SpectatorBytes

Today’s major news headline is NewsCorp’s FIM sales reorganization (see here). While internal politics have been blamed for the changes in the blogosphere, in an strategic sense, I would expect the move to further help FIM built its brand advertising revenues. Here are some of the reasons why:

- Increases focus on creating “scalable” custom solutions for brand advertisers at each property; Brands will demand it
- Allows each property’s sales teams to focus on highly targeted, relevant set of advertisers
- Makes easier to identify properties which will not command premiums from advertisers
- Positions successful properties to share success with other publishers in their vertical and thus build market scale (yes, this could mean more vertical networks)

In terms of non-premium (or some people like to call them premium unsold) advertising revenues, the question that is still outstanding is whether or not each property will be able to optimize their advertising revenues by accessing multiple ad networks rather than being asked to use Google or the FIM network – i.e., are they going to be able to use adopt some of the emerging tools like Rubicon Project or Yieldbuild to further optimize their monetization.

Given the Darwinistic nature of the Web, I believe Web networks would benefit by letting their “owned” publishers (or o &o’s) behave like a third party publisher. This would also have the added benefit of making the owned ad network even more competitive.

Managing these new dynamics will not be easy (e.g., Multiple calls to advertisers coming from multiple people, some cost inefficiency, internal competition, etc.). However, in today’s Web, clear focus seems critical to succeed.

FIM is certainly exploring waters other Web networks have not to date.

Having said all that, I may be reading too much into the changes at FIM.