• by Joe Mandese , June 17, 2009

Because, by the time you finish reading it, a new online publishing platform will have been created. That's right a new online destination is created every few seconds.

Some of you may have read, or heard me say this before, and I apologize for any redundancy, but I think that fact deserves repeating this morning, just before the OMMA Publish conference gets underway in New York.

Of course, all the new blogs, personal social media pages, microsites, etc., that have been created even as you read this won't necessarily compete with the big, premium content publishers that depend on Madison Avenue to stay in business. But some of them might. And all of them, collectively, do.

Online publishing is unlike any mass medium that has gone before it, and the barriers to entry that preserved big media outlets in other media do not exist online. The only thing separating this blog post -- or my personal Facebook page, for that matter -- from the NYTimes.com or Yahoo's home page, are the quality of the content I put there, and my ability to attract any audience to it.

Okay, so the Times and Yahoo have me beat there, but in aggregate, they are getting beaten down by the long tail of micro competitors.

No wonder big publishers like the Times are investigating Nielsen Online numbers showing their audience trending down. It's a natural reaction to blame the messenger, or in this case, the methodology. But my intuition tells me there is some truth there, and the trend for big, premium content publishers can only be downward. There simply are too many online options for them to maintain their mass.

Of course, this has huge implications for the economics of media. Recently, at MediaPost's Search Insider Summit, Wall Street analyst Jordan Rohan estimated that the shift in audience from big publishing portals like Yahoo, MSN and Yahoo to social networks like Facebook and MySpace, would cause $1 billion worth of premium online ad spending to leave the Web publishing marketplace. He said that was mainly due to the ad value differential between big portals and social networks, but the same principle is likely true of the long tail's impact overall.

So we will discuss much of that at OMMA Publish today, especially how third party aggregators -- ad networks, exchanges, optimization firms, yield management firms, and even Madison Avenue -- are seizing control of the Internet's vast wasteland of unsold inventory. Good for them. Bad for premium content publishers. Or is it? We'll discuss. Maybe you'll find out.

Frankly, I'm not sure, and I'm going to be moderating a panel dubbed, "Fire Your Ad Network." But I don't believe they are the culprits. I believe in open and efficient markets, and I believe all the third party aggregators are helping to make online publishing more efficient. The problem for premium publishers is that they're not used to efficiency. Their models are built on inefficiency -- or some might say, the economics of largesse.

What premium publishers need to do, is spend more time focusing on what truly makes them premium: their content, their brand, their audience, the analytics that prove the value of that audience, and of course, the skills of their sales organizations to communicate the value of that audience, and to come up with creative ways of aligning it to advertisers' brands. So that, and we won't be holding and "fire your ad network" panel discussions at future OMMA conferences.