We Need a Small Little Change to Banner Serving

[AdJug](http://adjug.com/) just raised $2 Million. Congratulations first of all. But this is pushing me further and further into the idea that we need a change in how all these banner servers work. Things like wunderLoop, possibly OpenAds, and others will play a role. Actually, I do believe everybody should play a role.

The problem I am starting to see, especially for the smaller sites, is that they will have to choose one network, like AdJug to serve their ads. Then they are quasi locked in. I personally want the highest paying ad running and I don’t care where it is coming from. I can now go into my installation for OpenAds on my blog and choose to run AdSense ads or AdJug ads or like I set it now, Ormigo Ads (just testing my own stuff here, nothing for your to test, sorry) when people come from Germany. It’s all sub-optimal though. Because for any given page, AdJug might have the better ads, or we might or somebody else might or I might choose to just run AdSense, or even opt to have a CPL AdSense campaign shown when it really fits super well.

What we need is a VISA kind of market for advertising. In general I would love to do this as a start-up, but the thing is that it’s not really a start-up as it is not there to go public or get sold or anything else to make money of as an investor. It’s a separate entity that will make sure that the ground rules are clear. A good starting point to get an idea was what Dee Hock asked when they thought about how to structure VISA:

_If anything imaginable was possible, if there were no constraints whatever, what would be the nature of the ideal organization to create the world’s premier system for the exchange of value?_

Still makes me go wow when I read this, each and every time. But this is really what we have to think about. Exchange “value” with “advertising” and a few things become clear. It needs to place those ads that are creating most value for the publisher. Here you need to factor in what a publisher thinks value is. A small publisher might opt to not have image ads, another one might. The most valuable ad will not always be in the same network though, so we need an ubernetwork right there. The advertiser wants their ads to be where they fit best, and that again includes all publishers. The idea is to have an open exchange, where everybody can play, and every member of the system can do whatever they want … as long as they abide to the standard rules/APIs. Think of it a bit like a peer2peer advertising platform.

So what might be an example process. I have structured information about my site. It includes pages, keywords for those pages, available impressions, average clicks, lead values, … I need to be fully transparent. It’s a simple XML file sitting somewhere, available to all, with information about the site and current booking status. You cannot book my site fixed, because it’s all performance based. Of course if you pay 100 EURs CPM you will likely get it fixed as there will be no other performance based deal that will beat that. Next to that there is a cloud of advertisers that tell each other and each publisher what their ads are. This would be simple format of the ads, sizes, content guidelines, targeting ideas (there are no rules, if it works it works), tracking information, … . I can also make a deal with wunderLoop to give further information about my users for possible targeting. They would just either add to my XML file for general information or publisher their own file that can intermix with mine.

Of course there are lots of performance issues to think about, and this might not really be a live system, which often is not even needed, but the general point is that everything is open and the systems will use those ads that are paying best. No more island solutions. An advertiser will be able to access all sites within the network, a publisher will be open for all advertisers. An agency will be able to really optimize bookings for a client as they know which different sources to mix and match.

Of course there are also problems. The wining and dining part of the advertising business might move to the background a bit. The best paying ads will run and boy is there lots of trickery going on there to make some things run more than others because of personal relations. This will have to go as adding this kind of layer will make the system overly complex and will be hard to be codified into a rule. This will really be the biggest problem to get a thing like that to take off.

The end result should be that the best ad from whichever network runs, because the banner server part on my site knows what pays what. It will not simply run the AdJug code and the AdSense code 50/50 but dependent on likely performance.

We are working on different things at Ormigo that are moving into this direction for a small part of the ad world, but it is not something to take lightly. Looking forward to your feedback.