Just saw a nice article by Om Malik (will the adds slow down reach the web)? He points out that right now in traditional media advertisement spent drops, and he wonders whether this effect might cross over to the new (on-line) media. I agree with him that, since there are more platforms and all the advertisement spend need to be divided amongst them, some degeneration will take place.
An interesting question is whether or not the CPM metric is slowly becoming less useful in advertisement. I do think there is a need for advertisement to keep business models running, but there is a risk of saturation or dislike when advertisement starts failing the need of the consumer. I think this might even be a greater risk within social networks, as more people get involved spending more time updating and enriching their own profiles. I imagine that their Facebook, or MySpace profile becomes increasingly their own identity, not simply an extension of themselves virtually on the Internet. And if there is advertisement in their own space that doesn’t match in some way the needs of the user, it will in the end frustrate him or her.
It would be interesting to see if we could let the community itself come up with advertisement models that better serve their needs, getting rid of the CPM metric, and coming up with more of a pull metric instead of a push metric. Any thoughts on this?
@vanelsas 
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