With the consolidation of sites as dot-coms fail and the resultant concentration of user traffic, we're going to see more value placed on those sites that survive this dip. This is very good news for the long term. Information Overload One point made by Marc Ryan, director of media research at AdRelevance , really caught my attention. Publishers are selling less inventory, and the inventory devoted to house ads on their sites is increasing. One of the greatest problems online ads face is user information overload.
Ads appear over and over in a site's design in exactly the same static ad space.
And as is my wont, I started thinking about the problem from a technology standpoint. If publishers can figure out what the effect of NOT running house ads is, then they can make intelligent decisions about best practices. That kind of analysis isn't helpful without a good tool to sort the vast amounts of data before the human eyes start looking. Part of the problem is that these solutions are extremely expensive and require a staff of people who are experienced analytics specialists. Virtually no agencies have this kind of staff.