StructuredBlogging and the Classifieds Market
When I was at Les Blogs this month I talked a bit with Salim Ismail from PubSub about the now launched StructuredBlogging initiative and mentioned to him that this would be playing really well with an idea we are currently following with Ormigo. Now I see Jeff Clavier (didn’t manage to talk to him at Les Blogs, damn) posted about StructuredBlogging. This in itself isn’t too interesting, as I already mentioned that I believe in the general idea in my predictions for 2006, but … Read this part:
_Mike Arrington from TechCrunch fame, and also Edgeio — the stealth project he and Keith Teare have been working on — briefly mentioned that supporting a forthcoming Classifieds micro-format will be part of the roadmap of the company. I should use this occasion to disclose that I am also involved in Edgeio — more on all this later._
This seems to be very close to what I talked about with Salim Ismail. In general what StructuredBlogging already hints at, is the option to describe divers things in a standard way and this can be applied to the classifieds market. If you then add something like the corporate structure that VISA is using, being open about performance, letting everyone add stuff, everyone code how they get their stuff out (e.g. my stuff first) and handle the billing on a lead basis (to remove the click fraud problem), then this gets amazingly interesting. Henning and me did already set up a very big performance marketing system in Germany in our previous positions, outbidding Google in several places, so we know what the publishers really are looking for and it is not all about money. An open service will add a whole new competitive layer that Google can’t possibly match, meaning that you don’t even have to have the best performance, just one that is close enough. We know that lots of companies and publishers out there will be amazingly interested in something like this. They all want an AdSense but they all don’t quite know how to build it and it actually doesn’t make sense for them to build it.
[Adam Trachtenberg gives a similar hint](http://www.trachtenberg.com/blog/2005/12/12/how-to-commoditize-away-googles-advertising-revenues/) by just thinking out loud about web services for classifieds pricing structures. The entire system is to a large part a challenge in corporate structure, especially as you need something above and beyond a technological edge. VISA is in my mind a very good example of such a structure. In the end it is about being open and about not being seen as the one making all the profit. Just enable others to make a profit, and make a tiny amount in processing fees. It will create a real market where only those that pay well and perform well will be able to survive. Tough market, but fair market, and one we believe Ormigo can survive and prosper in, which is why am starting to think out loud about this. We named the system AdCloud for now. :)
My fellow Corante Web Hub member Alex Banrett has some more thoughts on StructuredBlogging tying it in with AttentionTrust. Pete adds more thoughts of his own.