Subject: Re: FYI: More on duplicates in feeds: DoubleClick does ads the WRONG way!

From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 May 2005 08:48:12 -0700

--On May 2, 2005 5:32:22 PM +1000 Eric Scheid <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Counting impressions is essential to their trade, and you'll find that it is
> industry standard practice.

Make that "was essential", and "should be a dying practice." Ads have moved to 
results-based billing, paying for clickthrough and conversion.

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect, Verity

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From: Antone Roundy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2005 10:23:07 -0600

> results-based billing, paying for clickthrough and conversion.
...except that calculating clickthrough percentage is still important, 
and that requires counting impressions.

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From: James Aylett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2005 19:58:32 +0100

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 08:48:12AM -0700, Walter Underwood wrote:

> > Counting impressions is essential to their trade, and you'll find
> > that it is industry standard practice.
> 
> Make that "was essential", and "should be a dying practice." Ads
> have moved to results-based billing, paying for clickthrough and
> conversion.

That's an awfully broad statement, which isn't borne out in
practice. Clickthrough isn't a terribly good metric for success, so it
isn't going to maintain its image as a good basis for
billing. Conversion is more interesting, but is a much higher risk for
publishers to book against, especially on smaller brands. I strongly
suspect that per-media booking (for instance, booking by the thousand
impressions) will be with us in some form or another for some time to
come.

Besides, as has been pointed out, even if you do book against raw
click volumes, your only way of figuring out whether this was the best
value you could have made out of your property is to calculate the
clickthrough rate, which requires some measure of per-media recording.

James

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  [email-masked]                               uncertaintydivision.org

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From: Walter Underwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 May 2005 13:03:23 -0700

How to make money from ads is off-topic, sorry for starting in that
direction.

I don't quite get this, though. What about e-mails and RSS is
being compared?

--On Monday, May 02, 2005 11:43:28 AM +0100 James Aylett <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>  (2)	 but it's not that uncommon for people to need to track
> 	 static instances - consider, for instance emails; HTTP level
> 	 cache control is being used as well. There's no reason
> 	 RSS feeds can't be considered in this way.

The business of ads in feeds is pretty confused. How does a feed
relate to an impression, when it might be viewed later or not at all?

I would hope that advertisers figure out that impression-based approaches
don't really mesh with feeds, but in the meantime, we are probably stuck
with hacks like Bob Wyman describes.

We punted explicit support for ads, so they will continue to show up in
content and cause more work for Bob.

wunder
--
Walter Underwood
Principal Architect
Verity Ultraseek

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From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2005 17:26:18 -0400

Walter Underwood wrote:
> We punted explicit support for ads, so they will continue to show up
> in content and cause more work for Bob.
	Uhh... It isn't just me. This work needs to be done by just about
anyone who builds an aggregator if they implement duplicate detection based
on analysis of item contents. Hopefully, that will be much less necessary
with Atom feeds in the future; however, as long as we've got RSS we'll still
need to do text-based comparisons to detect "updates." 

	The problem with explicit "ad" support was, of course, that people
would be highly likely to use the "ad" tag as a license to delete content
and strip the ads. 
	I've been thinking that there might be a more general solution in
allowing people to tag certain elements, spans or divs as dynamic content
which could be masked during canonicalization prior to change detection.
Such a generic method of tagging would eliminate the major "damage" done by
ads while providing support for other kinds of dynamic content that doesn't
involve ads. For instance, we've got Slashdot and now Spaces that change a
"comment count" in posts whenever someone creates a new comment. That wrecks
havoc on change detection code... Also, at PubSub, we'd love to insert data
like the current LinkRank or LinkCount, and various other dynamic bits that
should be ignored when comparing two items. If we could create an attribute
like "dynamic" (much like the nofollow attribute) that could be put in
elements, then comparison code would know what bits to ignore -- whether or
not they were ad related.

<span dynamic>
  The time of day is: 5:25pm EST.
</span>

		bob wyman