Sell Side Advertising

I was at a board meeting a couple days ago and heard about a concept called Sell Side Advertising that John Batelle and Ross Mayfied cooked up.

I was intrigued so I went digging and found the post here on John's site.  It's from last August so I am late in getting to this.

Not to digress, but old posts have a lot of value, I find that close to 1/3 of my comments are coming on posts that are at least a month old and at times a year old.

Anyway, back to sell side advertising.

I only heard about this concept a couple days ago, but I am convinced that this is how the market is going to evolve.

There is a huge imbalance between the demand for pay for performance advertising and the ability to meet it right now.  And the reason is that there are huge inefficiencies in the market. 

Advertisers have to make choices about where they are going to run their ads (Google, Overture, FastClick, Kanoodle, WhenU, etc, etc, etc).  Then these networks have to get the ads onto the sites where they will perform.  Most use some form of technology to do this.

But we still have a pretty closed system where the market can't work perfectly.

There will come a time, and not so long from now, when advertisers will just post their ads, plus some data about them, and how they want them to perform, and how much they are willing to pay for leads generated by them, and the net will do the rest.

The standards need to develop but there are thousands of talented developers and entreprenuers out there who will drive this from concept to reality. And I'd like to invest with some of them who have the talent and vision to make this happen.