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Many of my friends that work in online publishers often talk to me about the difficulties they face when wanting to rapidly change directions (business) and react to new entrants coming into the market. Now, this complaint has been around since the dawn of the Internet market and indeed could equally be applied to companies in the auto or IT sectors... so we need to address the bigger issues of corporate cultures, managerial process and organizational theory.. seems quite a major task then to develop and embrace innovations and new models.

Take for example, the process of new marketing concepts.... Companies like Apple and Google don't solicit ideas from their users, relying instead on their own staff's ingenuity in devising new products. On the other hand, companies like Procter & Gamble and Lego have been very successful in involving their customers in developing new products. Simply a different  philosophy and approach.

There is the same issue when thinking about using ad models. Some publishers are open to new models such as CPM (I am specifically talking of Chinese publishers where very few use this pricing model) and some are even using CPA (cost per action). Why should publishers be looking at new revenue models; simply put, if they don't they will be leaving money on the table and the advertisers will find some other publisher to run these campaigns.

Publishers (the leaders I talk too) often site, the eroding of the CPD (cost per day) rate card and the demise of their entire revenue model as reasons why they won't adopt "in-category" advertisements by using alternative pricing structures. Actually, the reasons could also be not having an internal sales team with the abilities to understand performance marketing models, not having ad servers that support cpm or cpa campaigns (although most larger publishers use Doubleclick, Allyes or SinoTech Group's ad servers that support these features) or what I think is the most common reason which is the ignorance or inability of certain company exec team's to appreciate that the Internet is a dynamic, evolving eco-system and that status quo for ad models will go the same way as the dinosaurs .... I guess Darwinism (survival of the fittest) will also be true in the commercial world of online Publishers...

Let me know if you work at a Publisher and recognize some of these issues or your online publishers is one of the innovators... I would be interested in knowing what are some other considerations limiting innovations in these group.