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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