Premium Inventory

The symptoms of a sick online advertising industry are easy to see. Publishers cannot sell inventory. Brand advertising budgets have yet to shift online. Easy money from deep-pocketed dot-coms willing to wantonly spend for market share and awareness is gone. Traditional advertisers remain cool to online spend, clenching advertising and marketing budgets tightly. The perceived ineffectiveness and glut of inventory threaten to kill the online advertising industry. New creative formats, performance pricing, and greater accountability will not lift the pall of despair from the online advertising industry overnight (or for the next few quarters,). Publishers should devise tactics to sell the 30 percent of their inventory they can sell at a premium.