Econometa

A PDF version of the complete primer can be found under docs. Hopefully this will at least help a few people out there besides me who are trying to get all this stuff straight…

—– Google, auctions, and arbitrage —–
As always, the picture comes before the explanation, and clicking on it will give you a bigger version. This one shows how the Google advertising system works.

—– Google —–
Since Google has been so successful in advertising, and since AdSense is currently the main player in placing ads on smaller publisher […]

—– Search engines and intermediaries —–
As usual, the picture comes first, with explanations to follow.

This figure shows how vendors use intermediaries as outsourced marketing in the same way that manufacturers use distributors and resellers as outsourced sales. As usual, you can click on the diagram to get a bigger version.
—– Search —–
According to […]

—– Outsourcing ad buying and selling —–
I’ll again put the picture first, with explanations to follow.

This depicts how ads flow from advertisers to publishers, including the roles of ad agencies and ad networks. Like last time, you can click on the diagram to get a bigger version.
In this post I’ll dive more deeply into […]

—– Advertiser and publishers —–

I put the picture first, but the rest of this post will explain the pieces that are shown in the diagram. Note that this is a conceptual diagram, not a technical one, so for example the publisher does not transmit user segment data to the advertiser, instead segments are offered to […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I think that advertising is an important part of making the Web work well: it helps developers and writers get paid, gives users more choice in how they support sites, and reinforces the shift in power to participatory users and small creators. But it also certainly has its problems, which I’ve […]

In a previous post I tried to describe an economic shift that I think is helping to support a new environment less tolerant of the monopoly power inherent in private enterprise platform determination:

The liquidity in the maturing online advertising industry, which allows new applications to monetize utility to users quickly and directly.

In other words, […]