Noah Robinson has a smart two-parter on the CPM gulf between reserved ‘premium’ inventory and unreserved ‘remnant’ inventory, the problems this could pose for publishers in an era of savvy brand advertisers, and what publishers are trying to prevent it.
Noah thinks behavioral targeting is the savior of publishers. Segment your audience based on your context and then let advertisers target against it when they’re off your site, in a context-free zone. This BT-sharing can work very well in an exchange model (like my employer’s.) But Noah should consider that behavioral targeting’s a two-way street, and advertisers can do it just as easily as publishers. I’ve often wondered why the big ad networks don’t just monitor my interactions with their ads, see that I haven’t clicked on one for over 10,000 impressions, and just stop serving me and my ilk (and paying the publishers for) any sort of direct response whatsoever. In an environment where big publisher networks are using BT to boost CPMs but big advertiser networks are using BT to only serve to the fish, overall publisher revenue could go either way.
