Wired Editor Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail spawned one of the most talked about issues on the commercial web: how the scale of the internet allows business such as Amazon and Ebay to generate huge profits out of the “long tail.”

How does the long tail opportunity translate to the ad business? The web is full of small publisher websites and blogs that cover every imaginable range of topics. This is both a great opportunity for advertisers and ad networks, and also a fairly large challenge. How do you effectively find these sites? How do you know which ones are quality? How do you scale supporting them and paying them their money every month if they’re making small amounts? How do you optimize across them?

As a small publisher in this long tail world, how do you get advertisers to notice you? What if you don’t meet the lofty size qualifications of some ad networks? How can you make money if no one will give you the time of day?

The questions are a bit daunting, but there are many success stories to draw from. There are more ways than ever for advertisers, ad networks, and long tail publishers to work together to everyone’s benefit.

In the panel “Taking Advantage of the Tail” at our upcoming Right Media Open, we’ll discuss these issues with a group of experts in this space who have great success stories to share:

Steve Jenkins - CheatCodes.com
Steve is a longtime internet entrepreneur whose advertising success with CheatCodes.com provides great publisher insight for the panel.

Jim Mansfield - PhoneZoo.com
Jim leads the advertising effort at PhoneZoo.com, one of the most innovative ringtone sites on the web. Another example of a niche publisher who’s doing well in the advertising industry.

David Zapetal - CPX Interactive
CPX Interactive has seen explosive growth over the past few years, and much of it is a result of how aggressively they work with tail publishers and scale their operations to handle that growth.

Patrick Gavin - Text Link Ads
Patrick Gavin is practically synonymous with tail publishers. As the founder of Text Link Ads he’s made working with tail publishers the core of that business, and he also helped start another tail-friendly network, AuctionAds.

There may also be another addition or two to the panel, so it should be a fun and educational time for all. Are you taking advantage of the tail for your business?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Right Media Exchange, Publishers, Events. 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.