Helpful article if you plan on starting a business that intends to make money via advertising.

Quoted: As a result, I believe the vast majority of this ad inventory is being monetized by arbitrageurs via ad exchanges. Ad exchanges such as Right Media differ from ad networks primarily in their pricing model, which works like a stock exchange. This facilitates an arbitrage model where those who know something about your audience will buy your ad inventory at very low rates and resell at higher rates. Of course, this doesn't always work well for you the publisher -- they don't share what they know about your audience with anyone, because the lower their price the more money they make.

A great list of essays, especially if you are involved in anything in the consumer Web space.

On an unrelated note, I like how he includes his name and Twitter id in the blog title.

Quoted: I finally decided to make a page listing all the reasonable essays I've written over the last 2 years on one page, which you can find here.

Microsoft is way down, too.

Quoted: Google announced their Q2 results today after the market had closed. Shares are down by as much as 12% as earnings growth reported was below analysts expectations. Net income for the quarter was $1.25B, up from $925M. The company reported a profit of $4.63 per share, which was slightly below the $4.72 average expectation from Wall Street analysts.

Quoted: Mr. Armstrong, who is 37 years old, describes Project Spaghetti as an effort to fix the plumbing behind all of Google's ad initiatives. The inefficiencies, he says, are a product of Google's rapid growth and its innovation. Streamlining the systems and developing new ad formats, he says, should eventually improve the company's bottom line.

Quoted: "The growth of behaviorally targeted online advertising has been delayed by incomplete development of technology, brand marketers that prefer to have their ads appear with relevant content and concerns over violating consumer privacy," says David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, Behavioral Targeting: Marketing Trends. "But a number of things are changing."

Some good, albeit depressing-if-you're-a-large-site, data here. These eCPM numbers are much lower than we see.

Quoted: The overall trends you pick up from the report are not that surprising. For instance, the improved monetization of small websites is because they have more focused content, which presents more targeted advertising opportunity.

The numbers he sites are really low. However, this tidbit is interesting and potentially surprising...

Quoted: Small sites (less than 1M page views/month) earn 3x better on their remnant ad inventory than medium (>1M page views/month) and large Web sites (>100M page views/month).

The trick, in my opinion, if you are a larger site is to slice your inventory into smaller (and higher CPM) pieces.

Some good data on what people are making on Facebook...

Quoted: Great data from Justin Smith on Facebook app CPMs: What CPM is your app making? Data from Facebook Developers. Thanks to Justin for putting together these great numbers.

Quoted: Now, the Techcrunch article discusses the idea that small sites monetize better than large ones. I think that's actually a correlation rather than a causation. There are a ton of small sites out there, and much of their traffic comes from Google. It's much harder to build a functioning social site where people coming back daily than a site where people occassionally stumble on it through their search engine.