Beyond AdSense

November 7, 2005

New online advertising models give publishers more control. But could they have saved Suck.com?

By Greg Lindsay

Remember Suck.com? The original home of bite-size critical savagery on the Web would have turned 10 next month if it hadn’t flamed out four summers ago. The site, online publishing’s answer to the Velvet Underground, had few readers, but those who did peruse it regularly all started blogs. Why they have a chance to make real coin while Suck never did has everything to do with timing and the automation of the last piece of the publishing puzzle.

If you break the cost of publishing down into its primary constituents, you’re left with distribution, production, and sales. Free and automatic distribution was the obvious draw of the Web 10 years ago — you didn’t need trucks or a newsstand presence, just a dial-up connection. Production was the next piece to go — free HTML text editors gave way to powerful but outrageously expensive production systems like Vignette StoryServer, then evolved into cheap and powerful tools like Movable Type. These, combined with an inexhaustible supply of nonprofessional content creators (bloggers, citizen journalists, and what have you) made possible the creation of blogging networks and other ultralight publishers (what some are already calling blogging 2.0).

Still resolving itself is the last piece: the automation of advertising sales. Google’s (GOOG) AdSense heralded that it was finally possible; anyone could sign up, clear space on their sites, and never again think about the checks coming in. While Google’s long-term fortunes may depend on AdSense, publishers can’t say the same thing. Why? Because it’s a little too automatic, a deus ex machina solution that’s too good to be true.

The commercial poster children of ultralight publishing — like Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. — still employ at least minimal sales staffs, because they want to retain some measure of control over their ad-selling destinies. They’re not comfortable with the idea of throwing themselves completely on the algorithmic mercy of Google. Poll them and you’ll hear that AdSense is great, but there’s still an opportunity for ad networks and publishers alike to strike a balance between automation and control.

Control is at the heart of AdBrite’s sales pitch. I had lunch last week with the company’s founder, Phillip Kaplan, who’s better known for his previous incarnation as the ringleader of FuckedCompany.com.

AdBrite is one of the advertising networks — like Blogads and Burst Media and plenty of others — competing to aggregate the traffic of publishers in their networks and sell them to advertisers. In return for the outsourcing and automation of sales, they take a cut. In AdBrite’s case, it splits the revenue with its publishers 75-25.