Root.net...
Well, I kind of skipped over a major element of the blog post about root.net - and that's the financial arbitrage they're trying to bring to the ad market.
I myopically picked up on the attention aspect (a big part of the the 'technique'), but reading the A VC blog , he reminded me that the business model is to leverage this attention:
"In the same way that the mortgage security market transferred credit risk away from the balance sheet of operators and into the portfolios of professional investors, a media futures market will enable non-advertisers (aka speculators) to take on the risk from the balance sheets of publishers. Publishers will be happy to hedge out their inventory, limit earnings volatility, and focus entirely on creating value-added programming; rather than spending their time speculating whether CPMs are going up or down.
Similarly, companies (ie the buy-side) can concentrate entirely on developing better products and service. Their marketing groups can focus on creating and communicating their brand images, while their sales organizations can simply specify the kinds of customers they are looking for and the prices they are willing to pay; the Media Futures market will take care of the rest."
Quite interesting - he did start off that long post talking about how hedge funds were the only money makers in the 2000 'correction' - and here he is talking about hedging the ad market.
I signed up for the root.net attention firefox extension - very interesting...a tracked history of my browsing activity, segmented by topic, trends. Go see it in action on this blog.
They'll need to come up with some smart incentives to persuade people to browse like this - Google's web accelerator and free wifi access would seem to be compelling approaches. But for companies, they own the network -in fact a lot of them already employ proxies and other punitive technology to monitor activity - why not put that to some good and monitor attention?
