Amit Kumar

Publishers are leaving money on the table by treating much of their inventory as remnant, when a lot of it really should be part of their premium offering. Content that can be expressed in terms of structured data, and advertising that can make use of it – these will form the basis of a new class of premium inventory.

Imagine Yahoo! selling to Hilton a new premium package. This includes pages on the network, that refer to cities, and only those cities, where Hilton has a hotel. Further, imagine those pages then showing ads for the specific Hilton hotel in that city. Then, imagine that sales rep able to put together the same ‘package’ for Waldorf Astoria – far fewer hotels, but no harder to sell or implement.

Sadly, this isn’t the state of art today. Publishers don’t publish and manage their content semantically (and their ad networks don’t provide any value-add), hence their sales force is unable to create compelling premium offerings; as a result technology that would help advertisers take advantage of such an offering isn’t mainstream yet.

While leaders in this field like Dapper are helping individual publishers and advertisers, it’s time for majors like Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft to take a stand (note Google doesn’t contribute premium inventory)

• Publish your content properties semantically, to allow easy bundling of content
• Create simple tools for your sales force to create and sell these premium packages
• Adopt real dynamic ad offerings (please, no lip service) for your advertisers

Why stop there? Be the network that can help your partners be part of this new premium offering, too!

This is the age of Data – use it to your advantage. Create the new Premium.

- Amit

Readers: what do you think? I look forward to your comments below!