Over at the Big Picture blog, Daniel Taylor comments on the inquiry into the indifference of the OPA to the rest of the Internet world. Basically, he asks, what’s the rest of the Internet planning to do about it?
Good question.
It may interest him to know that a few years ago a group of us did, in fact, think about founding a separate trade association to represent the interests of, as he says, “the little guys.” (I used to hate that term because it’s not accurate in regards to many, many web sites out there; but now I’ve grown to like it. There’s something appealing about being on the side of the little guys, even when they might be big.) We were drivers of that initiative at Burst, but then we moved on to other things, and it lost its energy.
Daniel is right, however, it was bound to happen and we did see it coming when we tried to organize. Large publishers would have found a third-party to substantiate their “superior” claims vs. the rest of the marketplace. As I said in the Ad Age piece, these sorts of studies are instruments of state propaganda. We get it. So, logically, next we’re going to rally to produce a study that challenges the OPA claims, and we can have a fair fight back and forth.
Some of the first people we may call to work with us on that study are OPA dues-paying supporters ($5,250 annually), many of which – interestingly – are ad networks: 24/7 Real Media, Collective Media and Tremor Media, for example, along with other ad network enablers such as Ad Meld, PubMatic and Rubicon. Many of those, and many others, celebrate the fact that their networks are rich in OPA member inventory, which explains why they are OPA supporters. We work with Rubicon. We also work with Short Tail Media, another OPA supporter, which is a customer of Burst’s adConductor platform and launched with the intention to help OPA members kick the ad network habit by being the partner of choice for the OPA. We’re rooting for them, naturally.
For starters, as we design our study, we’ll want to understand the implications of the OPA study as it pertains to the value of the inventory they re-purpose through their ad network supporters. Most of those networks bill it as “premium” inventory, but it is probably regarded as scrap, or remnant, by the members themselves. Keeping things apples to apples, our study will want to strictly compare the value of the proprietary inventory of vertical niche web sites to the proprietary inventory of the OPA’s members and not – thank you very much - to the remnant stuff they send to ad networks and which they’ve just shot to hell with their study.
I am confident of the results of our study. It won’t be a hatchet job on branded web sites, however. We expect to be able to show that the abiding relationship audiences have with online media, that is of premium value to advertisers, is derived substantially from relevant and timely content. We expect to show, further, that it does not grow on trees; rather, it comes from publishers that know and care. In the end, we will show that there are many, many, many who know and care online, even some of those at OPA web sites for whom it’s just a job.
Posted by Jarvis Coffin 
Posted by David Cooperstein 
Posted by David Cooperstein 
