Publisher Opt-In Advertising

One of the interesting things about Federated Media is that it gives blog authors the ability to reject advertisers from running ads on their site. In the post mentioned above, he explains:

"The approach of having the authors approve the companies which advertise on their site seems obvious, but when you think about how traditional media works, it's downright revolutionary. The lunatics were running the asylum! But it turns out, when an author approves a company to advertise on his or her site, they are, in essence, inviting the company to join that sites' conversation. A permission has been given, a trust established. To this day, every single ad FM sells is approved by our authors before it appears on their site. And despite our initial worries that author approvals would be a hurdle to marketers - after all, they're used to getting their way - it has, in fact, turned into an overture, a conversation starter that has led to all sorts of examples of new approaches to marketing online."

John provided an interesting example of one of his bloggers rejecting an ad. Cory at BoingBoing has been a very vocal opponent of DRM. When a pro-DRM group approached Boing Boing (via FM Publishing) to run a $35,000 a month ad, they turned it down. At this point, this is the largest advertising opportunity that has been refused. However, since launching, John estimated that only 1% to 2% of all advertisers have been rejected. In addition to these small percentages, many specific ads have been refused until a better creative was developed - which leads to the next point.

Evolution of Advertising Creative

In John's post he wrote about the creatives of 3 campaigns which actually leveraged the conversation. They included an ad for Dice.com, which used JavaScript to ask "Why does your job suck?", and then allowed respondents to enter their answers into a text box - which ended up displaying in the ad. On the panel, John said that currently only about 15% of ads on FM Publishing leveraged unique creative like this. John said that these ads are performing very strongly and maintaining their performance. Typically, a display ad's performance (regardless of interaction metric) degrade over time as visitors to a site grow used to seeing them.

Summary

The web is only going to become more social. However, the dirty little secret is that those pages don't monetize nearly as well as many other pages - which are either contextually rich (in some areas) or the direct result of a user request (such as search). So the challenge is to figure out how to adequately compensate the individuals behind 'people media'. John made an interesting point about the gap in time between search engines emerging as the method of navigating the web, and those queries being monetized effectively. Today, search advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. To do this it took the correct metric (Cost Per Click) and correct ad unit (text ads). 

I'm confident that as the interactive advertising and media industries wrestle with the challenge, we'll come up with the correct metric and ad unit for advertising on people media. However, just like it took time in search - it will take time with people media.