Via Reuters today: “The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue.” “The trademark orange “T’s” marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night…” - it’s about time. That TimesSelect thing was misguided from the start, and I told you so.

Today at ad:tech SF, Mark Kvamme said something I’ve been saying for a while now — the online media party is only now just getting started. The fact that only 5% of ad dollars are spent online, and yet people spend 20-30% of their ‘media hours’ online, means that the current online ad market $12B is  likely to hit something like $30B by 2008 (Mark’s prediction), and end up north of $100B in the foreseeable future.

The problem is that too little of this money is going to the publishers and site developers that create the content and services that draw people onto the ‘net in the first place. Far too much is being eaten up by the throngs of middlemen — ad networks, “lead generation” shops, affiliate networks, SEO’s and SEM’s, and the like. Publishers are only getting a 50% of 20% of what they should be getting — all the rest is going to middlemen and arbitrage. I didn’t see that many publishers at ad:tech today — but it sure was a party. How long are online publishers going to continue paying for someone else’s party?

I don’t have time to write anything more lengthy about this at the moment, but I will say that I found Walt Mossberg’s most recent rant equating “Tracking Cookies” with spyware a bit, shall we say, unenlightened.

I’ll leave a more discursive response to others, but I did take a few minutes to produce a screenvid of all the nasty evil tracking cookies that show up when you load Mossberg’s article on the WSJ site. It’s quite amusing: you get WSJ’s *own* tracking cookie, followed by _several_ others.

Here’s the video; enjoy and share! Flash Quicktime

I went to another industry event this evening — the SF BIG launch party. SF BIG is “the Bay Area Interactive Group,” a new online advertising industry group with a geographic focus, somewhat like 212 in New York. Needless to say, this event was 180° from last night’s “hackathon”. Not entirely my scene, as I was never quite social enough to be an ad quy, but it was good to see so many people turn up, and I ran into a bunch of old friends and colleagues from the HotWired/Wired/Lycos days. Way to go, guys.
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