Barter syndication and content netwoks

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VideoEgg buys Six Apart and becomes Say Media. 

• VideoEgg is a rich media adnetwork. Six Apart was first a blog network ("connects marketers and bloggers to a massive audience through its social media platform"). Then it became a publishing platform and more recently an ad network. Finally, what do we get:? A network of content, federated by advertising tools. VideoEgg provides advertising tools. The new entity is rebranded Say Media,; now it is a rep. 

Issuu and Adform got together to launch Issuu AdPages

• Issuu is a place for different kinds of documents (magazines, brochures, catalogues, etc.) to be published on line ("publish by millions"). AdForm provides advertising tools (adserving, creative optimization, web analytics, etc.). Issuu AdPages is another kind of ad network, a rep.

Behind these moves and the usual rhetoric ("a new rich digital media format"), there is something already familiar to the U.S.: a network that corresponds to the traditional radio and TV media. Gather an audience, exchange it against advertising space or time (barter) + cash. Glam Media, Say Media, Federated Media, Wikio, Demand Media, Associated Content (bought out by Yahoo!), Squidoo, Seed, 5min Life Videopedia (the last two bought out by AOL), GoAdv, SB Nation, About.com (bought out by The New York Times), etc.: they are all more or less "content farms", many of them rely on crowd sourcing and user-generated content. Yahoo does the same thing when it puts together content from women's magazines (cf. "Du neuf avec du vieux"). It follows the same logic: gather or generate content and sell advertising (revenue sharing). It is a simplified version of a TV network.
What is the most obvious difference between TV networks and Issu AdPages or Say Media? TV networks' advertising tools are simply less sophisticated.
The Hollywood studios which own the TV networks know how to produce content. Internet develops efficient ad tools. One day, soon, they will merge. And the media world will be different.
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