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Thursday, June 26, 2014

State of online ad inventory

Three old Jewish friends are sitting around the park, feeding the pigeons and lamenting over how tough things are. "Oy vey," says the one. "Things are so tough in the garment business these days. We have to discount everything by 50 percent. Can you imagine that? Two for the price of one? It's ridiculous!"

"You think that's bad," says the second one. "The watch business is so crazy right now, we literally give away our watches at cost in order to break even."

The third one interjects: "You lucky, lucky bastards. The jewellery business is so bad right now; we give away diamonds for free and throw in $1,000 per transaction in the process!"

The other two look puzzled and say, "How on Earth do you make any money?"

"Don't worry," says the third, "we make it up on volume."

This is an ode to all the publishers out there who have original content but still choose to do business by competing with content aggregators who mooch original content and deploy better content finding strategies and rank better than the ones with the original content. Whats more pitiful - original content owners don't care to provide quality metrics such as the engagement of readers, neither care to measure it nor do much to deploy any content finding strategies.

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