Here are some stories that caught my eye heading into the new year:
— Advertising Age reports on how behavioral ad targeting is punishing Web publishers:
Who’s the most valuable surfer on the Web? For the auto advertisers, there are few more valuable than a visitor to Edmunds.com. For the next three months, he or she is considered an ‘in-market car buyer’ and will be stalked by a host of ad networks, portals, brokers and other digital middlemen who cut their slice of the advertising pie.
…Rumors abound about ad networks, portals and Google poaching audiences and dollars. …Here’s how it works: A publisher decides to allow an ad network to sell some of its inventory. That network places a cookie on the publisher’s site. Now, when a user leaves that site, and goes somewhere else, the network can track that user. If that user is worth $10 CPM (meaning the cost to reach a thousand viewers) on a site such as Edmunds.com, the network can buy low-value inventory for, say, a 40-cent CPM on MySpace and re-sell it to an auto manufacturer when the onetime Edmunds’ visitor arrives on the social-networking site.
— The Associated Press provides a roundup of downsized newspapers that have formed regional content-sharing partnerships. Just goes to show that when you’re fighting to stay alive and relevant, it pays to see others as potential collaborators; not automatic competition.
— John Battelle, who runs a blog about the media, technology and the Web, offers predictions for 2009. Some of his predictions might be especially interesting for the news business. He predicts:
… Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies. Both can win at this, but only by understanding how to truly add value to real communities — not flash crowds driven by one-time events.
