Inefficient Markets...

Andrew Goodman on why so much more offline stuff could be sold online, and better. Likely an area Google will be a big player in.

Meanwhile AdBrite adds site tagging, but they should have made an about page or something...give people something to link at & give them a story to tell...why is tagging important, how will the publishers and advertisers earn more, etc.

Although Google is making ad buying easier they still do not let most people tag their sites, so my poor friend Mike is stuck serving worthless Pokemon AdSense ads on his video card site.

As more ad formats appear, and contextual advertising comes in many forms, what competing ads will Google allow? The answer so far is that they are unsure, but just like the limits with search spam, they don't want to approve anything too broadly & too clearly, especially considering that for some people those competing networks may have a greater payout.

For the mass market contextual ad market to be efficient it needs to have automated ways to understand content, and accept user data from advertisers and publishers to override targeting errors to help the machine learn relevancy.

There will remain a bunch of niche ad providers to serve people who for one reason or another do not want to work with one of the major players, but the feature lists continue to improve as they fight for publishers and ad dollars and make more efficient markets.