Did you hear about Rupert Murdoch’s calling out of editors who have long acted as “demigods” when it comes to content strategy? He sees the audience migration from print to online as tied in large part to, well, a print mentality. Essentially he is talking about the arrogance of not paying close attention to the needs of newspaper and magazine readers. This attitude, he said, “stems from having enjoyed a monopoly — and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception.”

By extension, this kind of “complacency,” as Murdoch calls it, can become a disease that encroaches upon the online version of the publication too.

This brings to mind a story I have told in consulting engagements with online companies. It is a cautionary tale and goes back to the days when I worked for a print and online brand that had enjoyed years of market dominance. We had decided to completely redo the design of our site, and we did so without any research among our users or readers. The editorial team had control of the design and navigation. When we unveiled the new site, there were many internal hurrahs on the way that the design captured the look and feel of the print property. I was not so sure, mostly due to the fact that we had not brought our most important asset, our audience, into the process.

Shortly after the launch I was on the phone with Mark, a guy who had been a guest columnist for our publication and site for several years, had been a long-term reader, and now was telling me about an online company he had started that focused on building fan communities around online radio sporting event broadcasts. Mark was buzzing about community. And this was well before the rest of us discovered how important community would be to the Web.

I asked him if he would look at our site and give me his candid feedback. What Mark told me over the next 15 minutes put me into a trance. I dropped my pen and just listened, euphoric with the sense of a kind of transforming awareness that he was giving us the keys to the kingdom. Mark told me that the new design was pretty but irrelevant. It was one-dimensional, essentially just an online version of the publication, without leaning into the power that we had at our fingertips — a passionate, engaged, important audience. He described all kinds of ways to tap into the ideas, interests, and enthusiasm of our visitors. He said, “Kevin, the Web is not really about your editors, it is about your audience. The Web flips the old model. The sooner you realize that, the better.”

When I told my boss — the president of the group — about this conversation, his jaw dropped, and he immediately summoned the editors in charge of the site. With an appreciative smile on his face, he asked me to recount what I had heard. The editors sat with arms folded. They were not happy. They said that no one knew their audience better than they did, and Mark’s view was a load of garbage. And in the end I had to accept that the editors had the final word in this case.

A year later, B2B and consumer community sites began to emerge, which were designed along all the concepts that Mark had suggested to me — community feedback, posts, user-generated content, tools, forums, alongside content that editors wrote that carefully matched the measurable priorities of the audience.

We would have done well to listen to Mark. While the site for the next few years repurposed print content, other sites in its category (business technology) surpassed it by following the very principles Mark had laid out. Our friend followed his own advice and did rather well with his little Web site, AudioNet, which he later called Broadcast.com and sold to Yahoo for $6 billion. Yes, I am speaking of none other than Mark Cuban.

And let's kill brand advertising while we are at it.

Brand advertising and display advertising are outdated ideas that lack relevance in an online world. We merely dragged these concepts over from traditional advertising. Do we really want to be sharing our industry with  bus wraps and  heat-activated urinal billboards?

Online display advertising has become the bucket for all forms of terrible advertising. Pop-ups, interstitials, banner ads, Flash ads, and countless others litter our Web sites in lame attempts to generate revenue. We continue to develop new ad formats without any thought as to who is buying them or why.

It is time for publishers to stop sitting on the sidelines while the needs of our customers evolve beyond us. We have allowed a lack of clarity to exist for far too long.

Brand Advertising is just code for "ads that can't be measured and don't make any money."

EVERY ad is supposed to drive revenue for the advertiser; the only question is timing. Our customers can be divided into two distinctly different groups with unique goals:

Transactional Advertisers that are looking for customers to buy their product instantly, or as close to instantly as possible, and;

Influence Advertisers that are looking to influence long-term purchase behavior. These advertisers are selling cars or other products that either have long sales cycles or are primarily bought offline.

Let's break down these two new markets.

Transactional Advertisers: Time is the enemy of transactional advertisers.

The longer customers are away from an advertiser's Web site, the lower the chances they will end up buying something. Transactional advertisers need to instantly engage, demonstrate value, and close the deal.

Transactional advertisers are only concerned with three things. First, they want to immediately drive revenue. Second, they want to be able to measure the cost of acquiring the revenue so they can measure ROI. Third, and most importantly, they want to achieve the first two goals with the least amount of risk.

Transactional advertisers require new ad formats that enable transactions to happen on the spot. Many users are hesitant to click on ads, because they are afraid of losing their place and being taken to another site. Instead, the ad needs to come to them. For example, if I am looking at movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I should be able to buy movie tickets without leaving the site. I should be empowered to use my social data to invite friends to join me at the movie.

Transactional advertisers need an unprecedented level of cooperation with publishers. They need results-driven pricing models like cost per action (CPA), but are willing to pay a premium for results.

If you eliminate risk for a transaction advertiser, you will be rewarded handsomely.

Influence Advertisers: Unfortunately, not every purchase can result in an immediate transaction.

There are several reasons for this. Some purchases, like buying a car, require multiple steps like securing financing (at least until a few months ago) and a test drive. Other purchases, like buying laundry detergent, do not typically happen online.

Influence Advertisers may have a multi-step sales cycle, but they still have a sales cycle.

So how should Influence advertising differ?

We need better ad formats and measurements. Annoying a potential customer with a flashy ad or an interstitial is a great way to damage your chances of winning the deal. The current click-through rate measurement rewards intrusive ads that may drive clicks, but not revenue. Click-through rates average less than 0.5%, so an annoying ad could end up angering 199 potential customers to generate a single click, but not a single dollar.

Why can't the ad enable you to print a coupon for laundry detergent or a test drive in-line without leaving the publisher's site? This would serve as a reminder and dramatically increase the likelihood of you taking action. It would also enable advertisers to track revenue of offline sales.

Influence advertisers need new measurements that track progress on the sales cycle, not clicks.  This progress should be driven by in-line ads that enable education and engagement to happen on the publisher's site.

Let's Bury Them Together

If we are to survive as an industry, we need to make drastic changes. The 21% drop in CPM prices this year is a clear signal that we are adding inventory faster than we are adding value.

As any loyal USA Today reader or Fox News viewer can now tell you, a strong economy hides a lot of problems. The recent economic downturn is going to make all of our flaws even easier to see.

Our customers are transactional advertisers, influence advertisers, or both. They buy our product because they believe we can deliver a positive return on investment short-term or long-term.

Let's kill off display and brand advertising, and prove them right.

As we enter an age of government bailouts and buyouts for investment banks, mortgage companies and auto manufacturers, one begins to wonder who the next contestant will be in the Uncle Sam Handout Sweepstakes.

While the Internet juggernaut is showing signs of slowed growth, it is hard to imagine the kind of meltdown the financial industry has experienced in recent months taking a similar path in our industry — or is it?

Who could have predicted just a few short years ago that the AIG and Lehman Brothers failures would nearly cripple the global economy, or that our nation's first black president would be preparing to step into the Oval Office — or that Drew Carey would have stepped onto the hallowed "Price is Right" stage to replace the legendary Bob Barker, for that matter? If nothing else, the events of the past year have shown us that change is inevitable and that we should come to expect the unexpected.

Online advertising spending estimates from eMarketer predict that year-over-year growth will slow from 25.6% in 2007 to 17.4% in 2008 and 14.5% in 2009. Assuming that the economy recovers from the current recession, those estimates jump back over the 20% range by 2011. It would appear from looking at these numbers that Internet advertising will remain healthy — which is good news for advertisers, publishers, agencies and every other fringe element that depends on the Web to fuel their business model.

But, just for the sake of argument (and to create a compelling story line for this column), let's consider the possibility that some unexpected event could cause our beloved industry to fall into a downward spiral reminiscent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Are there Internet companies that have become such a significant part of our culture and economy that the government would be compelled to step in and offer a lifeline to those firms just to save the digital world as we know it?

If such a scenario where to actually happen, which companies should be saved? I decided to start a list that is completely subjective, somewhat arbitrary and in no way involves any scientific data:

Google - First in line for the Internet Economic Stimulus Package would be Google. Trying to imagine a life without Google is more difficult than trying to fathom an America with baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, but no Chevrolet. We could no longer "Google" something, or fill our Gmail inboxes with years of useless email just because we have Over 7262.247066 megabytes (and counting) of free storage. Without Goog411, who would provide our free telephone directory service? If there were no more Google Maps, would we have to relearn how to fold and unfold those unwieldy paper maps again? Let's not forget the significance of YouTube in providing a 24/7/365 outlet for people who can't get enough of America's Occasionally Funny Home Videos.

Microsoft - While I'm not a PC, I'd throw a bone to Microsoft just to save all of the Microsoft Office apps including Entourage (The MAC version of Outlook, not the HBO show). Even though the company's relevance in online advertising continues to shrink, it's always good to have at least one competitor for Google to continually crush (and I have a friend that works there, so this is my own personal pork-barrel add-on).

Yahoo - They will most likely be gone by the time this program takes effect, so I'm going to disqualify them from the list.

Facebook - Facebook has built an empire based on taking money from outside sources with little revenue to show for it, so accepting government money fits its current business model perfectly. If we didn't have Facebook, how could I possibly know all of the inane and irrelevant details of the lives of my friends, family, co-workers and complete strangers?

Twitter - While I'm not completely sure yet why I can't live without Twitter, all of my really cool, social-media-immersed friends and colleagues seem to think that Tweeting is synonymous with breathing. You simply can't do one without the other. I'd hate to see them all suffocate from a lack of Tweeting, so we'll throw them a lifeline and pump more money into another non-revenue-producing social media phenomenon.

Ad networks and SEO firms - This is purely for self-preservation and selfish motives, which is the cornerstone of any good government-spending program. Depending on your perspective, a world without ad networks and SEO firms would be either a beautiful place (see my fellow OPI columnist Ari Rosenberg), or a chaotic mess within a diverse and fragmented landscape that no single advertiser or agency could possibly navigate through. Eliminating ad networks and SEO firms would also mean eliminating my paycheck — so this segment of the industry is definitely a keeper.

That's my abbreviated list. What's yours? If you only had a handful of Internet companies you could choose to save from financial peril, that you couldn't live without, which ones would they be?

How many times have you heard the term "User Path Analysis" being mentioned as something you should conduct for your site? If you have anything to do with managing a Web site or Web analytics, chances are, you have considered it… or maybe gone down that path!

Pathing is, as expected, the path a visitor takes through a site. It is literally a flowchart of how a visitor makes his way from the landing page to the exit page and the content consumption between these two.

It does, thus, seem intuitive to want to analyze this user path — to determine the most common path users take before a desired outcome (a purchase, a request for information, etc.). This information can then be used to modify site navigation or copy to push visitors down that trusted, successful path. This approach, however, is not as efficient as it sounds.

For one, consider the number of paths a visitor could take. An example:

Path A: "Home page" to "Browse store" to "Clearance" to "Kids" to "Home page" to "Furniture" to "Kids" to exit

Path B: "Landing page (from search engine)" to "Kids" to "Clearance" to "Home Page" to "Furniture" to "Kids" to exit

Now consider a 100- or 200-page site and the possible number of paths a visitor can take. Keep in mind the complexity that the back button and page search add. There are simply too many options. Web consumption is not linear and neither are user paths. This means that there probably isn't a magic path to conversion.

Also, due to the wide variety of options, there is a small percentage of visitors that actually follow a common path. If only 5% of visitors follow the same path to a purchase, would it be wise to try and push the other 95% down that path as well? And even if we want to, is it doable? Probably not.

This isn't to say that there is no merit in looking at this information. However, it needs to be managed carefully. We need to address the issues of linearity and too much information.

Hence, user path analysis has direct applicability in the linear sections of the site — e.g., checkout pages. If all the consumer is expected to do is hit "next," user path brings to light the drop-off points in the purchase funnel — for example, most prospects drop off between the "Choose your color" and "Review order details" pages. Why? Is the color selection not right? Not adequate? Is the next page not loading quickly? Etc. etc.

The information can also be used to answer a specific question. In the first example - Are users interested in buying kids' products also looking for furniture deals? Such specific questions make the data and the analysis manageable, meaningful and actionable.

Another way of gaining these insights is through segmentation. For example — all visitors browsing the kids' pages are one segment. This means that we don't need to worry about the specific path they take within the kids' section, how many times they hit the back button, etc. We start to analyze the data when they leave the kids' section — what other products are they interested in, what site features they navigate through and what products they come back to buy. Of course, this segmentation varies by purpose of the site and its functionality.

As attractive as it might sound, don't jump right in when someone wants to look at user path. Take the time, understand the question being asked and make your dataset manageable. Analysis paralysis isn't uncommon on this one.

I don’t mean to sound like a pessimist or set off alarms for the sake of hearing a bell ring, but we have a core value problem that will only get worse, not better, based on the tracks the online sales train is running.

Two weeks ago in this OPI offering, David Koretz pointed to the dramatic disparity between the spending allocated to online advertising versus the time consumers spend on Web sites. Why does this disparity exist? One simple answer: Online inventory is cheaper, so advertisers don’t have to spend as much as they do with other media. And I can’t think of a worse label for a medium to bear than “cheap.”

According to Pubmatic’s Q3 AdPrice Index published last week, which reports the effective CPMs delivered by ad Nnetworks to their publishing partners, the range, depending on the type and size of site, was from 18 cents to 86 cents. These revenue figures are post-split — so assuming a 50/50 share, the ad networks are selling online inventory on a cost-per-thousand-impression basis of less than 50 cents in some cases.

According to a very compelling presentation I sat through at the DPAC conference here in New York yesterday by a financial analyst from Clearmeadow Partners, the “page view CPMs” at the three major portals range from $7.36 to $13.61. These figures sound terrific compared to the ad network prices, or those at the social networking sites (Facebook was reported at 63 cents per thousand page views sold, and Myspace at $1.34), but these portal CPMs pale in comparison to other media. For example, magazines, even at heavily discounted rates, are generally in the $20 to $60 CPM range.

OK, so the cost per thousand “impressions” or “page views” should be lower than the cost per thousand “readers” — I get that. But it still doesn’t make up for the widening discrepancy between how much online costs clients to buy, versus what they pay in other media.

We can blame the ad networks for deflating pricing. We can blame the search engines for training advertisers to only value an ad buy when a direct action occurs. We can blame the forefathers of online advertising, who adopted a pricing model that mimics direct marketing instead of advertising sales. And we can blame buyers for holding our medium to far greater ROI scrutiny than other media. But as Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits shares in the song “Solid Rock”: “When you point your finger because your plan fell through, you have three more fingers pointing back at you.”

We are to blame for this value problem. We are the ones who accept buys at CPMs that make the McDonald’s Dollar Menu feel expensive. And we continue to do so using the crutch that, as perishable inventory, it’s better than getting nothing.

But maybe serving no ads is better than shilling our space at these low rates. Peter Naylor, the senior vice president of digital sales at NBC Universal, who earns an audience’s respect the minute he starts speaking, shared an interesting “what-if scenario” during a panel at DPAC. He prefaced it by saying that, as unrealistic as it might sound, just because there is an ad spot built into a page view doesn’t mean we have to serve an ad. He explained that the content could restructure itself so no ads appear if there isn’t one sold at a premium rate. And if that were the case, the user would not always expect to see an ad — so when one does arrive, it may have more visual impact.

I applaud Peter for thinking of a unique way to increase the value of the exposure we sell — when so many of us are focused on figuring out how to increase the performance of the ads we agree to run. The latter is a NO-WIN proposition, which is why CPMs for our inventory will continue to plummet. We as publishers have far less control than we pretend to have in impacting a campaign’s performance. And even worse, the better the ads do perform, the greater the demand for even better results will occur — and there is no faster way to improve a cost-per-anything metric than lowering our CPMs.

Another possible solution to this core value problem is making greater use of a preemptable inventory pricing strategy. Ad network buys we accept are preemptable — so why not apply that same logic with our own direct sales force? Stick a stake in the ground and tell your sales force that anything sold below a CPM of X has no guarantee of running. Your smarter sellers (and sales managers) will figure out very quickly the best way to exceed their quotas is to sell inventory that will run, and you will lose the sellers that cut deals at the CPMs “the buyer demanded.”

These are just some potentially viable solutions that may solve a problem it doesn’t appear many are sincerely focused on solving. So for those in that camp, I’ve got to ask: If our solutions are so advanced and superior to those offered by other media, why aren’t clients paying more for them — instead of less?

In previous articles I created a New York Times hypothetical example to illustrate how to make a compelling engagement story work in an advertising discussion. I have also done the same with CondeNet. To cite an actual case study, I will turn to a company I worked for several years ago, CNET Networks. Now part of CBS Interactive, the company has a rich history of telling powerful engagement stories that lead to actionable insight for advertisers. I spoke recently with Dave Morris, CBS Interactive Chief Client Officer (now there’s a great title!), who outlined how the company is using site data to provide advertisers with actionable site intelligence. With a portfolio of sites that span consumer to business technology, CBS Interactive has taken a unique approach to using audience intelligence to offer marketers the kind of insight that can drive strategy and tactics. Consider the following engagement stories, their plot lines, characterization, and epiphanies:

Games: Gamespot.com attracts a community of game enthusiasts who share their experiences and views with each other. CBS Interactive can chart the “buzz” connected to an upcoming game launch and gauge positive or negative market perceptions, show a story line that connects audience buzz and activity to brand and product editorial coverage, competitive announcements, and game introductions.

Consumer technology: CNET.com can show a laptop vendor how the market is shopping in relation to a specific product. Let’s say that a user comes to the front door of CNET.com via a search for a Lenovo laptop. CNET can show Lenovo how the audience is comparing that product to others from Lenovo — and from the competitive set. Editorial video and text reviews, user ratings, editorial comparison charts, user-initiated product comparison charts, and advertising clicks can show Lenovo that perhaps, in addition to the expected competitive mindshare of HP and Dell, for a specific notebook Samsung or Sony have, per Lenovo’s expectations, a surprising degree of consumers’ interest and consideration.

Business: Sites like BNET, ZDNet, and TechRepublic focus on the business user. The sites offer a unique tool for marketers, Business Trax, which allows near-real time views of the audiences’ interaction with content on ZDNet and TechRepublic. With BT Trax, as Morris said, “We can show a marketer how to influence the business technology decision process, from an 300X90 awareness ad unit to a 30-page white paper, all about the company and its product.” CBS Interactive’s Business group can do this by categorizing content and tools in terms of the marketing process. General editorial may be tagged as awareness. A video about a strategy for a technology solution may be tagged as consideration. A white paper on a specific product may be tagged as an even deeper level of consideration — closer in the sales funnel to the actual transaction. Gathering intelligence via search terms, content click depth, video or audio interaction, community postings, and downloads, CNET can then show a marketer a great deal about mindshare trends, company and product awareness, interest and consideration.

“We use our audience insight to help our customers be successful,” said Morris. “We can then very credibly advise them on particular programs and ad units to run. The better we do this, the more everyone wins.” The chart below offers a sample view into the way that an engagement story can be told:

Essentially the visitor searches, actions and interaction are categorized in five buckets that mirror the advertising/marketing sales funnel: awareness, interest, engagement, consideration and “deep” consideration. In the above chart, they can show HP, Dell, IBM and Sun visitor actions that correlate to purchase cycle behavior. Is this information credible — can HP really believe, for example, that its “consideration” numbers have dropped dramatically in the most recent period? The key of course is the credibility of the way that visitor activity is classified. According to Business Trax, “consideration” and “deep consideration” begin when users register for information and begin to download gated documents, video, audio, and produce community information relative to HP, to continue the example, and its products.

The CNET / CBS Interactive example here is one rich with audience data that can offer advertisers strategic insight on their marketing success and challenges. And because it so clearly maps to the customer sales funnel, it stands out as the kind of audience engagement story that a marketer would really care about.

What other engagement stories are leading marketers to these kinds of insights? Let me hear your epiphanies!

It is our fault.

The current growth issues facing online advertising are problems that we created and have let persist.

There is no question that the economy has been completely mismanaged. There is no denying the $14 trillion in U.S. debt, and there is no sugarcoating the 40% drop in the Dow over the last 12 months that wiped out trillions in shareholder value.

Yet, much as we would like to believe, the growth challenges in online advertising have little to do with the recent economic struggles.

According to IDC, the average user spends 32.7 hours each week on the Internet, and only 16.4 hours watching TV. So while Internet usage is double that of television, spend lags dramatically. In 2008, Internet advertising revenue will only be one fifth the size of television advertising, a third as big as newspaper advertising, and only half of magazine advertising, according to a recent Carat report.

Marketers are an opportunistic bunch. If there was money to be made by shifting spend, they would do so. So why aren't dollars shifting more rapidly?

As any drug addict will tell you, admitting you have a problem is the first step.

For the last several years we have been drinking from a fire hose, with perpetual growth our presumed destiny. Every chance they got, online publishers explained why spend would keep shifting online and "follow the eyeballs."

We cannot take credit for a lot of the growth, though. We rode the wave of increasing broadband penetration around the world, and watched time spent online skyrocket. As Web technology got better, we benefited from the ability to display high-quality video online, and we piggybacked off the tools that enabled Rich Internet applications.

Our biggest accomplishment as an industry was targeting. We brought an unprecedented level of data and analytics to the business of marketing. We layered data point on top of data point until we could measure every page view, click, demographic and behavior.

Yet all the science came at a price. We forgot about the true purpose of advertising: to create an emotional connection with the consumer that drives sales.

Let's face it; most banner advertising is about as effective as abstinence training in Wasilla, Ala. Text ads are not much better. They work fine for search, but look ugly and out of place on content sites.

90% of online ad dollars are spent on two media that fail to drive memorable engagement.

So what is the solution?

No more metrics: We need a return to basics. Marketers create endless metrics to measure success. Most of it is a distraction and a total waste of time.

There is only one metric in marketing that really matters: revenue.

Advertising may cause an immediate revenue impact, or it may have a delayed impact, but if it does not drive revenue, it was not successful.

Unleash the artists: As a technology guy, it pains me to say this, but we need more artists in this industry. We need more creative folks dreaming up ad formats that create a memorable user experience and drive consumer action. We need to create new ad formats that leverage the interactivity advantage of the Web.

Most importantly, we need some sex appeal. We need the type of ads that get talked about around the watercooler Monday morning.

Drive transactions: The Web is the best platform for getting consumers from awareness to transaction the world has ever seen, yet few advertisers leverage the Web as a transaction platform.

Publishers are still stuck in a page view and CPM world. This narrow focus ignores the opportunities that lie in leveraging the targeting information we have to help consumers find products and complete meaningful transactions.

College sites should assist you in finding a school, coach you on writing an essay, and even let you submit an application. Sports sites should let you buy merchandise without leaving the site. Dating sites should… well, use your imagination.

If we stop blaming the economy, and focus our energy inward, we can invent the ad models that will be both memorable and capable of driving transactions.

As the thought leaders in Internet advertising, we have the opportunity to position our industry for the next 10 years of growth. But first we need an honest dialogue about what we are doing right and where we could benefit from major improvements.

What do you think we need to do better? Let me know in the comments.

For those of you old enough to have watched the ’70’s television classic, “WKRP in Cincinnati,” you will remember the straight-laced, bumbling and insecure newsman from the lowest-rated radio station in Ohio. In one episode, he is having a discussion with a man named Steel in which Steel makes the comment that he feels a man’s name says a lot about who he is. He then asks the geeky, balding newsman what is name is. The reply: “Les. Les Nessman.”

In the same way that “Steel” was a fitting name for the steroid-enhanced deliveryman, “Les” perfectly described the diminutive and incompetent news director.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been wrestling with the significance of names from a business perspective. While my focus has been on the name of a new vertical ad network rather than a fictional television character, the primary question is the same. What should a name communicate?

With the proliferation of ad networks and online media companies, how does a company set itself apart in a crowded marketplace? With ad:tech and OMMA AdNets approaching in a month, I thought it would be interesting to look at the names of the exhibiting companies to figure out what their names communicate, or fail to communicate, about their respective companies. I’ve selected a handful of names and separated them into the following categories:

Obvious/Descriptive (Think of this like opening a shoe store, and calling it The Shoe Store)

The heart of what’s wrong with our industry can be found beating at our industry conferences. This is where we stand on stages; beat our chests as self-anointed media pioneers celebrating our own kind, while missing the entire big picture.

The damage is structural — not in the location or timing of these formal acronymic gatherings, but rather within the structure of the pecking order of whose needs need to be met first, the consumer or the advertiser. In the purest form of the relationship between content, consumers and advertisers, the consumer must sit atop the pedestal — and that’s where these conferences turn its attendees into human mannequins, placed neatly in chairs below the raised stages where the advertiser sits.

The issue is that the sponsors of these industry events are promised placements on the panels, thus shaping the content we pay to hear. It’s like paying for a magazine and reading press releases instead of editorial content.

The biased injections from sponsors (and from selected companies asked to send a spokesperson to speak) are not intentional and certainly not all as blatant as a recent session at OMMA, when a couple of brand managers from HP, Virgin Mobile, Nickelodeon, and an executive from the San Francisco-based ad agency AKQA, took over the stage and forced us to watch their commercial reels telling us how great they are. The resentment filled the room like the fog engulfing the Golden Gate Bridge. No, in most cases, sponsor and speaker panel participation feels more like a blog post born with a subtle bias or hidden agenda. Something just doesn’t feel right about it.

I attended OMMA and felt the diminished buzz firsthand as both a panel speaker and an audience member. The crowd barely cares anymore, paying little attention to the content they paid to hear and more attention to the work they carry in the palm of their hands. And MIXX was no better from what I heard, so let’s stop pretending these conferences are meeting “our needs” beyond our need to ask, “Are you going?” to colleagues and clients during the weeks leading up to these industry events.

Of course there are some benefits being delivered, and some gems of content can be found — but when it’s all said and done, we walk out with that feeling of disappointment as we empty our bags of collateral into the trash once we’re out of sight. It’s not all bad, but it is poisoned, and we can and should do better. Why can’t our industry conferences mimic the web we weave, and act like pure social media events, empowering the participants to drive and control the conversation? Why don’t we walk our own talk?

Let’s stop the press-release-laced communication and invite a truly open dialogue. We should be better at handling the logistics of this than any other industry. Let’s can the canned speeches from our anointed leaders and speak with them, instead of them speaking at us. Let’s stop allowing any sponsors to speak to the audience unless the audience addresses them first. I would add one more condition: if you as an invited speaker can’t stay at the event beyond your time to speak, you can’t speak at all. There is nothing more arrogant than showing up at an industry event just in time for your speaking part and leaving immediately afterwards.

Would this kind of open platform get out of hand? Likely. Would there be a need for some regulations? Of course. Would these industry events be more fun and engaging? The expectations of the herd in attendance are so low right now, how can they not. Will the pioneers of new media change the formats of these conferences in this way? Not a chance.

I suspect those shaping the conferences we attend no longer see why a line between sponsors and content needs to be drawn and defended, because as a medium, we have blurred this line between advertising and content so much we no longer see what we are stepping over.

And the beat goes on.

The interactive dimension of the Web continues to deepen and broaden.  Social media, professional communities, user-generated content, games, widgets, video — all attest to richer levels of audience engagement. How do publishers make the most of this heightened interactivity? 

Some publishers are already telling some rather sophisticated engagement stories and realizing great returns on their investment in audience insight. But first let’s take a step back and recognize the imperative to understand audience engagement and frame it in a way that resonates with marketers.

Engagement Is A Story, Not A Metric

We still need to be clear by what we mean by engagement. Previously, I alluded to the excellent distinctions offered by Gary Angel and Eric Peterson among three types of engagement: visitor, audience and brand. Essentially, visitor engagement has to do with understanding what users are doing on your site; audience, how you can use that intelligence to enable advertisers to succeed; and brand, how customers develop a relationship with a specific brand.  So when we hear someone speak of engagement, it is very useful to know which mode they are in.  For our purposes, we are speaking of audience engagement, which has obvious reference points with visitor (analytics) and brand (conversion and ROI metrics) engagement.

Audience engagement is a story, not a metric. We cannot look at a single metric or even a set of metrics and help advertisers know how to best advertise on our sites.  Metrics play an undeniably central role in getting your site on a media plan. Advertisers look for reach and composition at various metrics that you supply in a spreadsheet. Once you are on the plan, though, it is your understanding of your audience that can really enable an advertiser to get the greatest return on investment, and for you to realize highly profitable revenues.

But don’t get me wrong; metrics are indispensable to the story. The key: metrics can help you understand your own site engagement story. So let me return to the Peterson Model. Eric Peterson has understood that engagement is not a simple metric, such as duration or page views. What can such a metric tell you about what your audience is doing on your site and why your site is valuable to them? And by extension, what can you tell advertisers about how they can succeed, based on the fact that your average user spends four or 40 minutes on your site? Instead, the Peterson Model looks at indices, which give the metrics context.

For example, you can look at a community site and score interactivity, instead of page views.  Doesn’t a widget on Facebook that becomes highly viral lend itself to an engagement story that clicks and page views don’t capture? Instead the Peterson Model may bring the following indices into the story:

·        Downloads: how many people downloaded a widget, called, for example, the “Parking Wars Game”?

·        Interactivity: how many times the audience accessed the widget?

·        Duration: time spent on the game, in comparison with other widgets, perhaps?

·        Feedback: How many comments were posted?

These kinds of metrics can then become the plot lines of a compelling engagement story. But what would that story look like?

Here, you would need the widget metrics. But you would also need some intelligence. You need to understand your audience well enough to move from metrics to indices to a story that connects with another type of engagement — the one that matters the most to marketers: the brand engagement story. Some key points to keep in mind:

1.      What is the epiphany of your story?

Your audience engagement story needs to accomplish one thing: It needs to result in a big “Aha!” that shows your marketing or agency partner how to succeed with your audience.  Essentially, it has to culminate in actionable insights for your advertisers. Examples of these can include:

·        A clearer idea of the competitive landscape

·        The awareness, interest, and consideration levels for your clients’ products

·        The kinds of activities on your site that map to the sales and marketing funnel (Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Purchase decision)

·        The types of interactive ad units that succeed at key user moments

·        Where and when it is most effective to offer sponsored tools, widgets, downloadable documentation

2.      What is the Plot?

A compelling story is more than just a record of events. The plot enables the author to shape a story to emphasize what is significant and connected to the main point or climax of the tale. In the same way, metrics alone can never tell your engagement story. Intelligence and understanding need to guide the framework of those metrics.  A metric might tell the Democratic National Committee that the number of visitors to the election pages of CNN during the Republican Convention was slightly lower than during the Democratic Convention. A compelling story might be that the audience for the Republicans doubled among independent women voters and that a high percentage of them appeared via a search for “Sarah Palin.”

3.      Bring your Characters to life

Who is your audience? How can you bring some dimension to what makes them tick, what they care about, and why they are important?  I would advise taking a couple of related approaches to gathering these essential insights:

·        Visit Quantcast and look at the kinds of information that “Quantified” sites can offer about who visits their sites. In my consulting work with the company, I know that Web publishers are enabling advertisers to understand better the demographics, business and lifestyle profiles of their audiences. See the wealth of audience info under Bloomberg’s Quantified Profile, for example.

·        Take Avinash Kaushik’s simple advice and ask your visitors in an unobtrusive pop up survey some basic questions about what they are doing on your site and how your site is helping them accomplish their goals.

·        Talk to them. There are many great ways to identify representative visitors who can offer you a gold mine of intelligence about your site, your clients’ brands, and the best ways for your advertiser to win their minds and hearts.

Which companies that are telling “Audience Engagement” stories that connect the dots between the “Visitor Engagement” on their own site and the “Brand Engagement” goals of the advertiser on their own site? I’d love to hear from you on that. Meanwhile, I do have a stellar case study to share — next time on MediaPost.  Till then, stay engaged.

While the online advertising industry struggles, one sector is purposely restraining its growth.

Online video advertising could be a $20 billion juggernaut virtually overnight. The television networks just need to be willing to eat their own young.

And it has nothing to do with ad formats.

Our industry has this perverse need to “innovate” even when the best solution already exists. We have all suffered through countless arguments about pre-rolls versus post-rolls, the correct length of ads, and how to integrate interactivity into ads.

These arguments overlook the simplest fact of video advertising: the current format works. 15-, 30-, and 60-second interruptive commercials are just fine. Hulu proved this when it sold out six months of interruptive commercials in advance. Advertisers are comfortable buying this format, and users are willing to watch them. In fact, this ad model works even better online, because viewers can’t fast-forward their TiVo or flip the channel. While format innovation might yield some incremental gain, it won’t move the needle in the grand scheme of things.

TV is the most engaging and memorable advertising format available. Quant geeks waste breath arguing about the lack of measurement in offline ads, while ignoring the human aspect of advertising. Great brands tell a story, and that story is much easier to tell with TV ads than banner ads.

Two Markets Disguised as One
The real reason these format arguments happen is that all online video is mistakenly lumped into a single industry, when in fact it is two industries, driven by very different dynamics.

Short-form, mostly amateur video is one market, and long-form professional content is the other. And the lion’s share of revenue will come from long-form.

Google’s YouTube, the 800-pound gorilla in short-form, may be gobbling up all the impressions, but it’s barely making a whisper in the revenue department. Its struggle highlights two fundamental problems with short-form video:

First, the tolerance for interruptive ads on short-form is much lower. Being forced to see a 30-second ad to watch a two-minute video is too high a price to pay for your time.

Second, analysts estimate that only 3% of YouTube’s views can be monetized due to copyright concerns, whereas professional content sites like Hulu can monetize 100% of their views.

While short-form struggles, long-form video sites have artificially constrained their growth in two key ways:

The Fear of Real-Time Broadcast
Current audience measurement tools foolishly split online video into a separate category. Television stations are not going to risk simulcasting new shows online and offline if it will damage their Nielsen ratings.

As a result, video sites add an artificial delay, making them a destination for outdated content. You cannot arrange to meet friends to watch the latest “90210″ episode if you don’t know when the CW is going to get around to adding it online. For regular shows, this is a problem; for sports, it is a non-starter.

Until rating systems properly recognize online viewing, online video will not become a real-time broadcast medium and usage patterns will suffer.

The Library Effect
Today, Hulu is a great place to see that show you missed last week, but offers little more.

If Hulu were to offer every episode ever made, instead of the five most recent episodes, the usage patterns would change instantly. This may seem obvious, but the effect is not.

There are millions of fans that religiously watch, TiVo, and buy the DVD sets for their favorite shows. If Hulu became a reliable source for the entire collection of episodes, the market for television shows on DVD would tank.

While a Historical Video Library is hugely appealing to users, creating one would require content creators to intentionally cannibalize their DVD sales. Until DVD sales fall off a cliff naturally, or an illegal alternative emerges that accelerates the process, the Historical Video Library will be just a pipe dream.

These two self-imposed constraints leave the online video market sitting in the no-man’s land of random entertainment: too old to be a broadcast medium, and too incomplete to be a Historical Library.

If only the rest of the online advertising industry had such high-class problems.

On a recent flight from Phoenix to attend Ad:Tech Chicago, I was sitting near a young boy and his father. As we accelerated down the runway, the boy beamed with anticipation for the moment we would leave the ground. As we lifted off and began our rapid ascent, he gazed out the window and proclaimed to his father, “Look dad, the earth is tilting.” From his perspective, it seemed perfectly logical to conclude that the earth must be tilting since he was still sitting in his seat and the horizon was no longer flat. While my perspective in that airplane led me to a different assessment of our situation, I understood the alternate view from the four-year-old boy sitting across the aisle from me.

Individual perspective can cause two people who observe the exact same thing to interpret it differently. Such was the case in a recent Online Publishing Insider column I wrote about Facebook. In that column I referred to Facebook as a publisher. From my perspective, working for an ad network, there are two very broad categories for companies that conduct business on the Internet: advertisers and publishers. From that vantage point, Facebook falls into the publisher bucket. That perspective, however, was not shared by one of the column’s readers. In his comment posted to the Online Publishing Insider blog, he wrote, “They [Facebook] are a content aggregator or a repository of their user’s content,” inferring that they were not a publisher. I apparently lost all credibility in his eyes when referring to Facebook as a publisher since the company clearly doesn’t publish any of its own content.

Unsure of the validity of my perspective, I went to Ad:Tech seeking out some additional opinions. In one of the sessions I attended, Liz Ross, CEO and Global Chief Marketing Officer at Tribal DDB, made a comment that caught my attention. She said that one of her agency’s clients, Pepsi, produces so much online content that it would consider itself an online publisher. While that may be a stretch, even for me, it was clear that the traditional definition of an online publisher might need to be expanded.

While at the conference I also had the opportunity to speak with Shiv Singh, vice president of social media & global strategic initiatives for Avenue A | Razorfish. I asked him for his definition of a publisher, and his response was sufficiently broad as well. Singh said that a publisher is, “Anyone who has an audience and accepts advertising.” He added that he believes that more traditional publishers are going to start looking like the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world as they integrate social network features that will create blurring from both directions (social networks and traditional publishers).

If you agree with his definition, then an individual blogger could potentially be a publisher as well. With advertising widgets like lemonade and blog-centric ad networks, bloggers that can attract an audience can also monetize their content.

Is the earth tilting or is the plane ascending? Is a publisher defined as a media site that produces and publishes its own content, or could a publisher be just an individual blogger? It all depends on your perspective. What’s yours?

It's happening in front of our eyes.  Paid ad placements, inside the garden walls protecting traditional media values, are poisoning the grounds where Henry Luce and our publishing forefathers first drew "the line" separating church from state.  Today's media-buying demand for a "big idea" required to earn a media commitment, combined with a softer and more competitive environment, all driven by a sales force that has no idea who Henry Luce is, have publishers doing things not done before. 

The New York Times magazine recently selling its cover to an advertiser is a symbolic symptom of this self-inflicted disease.  The shock wasn't the cover being sold, but rather, that a traditional magazine publisher veered onto tracks laid by dot-com publishers over this past decade.

Print publishers are guided by ASME guidelines designed to protect the integrity of their product and the interest of their readers so there is zero confusion between what is edit and what is advertising.  Dot-com publishers are guided by their creative abilities to cross this line.

Case in point: UGO.com.  This entertainment network of sites bought by Hearst a year ago is notoriously creative at blurring the line.  In one example, they sold an ad campaign to the breakfast chain Denny's.  A co-branded Leaderboard ran on the site with a visual of a grand slam breakfast covered with copy that reads "Movies: Part of a Balanced Breakfast."  When you click on the ad, you land inside the site's editorial channel dedicated to "Film & TV" and a custom section reviewing the top movie breakfast scenes.  There is no mention this section was driven by advertising.  Check please line crossed.

Case in point; Yahoo.com.  This portal knows no boundaries when it comes to promoting the interests of an advertiser at the expense of editorial integrity.  The examples are many and the most blatant one I encountered came back when the movie "Me, You and Dupree" first opened.  Highlighted on the home page that opening Friday was a "feature story" with a picture of Owen Wilson and a headline that read "How to Evict a Freeloader" followed by a subheadline that read, "A married couple is besieged by a real life Dupree." What are the chances of this news story breaking the same day a movie about a freeloader who won't leave opened?  Pass the popcorn, hold the credibility, line abolished.

Case in point: Newsweek.com.  This example can make the case maybe it's OK to blur the lines if the interests of the advertiser and the reader are met simultaneously.  For the last nine months or so, a Rolex watch face has been affixed to the home page of this newsweekly's web site.  The watch not only tells the user what time it is, but what if they wish to know what time it is in Denver or Dubai, they can click on an arrow and the watch face changes to the exact time in those time zones. 

When I worked at Newsweek, there was no Newsweek.com and the editor was Maynard Parker — a world-class person who wore traditional media values the way older men proudly wear after-shave cologne.  If Maynard were alive today, I wonder what he would do if a salesperson sold Rolex a fixed position on the cover of his magazine.

My own firsthand experience crossing the line was at IGN.com.  We cut a multi-year, multi-million-dollar deal with a single retailer, to be featured on every page view the site generated, to give our readers the chance to order games online.  It didn't matter that this retailer was notorious for being the last to stock the most popular games or did not offer the lowest prices.  They wrote a check and we wrote off providing choices on where to buy games when on our site.  Game over. (Note:  IGN now provides a price comparison engine).

Online is famous for its ability to track and report the actions of its users, but what we can't track is the erosion of our credibilility.  This happens over time and inside the collective minds of those we are meant to serve.  Isn't it time buyers stop pretending requests for this kind of "creative" integration serve everyone's interests?  Isn't it time we institute and uphold firm ASME guidelines for online publishers, and publicly punish those sites that ignore them?  Isn't it time we take a look at what we are ignoring before we have nothing left to look at?

When I was leading a media sales team a few years back, I had a conversation with a senior ad exec at Microsoft who had a reputation for being “all about the numbers.” We were talking about what separated the very best publishers from all the rest, and he said that in the end it’s all about the results — and how well you deliver what you say you are going to deliver. But, he added, you can never underestimate the influence of salespeople who really act as partners and show that they care at least as much about the customer as they do for the company they represent.

The wisdom of that remark is one that my experience tells me everyone believes but few live by.  It is the exceptional salespeople, I find, who know what problems their customers are trying to fix and what is personally important to an individual client. When salespeople really know and deliver to the objective results and subjective needs of a customer, magnificent things always happen.

The  “Advertiser Intelligence Report,” Advertiser Perceptions’ semiannual survey of nearly two thousand marketers and ad agency decision-makers, makes this point emphatically. (Disclosure: I am currently doing consulting work for Advertiser Perceptions).  In the most recent report, “Results” are the most important criteria in the selection of online media brands. This is followed by audience “Reach,” “Composition” and “Engagement.”  “Results” includes a wide array of metrics, but here are the criteria that top the list:

1.    Number of impressions (54% rated it as extremely important)
2.    Conversion rates (54%)
3.    ROI (53%)
4.    Number of visitors (50%)
5.    Number of page views (48%)

Well worth noting: Only a quarter of the respondents, viewed “impact on sales,” “time spent on the website” and “click through rates” as being “very important.”   Knowing, for example, that the typical ad decision-maker values page views as far more important than duration on a site, might reshape a discussion of audience engagement. Understanding that ROI is “very important” to more than double the decision-makers than sales impact, should lead to a conversation that clearly identifies what ROI means. And while we know that click-through rates are not mission-critical these days to most advertisers, on the other hand, this metric is important to a quarter of them. Know thy buyer!

With the emphasis on these numbers, what is the role of the salesperson representing a site? Is it possible that online marketers just need a spreadsheet or an online calculator in order to make their decisions?

Hardly. Year in and year out, the Advertiser Intelligence Report shows the pivotal role of the sales team in providing advanced skills to advertising decision-influencers.  Of the 30 or so criteria in their evaluation of salespeople, note that media decision-makers are primarily looking for salespeople who know and understand the advertiser first and then work as collaborators in delivering solutions to their problems:

1.    Understands advertiser needs and priorities
2.    Knows the media brands they represent
3.    Knows the advertiser brand and products
4.    Responsiveness
5.    Respects our time
6.    Problem solver

Advertising decision-makers who give high grades to an online sales team also expect to do business with the online brand in the months ahead. Objective results and sales expertise therefore are closely connected to advertising decisions.

So the moral is that, to win the minds of top advertising decision-makers, online publishers absolutely need to provide the objective results. But equally important, salespeople must build collaborative relationships that demonstrate extraordinary understanding and problem-solving skills.  When a sales team can do this consistently, they will win the hearts of the customer as well as their minds.

The online advertising industry is ground zero for industry analysts who make ridiculous predictions to attract attention.

Worse, it is a vicious cycle.

The bigger the prediction, the more likely it is to be quoted by venture capitalists, reporters, industry pundits, and CEOs of start-ups looking to raise funding. The more you get quoted, the more reports you sell. So analysts are incentivized to produce ambitious, if fictitious, numbers.

Invariably, financial bubbles get created because people ignore fundamentals and start using questionable math to justify their own logic.

The rest of us sit below the ether trying to make sense of it all, while being told “we don’t get it.”

Maybe.

Or maybe every time a new business model gets created in the media industry, people make up a whole set of useless new metrics to measure it that never seem to track back to revenue. Or profit. Or common sense.

The mobile advertising market is the most absurd of them all. Forrester Research predicted the mobile advertising market will be less than $1 billion in 2012.

Then things got crazy.

 In September 2007, the Kelsey Group estimated that U.S. mobile advertising would grow from $33.2 million to $1.4 billion in 2012. Then Strategy Analytics predicted the global market would grow to $14.4 billion in 2011. Not to be outdone, eMarketer estimated that the US market will be $6.5 billion by 2012, and $19 billion globally. Finally, ABI Research threw down the trump card and declared that mobile advertising would be a $19 billion global business a full year earlier, in 2011.

What a difference a year makes. Those same firms are now revising their online advertising forecasts down. Predicting huge growth, and then announcing a market change and revising the estimates down is a waste of time. It would be much faster to just predict more realistic growth in the first place. Except then you might not be able to sell a second report.

If the paid professionals have a 700% spread on forecasts only three years away, what hope do the rest of us have to accurately forecast a market?

The key to rising above the noise is to ignore often-touted, but meaningless statistics. Here are three rules for assessing a market:

1.    Value is NOT a function of cost. The fact that social networking inventory, for example, is cheaper than other advertising options does not inherently make it a good value. Value is measured as cost versus return. Perhaps it is cheaper because it does not perform as well. Many articles have been written about advertisers getting negative ROI from social networking despite $0.15 CPMs.

Social networking can be a great value, or an awful value, but cost has nothing to do with it. When you measure value, you need to demand a quantifiable ROI measurement.

Ultimately, a marketing channel will be measured by the ROI it can deliver. Advertisers will measure the profit they can generate, versus the money spent, and the amount of risk taken.

2.    The success of an industry is not measured in venture capital. Slide may have raised money at a high valuation, but so did Kozmo.com, PointCast, Flooz, Boo.com and countless others. Like any other industry, not all investors are smart, and even the smart ones make stupid decisions every once in a while.

A flood of venture capital into an industry should be a warning flag, not a sign of prosperity. Hot markets get over-funded, leaving a sea of second-tier companies floating around aimlessly. Online video and social networking generated huge returns for a few winners, but left an army of also-rans behind to die.

A venture capital investment should be taken for what it is: one person’s opinion. An opinion that statistically is wrong 70-90% of the time.

3.    Understand the “how.” All too often, these forecasts are made without understanding how the market is going to achieve the outsized growth. In the case of mobile advertising, analysts have layered assumption on top of assumption to get to their number. In doing so, they ignore one of the most basic rules of scientific experimentation: You can change only one variable at a time.

To arrive at a forecast, analysts must estimate the rate of mobile Internet adoption, consumers’ willingness to tolerate advertising on the phone, advertisers’ willingness to shift large percentages of their spend to an unproven channel, and publishers’ ability to develop new advertising formats that will effectively leverage the channel.

Any time you have this many variables, proceed with caution. If no one can explain the “how,” run.

Only two things about advertising forecasts make financial sense: Analysts are trying to sell research reports, and CEOs are trying to sell venture capitalists.

And neither makes a compelling argument.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced June 26 that it had given preliminary approval to a recommendation to introduce a whole range of new Internet domain names, which would pave the way for a seismic increase in online real estate.

Talk about the Internet being like the Wild, Wild West. Along with the extraordinary expansion of domain name choices and opportunities would come HUGE potential for search engine marketing.

Currently, there is a limited range of 21 top-level domains (TLDs) from which to choose, such as .com, .org, .info and .uk. According to ICANN, this decision will allow applicants for new names to select the most marketable domains, making them perfect for attracting their target customers.

So businesses will now be able to apply for generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere. ICANN even reports that there are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based TLDs like .nyc, .berlin and .paris.

At first glance, this seems to make perfect sense. But my hope is that it doesn’t spiral out of control, becoming a field day for cybersquatters that register, traffic in or use domain names in bad faith, intending to profit from the goodwill of someone else’s trademark.

That would create a huge nightmare for established brands like Amazon.com, which would need to procure a laundry list of domains — everything from books.amazon and music.amazon to amazon.books and amazon.music — to prevent cybersquatters from wrongfully registering and profiting from its name.

It should be noted, however, that ICANN will not be selling the new TLDs for some time. The recommendation must first receive final approval early next year, followed by a limited period in which any established entity can submit an application for evaluation.

Search Engines and the Domainrush
If and when it does happen, look for an immediate impact on search engine marketing. Search engines love keyword-enriched domain names, since finding exact keywords in domains proves to be an extremely strong indicator of a Web site’s relevance to a search query.

By combining a newly acquired generic domain name with a very good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, a small company could find itself ranking among extremely competitive search terms and among Fortune 1000 companies. Of course, Web sites need quality inbound links to rank high on Google, but a great domain name can go a long way.

Keyword-enriched domain names and URL paths (there is a difference) are usually what it takes to achieve a top-10 organic ranking. Take, for example, AllFreshSeafood.com (ranking No. 4 on Google for “fresh seafood”); BreakingNews.com (No. 6 on Yahoo for latest breaking news”) and BagelBoss.com (No. 4 on Google for “bagels”). I’m sure you get the point.

Still, non-keyword-enriched domain names can be optimized by adding keyword-enriched page names. For example, StorageDeluxe.com sits atop Google for “Brooklyn storage” and the URL path is www.storagedeluxe.com/locations_brooklyn.asp; a Google search for “used Acura parts” returns www.uneedapart.com/used-acura-parts.php as No. 1; and a search on Yahoo for “cardio exercises” yields www.lucilleroberts.com/cardio-exercies on the first page of the search results.

Now that we’ve established that a keyword-enriched domain name can be extraordinarily valuable, just think about owing a domain like .insurance — you could have auto.insurance, life.insurance, health.insurance, business.insurance, etc. Beyond the obvious and tremendous SEO benefit, imagine what this will do to build brands.

I am curious to see if those who register new generic TLDs will use them to dominate their niche or resell domains. Only time will tell.

ICANN reports that there will be a six-figure charge for registering these new domains. That is chump change for major domains — and even those that want to be