E-Media Tidbits

According to a July 19 report from Nielsen//NetRatings, the demand for search-engine advertising (such as Google Adwords or Overture) is growing far more quickly than the supply of available advertising spots. This means that before long, popular keywords will become prohibitively costly -- at which point those search-engine ads would cease to make economic sense even for the largest online advertisers. (More on this: "A Drop in Search Engine Ad Supply," by Bob Tedeschi at NYTimes.com.)

Lurking between the lines of this report, I think, is a hidden opportunity for online publishers, including news sites. As search-result pages from Google and Yahoo get increasingly crowded by competing ads, programs that syndicate ads out to third-party sites may become even more attractive to online advertisers. But those services need to improve. I recently started running Google Adsense ads on my own weblog, Contentious, and the results have been disappointing so far -- mainly, I think, because Google's method of categorizing my blog's content is so ham-handed that the service winds up displaying ads that offer little appeal to my readers. I know my readers better than Google does. Why can't I suggest a list of relevant keywords and phrases to guide the type of ads that will be displayed on my blog? Right now, all the ads on my site are for blogging tools -- but my readers are far more interested in writing/editing services and e-learning. The clickthough rate would be much higher if I could somehow communicate this insight to Google.

My point is this: I think that third-party sites offer at least as much, if not more, potential to advertisers and ad syndication services if that market was only handled smarter, with more input from the publishers regarding ad placement. That could vastly increase the amount of available ad space, and ease the pressure on search-engine ad space.