Advertising as we know it: is it dead?

Garage Technology Ventures recently ran a conference called Revenue Bootcamp. The topic of one panel was “Is the advertsing model dead?” Bill Reichert of Garage moderated this panel, and it featured the following speakers:

* Samir Arora, CEO of GlamMedia
* Neil Chase, vice-president for author services of Federated Media
* Tim Kendall, director of monetization of Facebook
* David Kopp, senior director of North American ads for Yahoo!
* Xavier Zang, manages third-party publisher relationships for Microsoft

If your company is using or planning to use the advertising model, you should watch it here. These are some of the key points:

* The key starting point is great content. When you have great content, you’re more likely to attract audiences, and audiences are what advertisers are looking for.
* Even if the audience is not huge, an advertising model can still be successful because advertisers need to reach and engage niche audiences, so focus on a specific audience—for example, female shoppers.
* Don’t limit yourself to “advertising” per se. You can also make money when advertisers want to sponsor sites including their events. Data is also valuable to advertisers.
* Opportunities also lie in “jumping to the next curve” and not sticking to current advertising, sponsorship, and data models.
* Don’t look at what successful companies are now doing. Instead look at what these companies did to get successful.
* A good way to look at your business as “audience-based.” That is, what is the audience that you’re delivering to advertisers?