The web has always been about communication and community. For many, it was no surprise when ’social-networking’, ‘AJAX’ and volumes of users came together to create last year’s big bangs of investments and acquisitions regarding “Web 2.0″.

Now, everyone has heard of MySpace, a juggernaut of this zeitgeist. Valerie Burgess (ProfileJewels.net) discovered a unique way to work with MySpace users some years ago. As Community Education Manager of RMX Direct, I am honored to present to you our new ‘Featured Publisher’: Valerie Burgess.

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Vince Panero (VP): How did you get interested in web publishing originally? What were those early days like for you?

Valerie Burgess: Web publishing was a natural progression for me. I started out at a time when programming (more…)

The IAB Annual Members Meeting in New York on November 29 was jam-packed with exciting developments and upbeat forecasts. Not only did the industry record its first ever $4-billion quarter (story here), but ad revenues for the first three quarters of 2006 are nearly equal to the total for all of 2005. When the counting’s done, 2006 online ad revenues will exceed $16-billion, nearly triple the tally at the bottom of the dot-com bust in 2002.

Speakers offered many reasons for our good fortune, but they also worried about our ability as an industry to support continuing rapid growth with outdated systems and processes and without measurement standards.

On the upside, nearly every major advertiser will increase commitment to online advertising again next year. Online as a whole still commands less than ten percent of total ad spending, in spite of the fact that consumers spend more than 25 percent of their media consumption time online. Individual advertisers are accelerating their internet spending dramatically, however. HP, for example, dedicated more than 20 percent of its worldwide ad budget to internet this year, while more than doubling the number of sites bought. (more…)

Geotargeting: targeting your inventory towards geographic regions. The concept of geotargeting has been a mainstay feature in online ad management for some time now. It makes sense to match impressions with the companies that will pay the most for that geographic region.

That being the case, RMX Direct had to address this need, so we added this feature in under our “Manage Tab”: the place where you traffic in your 3rd party deals. Geotargeting for a placement is just one of a number features under the manage tab that augment the usefulness of making another network compete with our RMX Direct networks.

Now, with all features, their power can help–or hurt– your efforts…and it all depends on how you use it.

With that, I decided to invite our RMX Direct team member Luke Walsh to talk about geotargeting. He’s our head analyst and has had a hand in all things RMX Direct for almost two years. (more…)

One-on-one interactions: you want to usually make that other person feel good about you/your company–even if you have to draw a line and say no to them about their business proposition. Tricky business. One-on-one is tough; it’s tough to trust everyone’s intentions. ConverstionRater.com seems to be saying something similar here–see #9.

However, it can only get easier when you’re doing this within…a community. (more…)

I am pulling an article out of the vaults today from…June 2006: The Jensense Blog’s reference to adult content ads running on family sites due to an advertiser’s ‘oversight’. What’s really sad is the comments that some people leave below the article. Shouldn’t publishers have some sort of accountability mechanism available? Or at least a place where they can be heard as a group? (forums for a start...)

We hear about this kind of thing all the time…it didn’t start with the Super Bowl, and it happens a ton more on the web: too much information, coming at you, too quickly. How do you filter it?

Your options are limited. I have a child so I’m concerned about what he might see while looking with Mom at pictures of Winnie the Pooh on someone’s site. And there are other situations where you might merely want to control ads in another way– maybe per website.

And that’s why we created Media Guard. (more…)