🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <899602$69e$1@samba.rahul.net>,
axlq.a2i.info <axlq@unicorn.us.com> wrote:
>Thanks, Michelle, for the most fascinating article.  One part I have a
>quibble with:
>
>>Ad-filtering users are but a very small fraction of viewers.  Should
>>this change, expect that web advertising will go the way of print
>>advertising, where the publisher is responsible for hosting the ad.
>>If this happens, small websites will no longer be able to provide the
>>auditing required by major advertisers (and currently provided by the
>>media sellers) and will no longer be able to sell their sites
>>effectively as they do now. 

>
>What resources?  If you're talking about money, banner ad management
>software

No, I'm talking about auditing, not ad-serving software.  The
advertiser is not going to trust the web publisher that they delivered
250,000 bona-fide graphic-delivered impressions that month, all from
unique IPs within 1-hour slots (say) and not representing more than
7.5% of the site's available delivered impressions.  A third-party
trusted auditer is going to be required.  Right now, the media sellers
do this and because they host the ads, the cost is low (rolled into
commissions).  Having an auditor verify in-house statistics on
impressions from some random host machine, running who-knows-what
hacked software and verify that the impressions are legitimate and not
auto-generated on a site-by-site basis is going to be much more
expensive.  Since, currently, media sellers host the ads, the stats
are removed from control of the web publisher, thus establishing the
validity of them in a cost effective manner.

This issue is not as big a deal for pay-by-click advertising, but the
online ad industry is moving heavily to pay-by-impression and for most
publishers this represents 3 to 10 times as much income.  There is
much abuse in the pay-by-click ad arena, particularly with companies
that use pay-by-click campaigns for pure branding purposes. 

As for ad software, it's cheap and installing is no more expensive
than other aspects of publishing the website.  Indeed, a large
proportion of those who use media sellers also use ad software locally
to rotate in banners from other sources.

Actually, what may happen is that there will be trusted web-hosting
ISPs who act as auditors for a charge and web publishers will have to
move their sites to one of those ISPs to get cost effective auditing
for in-house advertising.

-- 
Michelle Dick             artemis@rahul.net              East Palo Alto, CA