Neville talks about an interesting, really cool IMHO, thing the U.K. supermarket chain Tesco is doing.  Not only are they sending out traditional e-mail marketing e-mails to customers (on the quantity or quality concept) they have created a "deal of the day" RSS feed.  Now, this rocks.  Frankly, I'd love to get my store flier in RSS.  Maybe, the just before the end of the day ... how about a quick recipe for an easydinner and oh ... here are the ingredients ... oh and severalof them are on a special web-recipe sale. How about that.

From Neville:

So my prediction is - more RSS feeds by consumer-focused businesses such as supermarkets. It's getting easier for people to use RSS (often without realizing it) and will get easier still as more businesses offer information via RSS, as simpler ways of describing it emerge (like ' live bookmarks ,' for instance), and as it becomes ever more easier to get the information offered via RSS. (Related development: expect more advertising in RSS.)

It's the heir to the direct marketing throne.

Michael Parekh may be right when he suggests that the Web 2.0 companies that find a way to share their revenues with their users will have the best chance of becoming Web 3.0 companies.

As many Qumana blog readers know, we are working on bringing new, legitimate alternatives to the process ofusing contextual advertising on and in logs.

There has been a growing amount of attention and a growing number of initiatives in the online advertising industry to address all the new potential *real estate* made available by and through blogs.

But all us bloggers are a pesky demanding bunch ... in order to use advertising that is not irrelevant or inane, we need breadth and depth of inventory from which to pull and place ads in our blog posts.

Today, if we want to do that and not make our publishing annoyiong to potential readers, we generally have to use Google, or one of the few alternatives that are trying to figure out how to serve this burgeoning new market for online advertising.

The main problem seems to be that CTR's are related to relevancy and pertinence, but the economic logic of what is paid to a publisher for an ad that *performs* is based on the search placement results and therefore still pretty much tied to the model that was built for the time when the Web consisted only of more static web sites. While blogging is tied to the *search and discover* process, it is not limited by that starting point .. and that is a real and significant difference when it comes to the circulation of online advertising inventory.

Here's Performancing.com's Andy Hagans on the issue:

Depth.

Adsense has it. YPN doesn't.

Admittedly, many bloggers have noticed that the two programs pay out about the same. The YPN CTR is usually significantly less than Adsense (because it doesn't target as well--due to less advertiser depth) but it pays more per click than Adsense (because it lacks 'Smart Pricing').

Now, Smart Pricing annoys me as much as the next guy, but in reality, it's the only thing that makes contextual advertising sustainable. Ads on blogs are just not going to convert as well as ads displayed on Google.com search results pages. It's that simple. When Google implemented Smart Pricing, it knew that EPC would fall across the board, but over time it would make that money back and then some by making it feasible for many more advertisers to enter the marketplace.

Their logic in "mathematical" form:

discounted clicks = more advertisers = more ads and keywords = better contextual targeting = higher CTR = higher long term revenue



From our perspective, there it is .. the first advertising provider that partners with an initiative such as Qumana (dedicated to bringing bloggers freedom, choice and control) will offer the blogosphere A LEGITIMATE ALTERNATIVE to the depth and breadth of Google's AdSense. And not only that, but Qumana in conjunction with Adgenta provides the personal publisher with increased versatility in terms of pulling and placing ads ... or, in blogosphere jargon, mitigates against *owning your content*. You choose your advertising, not Google.

The economic logic that needs (I think) only minor adjustment is in the split of the advertising dollar paid to the advertising network, the distribution channel enablers and the bloggers themselves. There is room in that advertising dollar, I am sure .. and the first one that gets it right might have to give up 10% or 15% of their current take to gain potentially vast numbers of users, greater click-throughs and substantially increased revenue .. while making it a win-win-win all around.

And, incidentally, not just forfeiting to Google a monopolistic position in this new and growing market space by default or through sloppy, non-innovative thinking and implementation.

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• Steve
• Darren
• Michael