Will Ad Networks Compete for Your Ads?

bokelley writes "TechCrunch has an article today about a new product called RMX Direct that holds a real-time auction for every ad on a site. Networks and advertisers bid based on the quality of the user (geography, site, time of day, etc). This could be game-changing for sites and blogs; if networks have to compete, will we see AdSense disclose more about its payouts to publishers? Will other networks like Advertising.com and ValueClick participate, or will they continue to force publishers to make hard choices? In a lot of ways, this has similarities to the challenges that Linux faces in a Windows world. The open source community has been fighting for more than a decade to make the progress it has, and we're not there yet — will online media be different?"

Re:AdSense already does this . . .?

[andrewman327]

The linked article talks about a small scale experiement in bidding on print ads. Considering the auctions ended back in February I do not know if Google plans to do it again.

Misnomer

[The Dodger]

Their definition of "auction" seems somewhat different from mine. It seems to me like this is simply a system that will tell you which of your ad networks will pay you the most for displaying their ad to a given user. Not quite a true auction where the ad networks can bid for the ad space on the page being displayed to that user.

D.