blog.collarity.com

It’s no secret that web publishers want to improve visitor loyalty by appealing to their varied interests. Along with their own content and features, larger publishers often include vertical content related to employment, weather or other categories from external suppliers – which are all monetized in their domains.

Now there’s demand for socially-created content as well. According to a recent WSJ article , niche companies are arriving on the scene to act as aggregators, and they have the ability to curate the content, blogs and communities that appeal to specific audiences. Andrew Braccia, from Accell Partners, supports these vertical players and claims that “three to five years from now, people will no longer be drawing a distinction between traditional forms of publishing and what we know as blogs today.”

Vertical content discovery may be important, but these niche publishers can’t make it alone because they would be challenged by low impressions and thus can’t deliver the right reach or frequency to advertisers. They turn to the bigger publishers but in a new content-sharing ecosystem, where ads can be targeted even if the content is “social” in nature.

While traditional licensing arrangements seem to be a thing of the past, it’s not clear that publishers will embrace content without having a very clear revenue path and upside. We think that large publishers must be smart about their content and placements, without over-exposing it or putting into a some lost corner of their sites. After all, this socially-created content won’t be unique or proprietary to a specific publisher.

The typical ad targeting approaches are thrown into disarray, with social or super-vertical content. Large publishers might already have a well-developed advertiser list that could be put off or otherwise feel the content isn’t what they expected. Put another way, ads that would be most appropriate for this niche content can’t be ignored either.

We feel that advertising needs to be re-framed in this cross-fertilized environment – and operate based on the visitors interests makes the most sense rather than pre-defining the domain targets. It’s not the traditional behavioral approach that works best here, but a careful cultivation of the content and interactions to drive targeted advertising.

Of course, Collarity is quite interested in the trend because we have been delivering these cross-domain and intra-domain content and recommendations, based on our collaborative filtering of site visitors. We are already working on these kinds of deliveries and seeing CPM boosts, and know that it’s possible to monetize well beyond the “category” targeting approaches typically used today.