Jeff Jarvis posts about blog ad networks, and something rather confusingly called "open-source ad calls". What are those? As near I can tell, a way to tag ad space so it can be part of an "ad-hoc" network:

In open-source ad calls, the publisher (blogger, media company) makes an ad space available to advertisers (or their agencies). In this case, the advertisers are selecting the publishers' sites.

What I find really interesting is the growing sentiment that the future of content advertising is cost-per-acquisition oriented. Jeff says "performance basis" and that could mean CPC, but I think a break-out will occur when someone (maybe Snap.com?) gets it mapped to CPA.

First, in either sell-side advertising or with open-source ad calls, I imagine that most advertising will pay only on a performance basis. The fraud, in that case, is about manufacturing clicks, but that's a different problem.

This sentiment feels like a repeat of the late 90's when banner advertisers started worrying about effectiveness, and started asking for cost-per-click or cost-per-action advertising.

So it's easy to imagine that the contextual content networks (i.e. Google AdSense, BlogAds, etc.) will be the first to move to cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Don't you think?

¶ 3/15/2005