The big media companies should blame themselves for creating more ad space than demand dictates. Display ads from the same advertiser should run on multiple pages. It would provide a greater return to advertisers and gets rid of the tacky brand-cheapening ads.

Raining meatballs would be funny on Jon Stewart but would turn visitors off to a weather website and wreck the brand. $50 CPM display ads on a general audience website are unnecessary; $50 CPM on a smaller, targeted-audience website is more cost-effective. The smaller, targeted-audience and city/regional websites are also where less expensive text ads can yield a higher CTR than display. The beauty of the internet is the ability to advertise to a targeted demographic. Google’s DoubleClick ad exchange should be very effective at allowing advertisers the ability to find smaller to medium volume web publishers to cost-effectively reach the right audience.

In the meantime, big media websites burning cash should try to learn from web entrepreneurs who are generating free cash flow in this environment.

Read The Wall Street Journal article.

Another logical step would be acquisition of the independent Category Leaders. Content trumps cookies.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Yahoo! recently made a huge change to benefit search advertisers by finally (after getting around intellectual property restrictions) allowing reasonable geo-targeting. Yet Yahoo! has not made a big deal about it. My data suggests that the prior lack of reasonable geo-targeting really hurt Yahoo! vs. Google among knowledgeable search advertisers. My data also predicts that Yahoo! search revenue could dramatically shrink because of it but this is necessary because prior Yahoo! search advertising costs were unnecessarily high before the geo-targeting initiative.

Yahoo! will have to prepare for lower search revenue while also considering unique patentable ways to get Internet users to choose it for search over Google. This could include a points system like that used by the credit card companies.

Read the Wall Street Journal article.

Yahoo! recently made a dramatic change in their geographic search algorithm yet I have not read anything about it on WSJ or NYT. Why? It might be the best thing they have done in years!

Why should a practicing dentist and professor care? Dentistry has historically ranked among the top ten advertising categories from the ancient times of Yellow Pages printed books to the current Internet age. The metrics are more statistically predictable and without the degree of volatility of other top ten categories. Ten years of Internet dentistry metrics can be used to predict the direction of companies like Google and Yahoo!

Read the Wall Street Journal Article.