A friend e-mailed after reading this post, “Are you saying sites using [some form of newsware] will be as common as [sites using] AdSense?”
Yes. Why not? Let met stretch the AdSense analogy further.
Advertising is only as common as the content that makes ad inventory possible. What if there were a service that helped publishers add fresh content (and therefore ad inventory) to their sites, as AdSense does for ads? It would have to be:
1) As easy to add as AdSense. Only “web skills 101″ required. (And if it were that easy, as I argued, all kinds of sites that you never imagined as news outlets would become such, just like all kinds of sites that you never imagined running ads started doing so thanks to AdSense.)
2) Make the matching easy. AdSense works because publishers don’t have to manually pick out ads, and advertisers don’t have to pick the sites. It does the matching for you – that’s the only way it scales. Similarly, a ContentSense service (Daylife or equivalent) would need to be intelligent and be able to place content based on context as well as the publisher’s wishes.
3) Allow for real customization. This is one requirement that departs from AdSense. Having the same web experience for an ad unit is ok (if not preferred) for AdSense. For a content web-experience, a publisher has to truly be able to make it their own to build an audience. A ContentSense platform has to allow the publisher to make the experience match their voice, their brand, their feel, whether they are using an experience out-of-the-box or inventing applications.
4) Sites don’t have to pay for it. At Daylife, we’re really happy (and our investors more so!) that we have a service that publishers find valuable and pay real money for. But, to really be as ubiquitous as AdSense, the service would have to be free for publishers.
Google says to publishers, “We’ll give you the ads.” A true ContentSense solution says, “We’ll give you the ad inventory.”
Pipe dream? Maybe. We’ll see.
