Or rather what @craigmcginty and @vagueware were.

This… http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_reboot

I must admit I’ve skimmed through the last three or four pages.

There was enough lines in the opening page to keep me amused on a Wednesday night; to even drag me away from Grand Designs.

The one about ‘caveat vendor’ replacing ‘the old doctrine of caveat emptor…’, for example.

‘In other words, ‘Let the seller beware as well as the buyer.’ In other words, there is a definite, positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth.”

And this…

‘We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations.

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful.

‘We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page.

‘The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Apologies for cutting and pasting at such length. There is, I hope, a method in such copying madness.

Because, for me, all the above gives a grander theory to everything that we try and seek to do with Addiply.

As opposed, I guess, to You-Know-Who…

For those who have not followed the life and times of our DIY, self-service advertising system – as now championed by the People’s Republic of South Devon…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=246

.. it was, in part, driven and developed by the thinking we installed in our banner ad management sytsem for www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity

www.twadservices.co.uk

… in which we gave every one of our advertising clients a unique log-in code; empowering them, in an instant, with the ability to check our numbers for themselves.

For little, local businesses brought up on being told that their £750 half-page ad on P17 of the Evening News was seen by 75,000 potential customers – honest – this was something of an eye-opener.

Now, all of a sudden, ABCs, readership figures as opposed to circulation numbers – the ‘reach’ beloved by The Newspaper Society – is replaced by one password; and there it all is… their very own click-through rate in all its 0.02% glory.

Oh, boy… isn’t that click-rate crap? Er, yes. By and large people don’t click through to a carpet wholesalers website when reading their footie… but look at the number of times your banner has been seen this month…

Because wittingly or not, from day one we’ve felt this need for a spot of ‘caveat vendor’.

That we owed it to our little local advertiers to tell the truth; that we felt there was a ‘positive burden on the seller for the first time to tell the truth….

That what we were doing was ‘giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations…’

In our case, it was the ‘financial machinations’ that came with buying banner, sky or button ad space on a newly-launched local football website… What am I actually getting for my money here, Rick..?

Here you go… Here’s the ‘tools’ you need to find out the figures for yourself.

It is an in-built logic that continues to work its way through the DNA of Addiply… You want to place a text ad on one of our beta triallists… Fine, here you go… Here’s our list of publishers; here’s the rates they themselves have decided to charge.. and here’s the traffic that they are currently driving…

http://www.addiply.com/index.php?option=com_addiply&Itemid=69

Caveat vendor. Caveat vendor. And it’s my use of the bold… because spot the terms that, hopefully, have started to become familiar on OWAB of late…

‘The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

‘The revolution will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful…

Sign up for an Addiply ad and you get the data; the click-throughs, the views… the works. You know exactly what every advertising buck you spend on Addiply is delivering; because of caveat vendor… because in selling our advertising space to you the hyper-local/niche buyer we have decided to be open and honest from the start.

No smokes and mirrors.

‘Only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear…’

Exactly. In these troubled economic times, my little NR2 hyper-local advertiser might only have £20 left by way of an ‘advertising’ budget.

To my mind – and, I suspect, to the mind of many out here in small-mediaville – he deserves to know exactly what he’s getting for his £20.

And we tell him.

Caveat vendor.

Once you get out here, it is all a numbers game. We are, indeed, entering ‘the Age of Quantification’.

And, as he suggested, for all us professional locals the numbers don’t add up.

Take, for example, our Google AdSense numbers since March ‘07.

406,002 impressions, 846 clicks…. $223. So I did Google a disservice at JEECamp. Apologies. When I said $180 for 400,000 page impressions I was $40 out and 6,000 page impressions under. We made £110 in a year.

We took AdSense off www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity round about September. www.myfootballwriter.com/ipswichtown and www.myfootballwriter.com/colchesterunited have never run AdSense; it didn’t make any sense; by the time both launched, for better or worse we were giving ‘addiply’ a go.

AdSense remains sat there on the mother site, www.myfootballwriter.com in the hope that any passing Colchester United, Norwich City or Ipswich Town punter might want to buy some Champions League quarter-final tickets off www.acetickets.co.uk

Unlikely, I suspect, but as the publisher it’s one of those little straws that Google leaves me to cling to.

It’s somewhere about now that ‘Out With A Bang’ veers more towards ‘Shuffling Off With A Whimper’ as we start to tip-toe around the whole G-word issue.

Cos clearly, in many other aspects, we need to cling to their magic black box with a passion. It is, after all, how all-too many people get to find us in the first place. And where would any of us be without that Google searchlight to illuminate this infinite web darkness?

But when it comes to earning anyone a living off their local web toils, well, I’m sorry. I can’t get it to work.

Not on my numbers; great, sticky 436-second copy twice a day and all that, but £110 for every 400,000 page impressions… someone’s having a laugh.

Of course, Google has now got a new toy for us all to play with – Google Ad Manager. It has, says Mr Jarvis, the odd chink in its armour – one that is unlikely to make the life of the local publisher any easier in terms of sourcing local advertising.

Because for 400-odd years that’s what under-pinned the business model of local newspapers, local advertising. And that hasn’t changed; that’s still there; all that’s changed – albeit dramatically – is our reliance as journalists on the wood-stainers to distribute our thoughts.

Nor for that matter do the little local advertisers increasingly want to bother with the wood-stainers any more – not when they’ve got a nice, new shiny website to promote. Like Ady. And his skips. www.adysskips.com

But back to Google Ad Manager and our Jeff’s thoughts from www.buzzmachine.com…

“One big problem with its program is that it doesn’t share that data with the publishers and let them use it to more efficiently serve its ads. It also doesn’t share it with advertisers and let them take advantage of a more transparent marketplace.

“No, Google’s holding onto that information itself and, once again, becoming smarter than all of us. And I say that’s our own damned fault for not building our truly open ad marketplace. It’s not too late, but it soon will be…”

That’s why for the Ady’s of this world we built www.twadservices.co.uk – these people have been used to paying 500 notes for a half page ad in their local evening paper and seeing that half page ad on Page 17 on a Monday night. So when the Mrs does the books, Ady can point to where, exactly, that £500 went.

What, exactly, they got for their money. A half page. On Page 17. On a Monday.

www.twadservices.co.uk causes me, the publisher, a pain in the a*se cos armed with all his new figures from his own client log-in page, I have to explain to Ady why we’re unlikely to hit 1.3 million banners this month; that January was transfer window month; that Norwich are doing crap; Colchester are bottom of the table; Ipswich are falling away from the play-offs…

But look, Ady… there’s your new ad. We’ve made it a sky-scraper this time. And look, don’t worry about this cpm stuff; just give us 140 notes for the month… and we’ll bung you a month for free at the end.

Go back to New York and my pal with his race to the bottom, and his other gem was the battle was lost; the war was won; that before any of us had re-organised and re-grouped, Google would have an ad rep in every city and town in the UK.

Me and our Kev bust our proverbials to get Ady and his skips onto our site. The story was that he got a call from Mrs Huckerby one day, ordering a skip from an ad that she’d seen on-line somewhere…

I would pay a small fortune to watch a Google ad rep go and get an ad off Ady.

I would pay an even bigger fortune to watch a Google ad rep go and get money off someone like an Ady. He’s as good as gold; doesn’t owe us a penny. But most of these boys come from a generation – maybe that’s now passing – in which paying us out of what’s rolled up tightly in their back pocket was the norm.

Cos they’re a local. And that’s where our future lies. At an Ady’s door, not at Google’s.