talk about ad networks buying up content sites because there is becoming almost zero distinction between an ad network and a content network.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next 18 months.
One Response
Anil // April 28th, 2008
Well, I think some of the skepticism about yet-another-ad-network is well-warranted, which is why I’d hasten to say that (no matter how it’s been characterized by the press) we’re *not* doing another ad network at Six Apart.
Our goal is to give bloggers everything they need, from great tools to our expertise to ways to make money, including ads. From what I’ve seen, a lot of the generic ad networks are basically saying “we hope to get tons of page views and then figure out how to sell ads on them”. In our case, we already have a large number of blogs and sites that we power, either with our technology or with our ad program or both.
And I think we’ve never been a company that feels the web is only for selling ads. We wrote our business plan during the web’s *first* economic downturn, in a time before AdWords or AdSense even existed. I think we’re the stronger for it. So I can’t disagree with any of your misgivings about ill-considered ad networks, but I have to strongly disagree with the notion that our ad program, especially as part of our larger efforts to help bloggers and the web as a whole, falls into the same category as those networks.