One of the themes of web product development in 2005 was that less is more.  37Signals really lead the charge here with their products and their blog, and the concept of less being more is also being applied to other areas of online content.

I’ve been trying to stay aware of the concept in how I use web applications, and it slapped me across the face today when I wanted to check some blog stats.  I’ve got an account with Google Analytics, the most powerful free analytics solution.  It has the majority of common web stats and more advanced stats than most web analytics users really need.  It has a lot of stats, dashboards, and plenty of detail to drill down into to find data.

I’ve also been trying out a new analytics product called Blogbeat. Blogbeat is about as simple as it gets.  It has your daily/monthly visitors, a list of recent visitors, top blog posts, top referrers, top search terms, and links (where people clicked out of your blog).  That’s it.  You just have a horizontal set of links of those choices and you click them to see the reports.  When I first tried it, I kind of chuckled about how it lacked so many “important” stats that I’d never use it.  However, whenever I want to get a stats summary over the past week since installing it, I end up just going to Blogbeat instead of Google.  Why?  It’s faster, it’s simpler, I don’t have to click through multiple pages in slow-loading reports, scroll past graphs, and select the right stat out of all the choices.  It’s not even like Google Analytics is really that complicated.  Before trying Blogbeat I didn’t feel like it was bloated and not usable.  When presented with a faster, simpler, and more focused option though, it loses.

As product details are hammered out, it’s really a hard thing to cut features, because you always feel like they’re useful.  One or more of our user personas will want to use it right?  It’s very easy to talk yourself into it.  I have a lot of respect for companies that are managing to control the urge to add more, and realize the value of less.

It leads to another problem though.  Where do you draw the line?  At some point, if you keep cutting features out, you’ll end up with a product that doesn’t have enough meat to be useful.  While I’ve seen a lot of posts about less being more, I’ve seen very little mentioned on HOW people decide what to keep.

I read the recent blog post by Agent Red on adotas.com about advertisements on porn sites and thought it was quite relevant to the need for Media Guard. Obviously, Media Guard is being developed to stop these sorts of things from happening – an advertiser’s creative showing up on a site they want to exclude because of content.

Currently, Yield Manager allows all advertisers and publishers to self-select descriptive categories about what their creative or site is about. They also select the type of counterparties they want to work with or exclude, and their “workable� subset is based on the self-selected descriptive categories.

So we have a self-policing marketplace, which works well about 99% of the time. But, as more people have joined the marketplace, due to user error or other motivations some parties incorrectly describe their websites or their creatives and so we now have the need to take regulation out of users’ hands (also see this article on Right Media’s main website). This need for additional regulation is a shame from a free-market point of view, but a reality that we cannot and will not ignore.

Currently, we check the descriptions of all creatives that are uploaded directly onto the Right Media Ad Network, as well as all publisher sites that work directly through RMAN, but we don’t check all of the creatives or sites that come from third parties through Yield Manager - either external publishers or advertisers or through other networks.

The new Media Guard functionality that we are creating will be a new system where we actively review and assign a description to every creative and site that does business through the Yield Manager marketplace. So, when any new creative or site comes into our system, it will pass through Media Guard and undergo an “audit� - which will be a set of pre-defined characteristics upon which users discriminate. So, a creative might be described as “contains Active X�, “Adult-content�, “flashes for 10 seconds�, “contains user initiated audio�. The creative or site will then be Media Guard “audited�.

The major change over existing procedure is that all these descriptions will be done by a dedicated, objective third-party – Yield Manager, which has no interest in serving the “wrong� type of creatives to publishers or placing creatives on sites they don’t want to appear on.

Of course all of this only helps in making sure that all creatives and sites are properly and honestly categorized. Users must still set their profiles properly to ensure they only get the content they want. If an advertiser does not have their profile set to exclude adult-content sites, then their creatives will still show on adult-content sites – whether Media Guard audited or not! Media Guard can only describe a site or creative, users themselves have to determine what kind of content they are willing to work with. It is like a Media Guard “audit� results are the menu at a restaurant, which describes the content of all the dishes the kitchen makes - but a menu cannot decide what exactly you want to eat for dinner.

Top priorities this week:

• Get ready to move into the production. We are going to do a throught audit of the code to make sure all input data is properly validated and that it is not possbile to access objects for reading or modifications if you are not an owner.
• Work on documentation - complete coverage of all custom types and usage examples.
• Custom codes APIs which allow to reference objects using codes instead of IDs.
• Fix all known bugs found by Adapt and Netblue.

Very simply, Media Guard is a new component of Yield Manager that we are developing to regulate the creatives and sites that flow through the Yield Manager marketplace. As traffic through our marketplace has rapidly increased, we have realized that we need go beyond the user-defined descriptions that advertisers, publishers, and networks apply to their creatives and sites, as even a few fraudulent descriptions destroy the trust and efficacy of the marketplace.

Media Guard will be a part of the Yield Manager platform that will increase the detail and accuracy of the descriptive features for creatives and sites. As we envision it, Media Guard will have two components that will be developed in phases.

1. The first phase of Media Guard will work with creatives and have an automated portion, where certain quantifiable attributes will be screened for, such as file size or pop up ads, and also a human review, that will check for more qualitative items, such as the content of the offer or the amount of flashing in the creative.

2. The second phase of Media Guard development will offer a capability that works with publisher sites and will have a human review that will screen these web pages’ content based on a quantitative and qualitative criteria list.

We will work with many different parties in the industry to help develop and further refine these products and the different screening criteria, in order to build the most robust and effective product possible. Once Yield Manager has this new functionality it will enable all parties to trust Media Guard’s objective, third-party classification of creatives and sites on the platform.

This week Adam Dell of Impact Venture Partners invited me to chat with his Columbia MBA class about the “Media Revolution” happening all around us. I got there a little early and got to see some of the material he was covering, and I was struck by his characterization of what’s happening in media as a revolution. 

It was something of a moment of clarity for me.  Perhaps it resonated because I’d just finished reading 1776 by David McCullough. The book chronicles the first year of the American Revolution, and it’s a particularly interesting piece of work.  We’re used to reading stories about how wars were won. But this is a story about how an ideological battle was sustained in the face of impossible odds, to be won later.  How an amateur army that was outnumbered, out gunned, out-trained and outmanned in every possible way managed to sustain a battle that should have been hopeless. What the American patriots did was survive a period in which they should have been annihilated. Then for an encore, they went on to win a most improbable victory. How?  I’m no expert, but there are two things that jump out at me about the American Revolution. 

- The revolutionaries had a different idea of what it meant to live on this earth and to be free. They had a fundamentally different ideology.

- The revolutionaries refused to fight by the rules which were the rules of engagement of a superior force.

Revolution is exactly the right word for what’s happening to media right now. Well, at least some of what’s happening in media.

The slugfest which is going on for dominance in search is only likely to get more violent as Microsoft enters the fray in earnest. It is certainly a spectacle. But it is not a revolution.  Even Google’s impressive assault on Overture’s market position was not the revolution it is sometimes billed to have been. The battle over search today is a land war involving heavyweights slugging it out for market share. Google coming from nowhere to dominate Overture was a flanking attack powered by a superior monetization mousetrap. There are hundreds of examples of competition over territory, market share and dominance. It’s much harder to think of a true revolution.

So what then, makes a revolution? A revolution is a fight over ideology. It’s not about dominance as much as it is about a different world view, a different set of core values…a different vision.

There’s something we hear a lot of over here.  It’s a composite quote, not attributable to any individual and not an exact quote. It goes something like; “Right Media is crazy to take on the status quo. They’re crazy to do it alone. They can’t swim across the ocean.”

I understand the logic behind it, but it only partly makes sense.  We’re not taking on the big closed networks. We’re taking on their way of looking at the world. Our business is not competitive to them, but our world view is. We have a fundamentally different ideology than they do. In short, we think the market should be liquid and transparent, and more access to information will benefit the buyer, seller and value-adding intermediary who embrace an open marketplace for advertising. For more on this, see related articles here and here. The closed networks think the market should stay closed, giving an advantage to the strongest intermediaries.  Google’s AdSense network would like nothing better than for market information to remain inside their proprietary systems. It favors their dominant market share. We’re not trying to take their market share away. We’re trying to change the market in which they get an unfair share today. 

We’re also not alone. Today over 40 ad networks are using Yield Manager to open their networks to buyers and sellers and other intermediaries. Publishers and advertisers are buying in too. With the launch of our Symple (working name) product in Q2, thousands of smaller publishers will be able to take control over the sale of their inventory. The marketplace we enable consists of thousands of advertisers, and we’re rapidly approaching tens of thousands of publishers. If this is the beginning of a revolution, and many believe it is, it is not a Right Media revolution. This is a market revolution. While a lot of attention is being paid to Right Media as the enabler of this new and open methodology for buying and selling advertising, there are hundreds of companies participating. This is about hundreds of companies, representing thousands of people who have embraced a fundamentally different methodology for buying and selling…not Right Media standing alone.

Some would say this is splitting hairs, and regardless of whether we compete head on or indirectly, we’ll be in their sights. Maybe so, but we’re willing to take that chance, because they’ll be forced to compete on our ground, by our rules. What we must do is change the rules of competition, and then we can have a revolution. And that’s why we don’t have to swim across the ocean. The empire (or empires) will come to us, comfortable in their superior numbers, talent, wealth and market share. And when they get here, they’ll find that the rules of the game are different, and that the revolutionaries are not 100 or so idealists working at Right Media, but hundreds of companies representing thousands of buyers, sellers and intermediaries who believe in a better, fairer and more open way of doing business.