Content and advertising is a balanced match and the way that all media companies operate.  It’s a like the chicken and egg situation. What came first the content or the advertising to financially support the content?  Great content gets read and attracts new readers by word of mouth and any other way that most marketers would refer to as viral marketing.  Good content is sticky.  As more and more information appears online, whether in the form of blogs, daily newspapers or magazines, ad networks are stepping up their own strategy to attract big portals.

Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick hammers this point home.  In the past, placing ads online within websites that may share the target demographic was hit and miss.  In the world of online gaming, paid advertising on sites became difficult for conversion and saw even lower ROI.  Finding sites based on gaming keywords such as online poker or online casino was constantly changing due to black hat SEO and Google’s forever changing algorithm.  What was number one on Google for ‘online poker’ one day, could have been completely erased from the directory the next.  This drove the gaming community to develop strong affiliate relationships where the affiliate would be paid on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis for depositing players.

However, in the mainstream placing online advertising is the opposite.  There are fewer affiliate deals and more money being spent with contextual advertising networks that have the technology to serve ads based on surfer trends. But have Google created a monopoly?  According to recent reports, not yet.

Advertising technology being created by companies such as Adify are giving high content driven portals the chance to control their own advertising networks.  Forbes uses Adify vertical ad serving technology and has recently announced that it will be creating an ad network and selling online ads for around 400 financial blogs this spring.  Forbes is not the only large corporation to create its own advertising network.  Viacom and CBS have also announced plans to build similar topic driven networks.

Content remains king but the targeted advertising around the content is and will remain, the  keys to the kingdom.