Greg and Pat both have already pointed out that ad serving is not what is important anymore. This leads to the question “So what is?”.

In the current world of networks of networks, and exchanges popping up left and right, there is really going to be only 3 places your company can live and then succeed. You have to either control Advertisers, control Publishers, or be the technology force driving the backbone of the whole system.

Let’s start with Publishers as their explanation is the easiest. As the controller of the eyeballs, you are controlling exactly what is sold. From which users, to what placement, it is all in the realm of control when you are a publisher. That control is the same whether you own Yahoo.com, or whether you are fredlu.com. In order to succeed as a Publisher in this dynamic, you just need to draw eyeballs. You control the right eyeballs, and you can monetize it however you want. The more eyeballs, the more quality eyeball, the more money you will make and the more successful you become.

There are plenty of articles already on the internet to help you draw people to your site. Scribefire.com has been putting up numerous entries to help the average blogger increase their readership. That would be a good place to start if you want to be successful as a publisher.

If you are a company and not just a blogger, then it means getting exclusive selling rights. There are various ways to do this. If you are GigaOm, you buy up websites. If you are Glam Media, you are providing guaranteed revenue. In short though, the goal is to be the single contact point for the advertising on those websites.

http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/07/giga-omni-media.html

For the last couple of months, I have been spending countless hours looking / waiting for a new TabletPC to come out. With the amount of time I have spent on looking, I probably could have just went and bought top of the line and forgotten all my worries. In the course of looking for one of these computers, I was able to stumble onto this site, jkontherun, and have found it to be great ever since.

I just want to say congratulations to the two of them as they hopefully were able to get something for all the hard work they have put into their blog.

I think this buyout confirms two of the fundamental points which Scribefire is based on, and why I am excited about what I am working on.

1) Niche blogs can be successful.

Blogs which highly target a niche can still be successful even as the Internet becomes more and more commercialized. Federated Media, Glam Media, etc all have found that advertisers want to target to niches and that they haven’t been able to, or that its hard. Most of the companies are targeting the large blogs with the large audiences, but there isn’t a reason why semi-successful or even more niche audiences are just as important to advertisers.

2) Bloggers really just want to blog.

Two snippets from James really struck a chord for me.

What will change is a good thing- both Kevin and I have joined the Giga Omni Media group and will be able to focus all of our time on writing for you here on jkOnTheRun.

Having these resources at our disposal will not only mean your experience on the site will get better but it means that Kevin and I can concentrate solely on creating the content you crave.

The truth of the matter is that when you are running a blog, especially if it becomes a full time job, is that there is so much to have to worry about beyond your actual passion. The idea that, quite frankly, writing content and finding an audience is hard enough without having to find your own advertisers. The un-fun parts of actually making money starts to take a bigger and bigger role.

As advertisers feel more comfortable with the idea of User Generated

So, recently I have been on this Pandora kick. As an internet advertising guy, I find myself always looking at how display ads are shown on pages and wondering their effect.

Here is two screenshots I took of Pandora’s single ad placement on their player.

Some observations:
1) It seems they use the one placement for all their ad sizes, a 300×250, 160×600 and a background. Depending on the refresh, you will only see one ad, the size and type varying.

2) In the cases of the normal display ads, they are completely out of place versus the layout of the page.

3) Despite being completely out of place, with my computer screen size, and firefox at full screen, the ads are smack dab in the middle of the my computer screen.

This leads to some interesting questions,

1) Was this purposely planned? It makes the ads a bit more jarring, but not overly so. This should bring the ads to attention for the user, but not be overly annoying (think the flashing ads you may have seen).

2) What is the performance of these ads? What is the CPM pandora can sell at? On the one hand, these are pretty well placed ads. On the other, we are talking about a music player, which essentially means people are not looking at it all the time. In fact, there are probably epople who leave it ona nd walk away from the desk. There is no requirement for interaction to use which should mean lower performance, possibly even worse than social networks where users are at least interacting with the current page.

Of course, in the end, I may have completely overestimated the thought processes involved in creating these, but whether intentional or not, I would love to know the metrics on an ad unit on Pandora.

So, where have I been and what have I been doing?

It can all be summarized here.

Long story short. I am part of a group which is building a whole new ad network focused completely around the blogger. With today’s private launch, that includes the original ScribeFire tool, which allowed a blogger to post directly from Firefox. This also now includes the new QuickAd ability, which allows simple drag and drop of ads directly onto a site. The most amazing part of it is that you never have to leave firefox to do any of this.

This is just the first in a long line of functionality improvements to both the addon and to the website. We already have improvements in the pipeline.

Expect more to come.

Hi Everyboyd.