Spanfeller says that as publishers have adopted a similar model with advertising, they have changed the success of metrics from ones based on demand creation to ones driven by demand fulfillment.

Until recently, we had seen the growing use of ad networks to liquidate the unsold remnant inventory that was the result of people spending more and more time online while the addollar migration from offline failed to keep pace, said Spanfeller. The IAB where Im chairman emeritus and Bain Consulting did a study on this about a year ago that showed a huge increase in the percentage of inventory sold via ad networks on a sample of seven member sites 5 to 30 increase in just one year. What this study also showed, though, was the incredibly low amount of revenue that these impressions garnered as the pricing for inventory sold in this manner was outlandishly low less than 2 of total ad revenue was generated by these impressions and the pricing from ad networks has fallen even further since this study was done, he continued. Spanfellers piece should prove to be an interesting one to publishers and advertisers alike, but some think it is just simply too late for the industry to adopt a different model. Publishers that try to go a different way face the very real possibility that their advertisers wont follow them, when they can simply get lower rates elsewhere.