Competition. In free market economies, it’s what happens when supply and demand meet in an open marketplace and operate under its rules. In nature, it’s about survival of the fittest among species and among individuals of the same species.

Competition builds up the strong and shakes out the weak. We sometimes may dread it, but nothing improves without it. Are you using competition to make your web publishing business as good as it can be? As profitable as it should be?

Certainly you put your users first, providing them with the best possible content and services your budget will allow, because it’s their attention on your pages that advertisers pay to engage. And, of course, you make it easy to offer your advertisers access to that audience for a fair price. Or do you?

How do you determine ad prices on your site? Do you even determine price at all, or do you let a third party figure it out for you? If you turn over your means to earn fair value for your inventory to a few select providers, how can you ever be certain that you are getting the right price for your inventory?

Fact is, there may be dozens or even hundreds of other players in the market at any moment who are willing to pay more than you just received from an advertiser or network for a given impression. It’s impossible for any publisher, no matter how prominent and large, to know all the players in the market at a given time.

But it is possible in an open media exchange for all participants to make their presence known to each other for the purpose of bidding on available inventory. By opening our businesses up to each other, we create an environment in which we can all succeed as sellers and as buyers. It’s as true in today’s media marketplace as it is on Wall Street or on eBay or in the ancient agoras and modern bazaars throughout the history of mankind.

Competition is a force that drives us all to do better and be better.  Are you using competition as a competitive tool to improve your business? If not, please ask us how.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Right Media Exchange, Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.