Henning Lange blog

This summer I had the pleasure to meet Seth Goldstein discussing the future of lead based advertising and his ideas about Root Markets. I pretty much liked his mind shifting ideas although his concept behind was hard to understand.

As Pamela Parker of ClickZ puts it in her article following the lead to a more transparent future "Root Markets wants to do nothing less than marry the financial market with the Internet advertising market."

As the lead market is a high arbitrage business where publishers don’t know what their leads are worth, and consumers have little idea of what their data is worth to advertisers which face the problem to decide how much to pay for which lead, a transparent and liquid market is missing. That’s what Seth is up to:

"Our goal is to be a neutral, independent exchange where we try to get out of the way of the market participants. We want to provide some open market data and an environment in which people can compete and trade and do business under a level playing field. There’s no black box where we’re hiding performance data."

Another big thing about Root Markets is to empower users to control and handel their data via it’s non-profit AttentionTrust. Therefore, users can install a recorder which tracks everything they do with their browser. It both allows to turn of and deletion of data. As TechCrunch put’s it "you get two primary benefits - the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit - like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful."

I like both ideas to create transparent markets and empowering consumers, but still believe it’s hard to revolutionize such a fragmented market with as many players as consumers, publishers, intermediaries, advertisers as well as investors.

All the best for you and your great team, Seth. I will stay watching

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