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Slashdot cofounder on the self-cannibalization of online advertising
"The next evolution [in online advertising] will be behavioral targeting, compared with contextual targeting. Right now, throwing up an ad from a financial service company, for instance, next to an article about banking is primitive, really. What these companies who advertise really want to know is who these people are who are reading the articles and how can they target them," said Jeff Bates, cofounder of Slashdot.
At one point in the U.S.'s development, there were 1,400 or so railroads. Today, there are three major lines. Admittedly, it is a leap -- but not a big one -- for Jeff Bates, cofounder of Slashdot, to apply that history to what is happening on the Internet today.
"If the Internet has taught us anything in the last 10 years, it is that the timing of a particular market's development becomes even more compressed," he tells the E-Commerce Times.
Bates is referring to the online ad networks and their accompanying strategies that are proliferating by the day. To be sure, there is Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) heft and reach, and most in the industry, including Bates, agree it is the network to beat right now. At the same time, there are countless smaller platforms, including a growing number of industry-specific offerings.
Slashdot, it must be pointed out, is one of the first truly vertical sites to have survived on the Internet, and Bates has spent the last 10 years watching which ad strategies have worked there and which haven't. His conclusion about the current online ad industry? "A lot of these platforms are going to fail."
