• by Roy Shkedi , January 6, 2006

If you're an online publisher, and you're not considering or already selling the profile information of your visitors, you may be missing out on a potentially lucrative revenue stream that could greatly benefit your bottom line.

Before people begin bombarding me and the editors about privacy issues, let me quickly point out that I'm referring here to completely anonymous, non-personally identifiable information. We're well aware of consumers' privacy concerns and the ongoing debate about cookie deletion. What we're discussing here is the basic strategy of behavioral marketing, the industry-accepted practice of gathering non-PII cookie-based profiles.

Currently, if you're serving ads on your site via an ad network, you're giving up potentially valuable information--and money. If some of your site's visitors have a network ad cookie, and those visitors are served ads on another Web site, based on information gathered while they were on your site, shouldn't you profit from that eventual advertising transaction--even though it didn't take place on your site? In the current industry, you may not benefit and/or profit.

We believe that you should.

If a user is served an ad, based on information that an ad network collected from your site (e.g., the searches they conducted on your site, the topics of specifics articles they read, what sections of your site they visited), you should benefit when a targeted ad is served to that user on another site. It's thanks to you the delivered ad is relevant, thereby increasing the ad's conversion and generated revenues.

Most online publishing sites, including yours, represent only a fraction of a consumer's total online viewership. In other words, while your lucrative visitors spend over 99 percent of their online time on other sites, your site only makes money from advertisements presented to your visitors within your site's ad space.

That means you're losing out on a major revenue stream. An estimated 50 percent to 80 percent of online ad space is next to content, which is more generalized and therefore hard to monetize. If your site attracts a lucrative audience, a strong opportunity now exists for you to earn an incremental new revenue stream when the non-relevant ads your audience sees on 50 percent to 80 percent of the Web's ad space are replaced with targeted relevant ads.

The world is changing. Revenues from advertisements on your site will only be a part of your total advertising revenue in the future. A significant portion of your advertising revenues will be the money that you'll be making from relevant, targeted ads delivered to your visitors on other sites--based on those visitors' profiles from your site.

Think about it. You work so hard to attract a lucrative audience, but you profit from this audience only when they are on your site.

Isn't it time you did something about it?