The Media Supermarket

When I go on selling advertisements, the traditional way, I have to get to know the client, talk to them, really understand them and convince them of the value of my offering. After that comes the long procedure (fight) over where to place the ad or how long it would be etc.
With contextualized ad systems, things seem to be just the opposite; I’m getting to know about the advertiser, through which I’m generating income, through my publication (blog), and after they publish the ads that I placed wherever I wanted!
This is how I got to know about several sites, blogs, services and people, one of which is John Chow.
The interesting thing, is that since advertising is contextual, and it is related to what I’m writing, the ads that show are usually interesting to me. Never mind about my visitors!
His ad caught my attention through several key words, like “your blog is a money maker”, and “I’ll show you how 100% free”.
He seems to really understand to the concept of giving in order to take, and has his own witty way of implementing it.
One of the ways he is using, is posting an ad on a certain blog, only to cheer the blogger and telling him to “keep up the good work”. How can you not wonder what the advertiser wants by just cheering up someone?! He only has the url of his blog under the cheer, and does not ask you to take action, not even click.
Apparently this not only caused readers to click and talk about it, the targeted blogger would reply with another Adsense ad as a reply for that ad. Here is a post showing interestig dialogs. Thanks JohnTP.
John’s post analyzing his incomefrom his blog was very instructive and gave me an idea about the different income streams available and how each can be used. I must have overestimated Google’s Adsense program. I look forward to sharing such results from my blog!
His latest strategy, which I fell for… (rose up to??) was to give links to bloggers who review his blog. For me, I thought it would be great to get some traffic from John, but I had to put something useful (I hope) about his blog. Therefore, I was forced to read more and more, to get to know him better, which is what his whole strategy is about. He got himself a new reader, and some links.
The memory of one of my college teachers,  Bob Schemel, just came to my mind when he asked us what was the thing that is equal for all human beings and no matter who you are, how much money you had, you are still an equal with all other people…
His answer? Time!
I had to agree, because come to think about it, we all have twenty four hours a day, and although smarter people might achieve more in less time, and might know how to collaborate, or purely use others to “save” time, we all have our deadlines, we need to be in a certain place at a certain time.
With the new available technologies, all this is collapsing. Time and space restrictions are collapsing. The quality of this post, for example, does not have anything to do with submitting it on time. There is no time limit for submitting it. So I “took” my time and wrote it at my convenience. You, in turn are reading it at your convenience and it can potentially be read any time in the future.
If this was a newspaper article, I would have had to submit it today, would have been paid to write it once, and anyone who wants to read it has only today, and maybe tomorrow to read it, then they’ll have to look in garbage can!
From an advertising point of view this article would have generated some income for the newspaper only once and that’s it.
In the case of this (and any other) post, whenever it is read, there will be some ads on the side or featured products to sell. It can therefore generate a theoretically unlimited amount of income for the blogger.   

Seems to me that time is no longer money, at least it is less so, than it used to be. Now, money is generated by the quality of your work, which is rewarded by more and more links (votes) from other people. These people don’t know (or care) when you wrote it, they care if it is useful or interesting.

So, if you want to make some cash, go out and get some links, because links are money!