Thriving In A Grey Market? Or Just Finding Their Feet?

Dear (local) online Ad agencies, I am still waiting for a reply. SSL.

A constructive criticism and my list of proposals:

Here goes.

Again, I do not have any shareholding interest in any ad agency group and no one pays me for writing this, I am merely speaking up as a blogger.

(1) Make allocation of bands/payment transparent. I do not see how this could harm competition, in fact that would make an ad agency even more attractive to users. You will get more sign-ups, and more sign-ups means more traffic and more exposure for advertisers. Proposal: Show the allocation of bands/payment 2-4 weeks after the completion of an ad campaign on the ad agency site. This will reveal who gets the most impressions for the duration of an ad-campaign and how much they make in relation to others. I cannot see this hurting any enterprise or bloggers, in fact it will encourage better ideas to improve traffic for the ad agency and the bloggers community who use them.

(2) Shareholders and staff of ad agency should be disallowed from participating as ad campaign earner. They get profits from the commission earned, so why eat from the same pie they create for others?

(3) Full disclosure and justification should be made as to how much staff and founders made from past ad campaigns, this would prevent (potential) perception of pay mis-allocation (like this one unhappy blogger felt, maybe he didn't understand the meaning of banding - perhaps the company care to elaborate?). Such disclosure will lift a company profile and improve their standings above those of the rivals. Everyone loves honest business people, and I am sure ad agencies have nothing to hide.

(4) There should be an (independent) arbitrage system to decide on contentious matters like bloggers being denied advert cash-outs because of click fraud allegations. At the present moment, bloggers do not have a specific association to report their woes to (the Consumer Agency?). Ad agency should be able to reveal evidence (not the system that detect "fraud") if bloggers questioned such allegations. We do not want a tightly regulated blogosphere, and I am sure you do not want a tightly regulated online ads business. Make life easy (and fair) for everyone and be frank with bloggers.