What Education Can Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?

The Importance of School - Jay Cross

Duration: 0\':38\'\' You ask how important is school. School, because you\'re taught things and only part of that is learned, and then most of that is forgotten because there is a lack of application, before you have a chance to really use any of these things. What I learned in school is almost worthless. However, school is a great socialization device. I guess if you think if the learning is not the academics, but learning how to get along with people, I learned some very useful things in school.

Learning to Inquire - Howard Rheingold

Duration: 1\':20\'\' What I learned in high school was how to get into college. When I got into college it just didn\'t make sense to me to continue to pursue the collection of nuggets of knowledge that I could then regurgitate at tests. At the time I was really interested in learning, so I went to a place called Reed. I\'d say that the one thing that I\'ve received in my college education was a real dedication to inquiry. Instead of collecting knowledge, discovering it. Instead of receiving it, trying to seek it, to answer some kind of questions, something that\'s meaningful to me. Of course, the whole business of "How do you find the answer to questions", back in the old days it was libraries, today it\'s search engines. And how do you judge what you find, how do you analyze it, how do you know it\'s for real, how do you fit it together into a structure of meaning? Those were the things that I learned in college that didn\'t make a lot of sense, then, in regard to what I would do with my life, but actually had a lot to do with what I\'ve ended up doing.

How to Live a Meaningful Life? - Nancy White

Duration: 0\':21\'\' "How to prepare ourselves to live a meaningful life?" Be curious, know how to ask questions, know how to communicate, know how to read, know how to cook, know how to drive, know how to saw a button, know how to balance your checkbook, but I think it goes back to curiosity. You can never ever ever ever stop being curious.

How to Prepare Oneself for a Meaningful Life? Stephen Downes

Duration: 1\':03\'\' Probably the hardest question to answer is: "What can I do to best prepare myself to have an educated, meaningful life?" And there\'s no simple answer to that question, because it\'s going to depend a lot on what your own interests, and your own inclinations are. If I had to say anything, I\'d tell people: "Follow what interests you! Follow what gets you excited! And pursue that, and not be distracted by the many other things people would tell you that you absolutely have to do." In my own case, it was reading and writing. And while people were trying to get me to do other work, I would be reading. When people were trying to get me to do schoolwork, I would be writing. These are the things that I pursued in my life to make my life better. For you it may be very different, it may be technology, it may be science, may be auto mechanics, it may be industrial design, it may be any of the million things, but whatever it is, follow it.

What to Do to Prepare Your Kids for Life - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0\':28\'\' "What\'s the best way today if you have kids to prepare them for life?" I think to expose them to lots of different ideas, to have them travel, look at things, and experience things. To have them teach how to use the Web to reach people and to be reached by others, how to connect, and how to interchange. I think one thing that\'s crucial in today\'s world is how to learn how to juggle with this huge river, ocean of information. That learning to learn, to me, I think is one of the key things.

What Is Learning For Me? - George Siemens

Duration: 1\':12\'\' What is learning for me? I have to rely on a statement that E.M. Forster famously made, which is "Only connect". I think in a very real sense. For me to learn today is about being properly connected to other people, being able to find information when I want. Having tools at my disposal that allow me to access different sources of information, and also having a network of people that enables me to reach out, ask questions when I need it. These networks are obviously based on trust, these are people that I have followed for a while, who I\'ve been aware of over the last several years. In a real very practical sense, my ability to connect to other people, is learning for me. My ability to find information sources through easy-to-use tools is learning for me. And ultimately, anything whether it\'s policy, government initiatives, copyright, or any other system that puts up barriers between me and my ability to connect to others and information, it is ultimately a barrier to my learning.

Preparation For Life - How To Live Successfully - Jay Cross

Duration: 0\':22\'\' Preparation for life? Be relentlessly curious, ask questions all the time, join in your exploration with others, be aware that everything flows, nothing is for certain, it\'s all in flux. Life is beta, hop in and enjoy it.
End of Part 2 Part 1 - Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of:

• Jay Cross - Internet Time Blog
• Howard Rheingold - Smart Mobs
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Stephen Downes - Stephen\'s Web
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• George Siemens - eLearnSpace

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 7, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 2 - How To Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?" ...]]>

]]> Wed, 7 Jan 2009 15:20:00 GMT http://www.masternewmedia.org/education-and-learning-a-paradigm-shift-part-2/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Robin-Good-Latest-News/~3/6aq6oWRDyeo/ It's all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov Why has it that advertising, marketing and new media have been able to rapidly deeply transform their own survival paradigms and have embraced principles exactly opposite to those that made them rich before but none of the discoveries and realizations we have made in this paradigm shift have contaminated our world wide educational system? Too early to ask? Why? Is it because we have often no direct business interest in education? Or is it because we have long stopped asking some good questions about what kind of value such school systems really provide? The tacit assumption here is that it is that we have been realizing for a while that true, useful, memorable learning takes place when there are conditions and a setting very different from the one offered by a classroom: Focus on the learning, not on the teaching, getting away from information stuffing and realizing the value of direct understanding and engagement, discovery work, exploration, opportunity to make lots of mistakes, interaction with elders / experts, passionate peers, are just some key elements we have realized make a true difference in creating a setting where true learning can take place. And the internet itself offers so many great opportunities to bring together those who really want to learn with those who know and want to share. Why then do we need to compromise for second-hand experts and hand over the greatest amount of official learning time our kids will spend with someone whose only credentials are mostly made up of certifications of tests sHe has taken? Given the times, wouldn't reputation and work produced be better "metrics"? I think it is about time that each kid wanting to learn something seriously should have the opportunity to do so by accessing the real world, he is supposedly being prepared for, and being granted a passport to access it as an explorer / assistant / lurker / collaborator depending on the situation. Newsrooms can open up to those who want to learn how to online media, just as much as a shoe shop or an auto mechanic can reserve days or time slots for having people who are there to watch, help, learn. For what are more theoretical matters students should be free to choose their teachers, and not be forced to be matched by sheer chance to instructors and peers who have nothing do with their interests and preferences. If the learner is the one who needs to come out with something of value from this long forced confined training, sHe should at least have the option to choose from whom to be instructed and be given the opportunity to do that learning path with other people cultivating the same interest and preference. Or not? Collaboration, conferencing and video technologies offer the opportunity to any student to potentially attend and make up a personalized curriculum of instructors and experts to learn from that doesn't require moving to Stanford, California, nor to wake up everything morning at 5 to take a train and two lousy buses. Or not? So, what's up everyone? Besides the few guys out there spending serious time researching and lecturing on today's educational challenges what are you doing to harmonize a little more what you have learned in the world of media and communication to the universe of learning and education your kids are immersed into? Feel free to shoot me back your criticism or ideas in the comments section of this post, and allow me to share with you a first short set of very brief video clips I have asked a few friends to record while I was preparing my LeWeb08 presentation: Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina have all accepted to record a few short videos for me while addressing some of the issues relating to our educational system and its future. In this first part (tomorrow Part 2) my questions are targeted at understanding what kind of education system we have, what do we really get out of it, and whether the infinite exams, tests and pieces of paper we get from them are really useful for living a successful / meaningful life. Well, here are some interesting views to start.

Is Our Educational System Broken?

The Paradox of 2.0 - Robin Good

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2':35"

What I Learned in the School System - George Siemens

Duration: 1':16" Most of what I've learned in the formal education system, especially at a K-12 level, doesn't necessarily have a huge impact to where I am and what I am doing today. If I was to say what's the one skill that's most critical, I'd have to say typing. That's the one skill that I learned in K-12 system that, to this day, serves me on a daily ongoing basis. Otherwise, so much of what I need today, I encounter, whether it's a skill that I need to develop, which is driven by passion and interest, sometimes by work requirements, or whether it's knowledge that I need to complete a particular task, whether it's in work or just through my personal hobby or interest, almost everything that I use on a regular basis today has come as a result of me wanting to learn it, rather than being forced to or being put in a position where it was part of a curriculum. So if anything, our schools system today should foster the creation of a passion, it should encourage individuals to pursue what it is that they most love doing and eliminate barriers to achieving what people actually want to do.

Are Schools Useful Learning Environments? - Jay Cross

Duration: 0:44" ..... is what I've learned in school. Schools are for socialization, not for learning. I was happy to have a good sendoff with school, but I have learned more in every six months on the Web that I've learned for instance in Princeton and Harvard, I can tell you that. It's not what people teach anyway, It's what people learn, and learning is the responsibility of the learner not the teacher. I'm a little down on universities, although I know it's good to have resource centers and things like that, but increasingly the knowledge of the past is not the wisdom of the future.

What Interests Do Universities Serve? - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0:52" "Whose interest do school and universities currently serve?" I think of course in many cases they kind of serve their own interest and... well, maybe not entirely serving their own interest, but it is something of course that has become a self-perpetuating thing. I think academia general needs to really open up and see what's out there in terms of knowledge and intelligence that's not part of this kind of world yet. To me learning is something that goes on everywhere between people, not between authorized professionals. Of course the question of quality comes up here. I think that is a real concern that we create peer pressure, so to speak, about quality and merit which we have on the Web in many cases. I do think that there's a huge trend towards the Web becoming the open learning platform. I hope it's not going all be about "Google.edu", but chances are that is going to be a substantial part of it.

What Kind of Education Do We Get in Schools? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:21" "What kind of education do we get in today's school?" I think I'd have to turn the camera around at my son to answer that question, but I know that by watching as a parent, I'm worried about what I see in school, I see people trying to get in the "test score mode" rather than really learning. And if learning is to become a life-long practice, which I believe it is, we need to change the way we're teaching in schools.

Whose Interests Are Universities Serving? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':21" "Whose interest schools and universities serve?" I think that schools who have adapted something like learning management systems, are not really serving learning, but they're serving teaching and control. And from that point of view, these systems are none the best methods for learning. There are more like good methods for managing people, courses, information. But not learning. On the Web people have been talking about personal learning environments. That's the idea that you construct your own learning environment. And in that world I see the future of these institutions and universities to be more like learning resource centers. Where you go, it provides a meaningful environment networks, and the people who are working on these things, may be even coaches who can help you to find the right communities, sort of tap into the right information. This come up with your own way of understanding these things. It's about scaffolding. These institutions will be about scaffolding, and it's not a tight-up environment with walls, but rather part of a network itself and interacting with the networks at the same time.

Do We All Need a Degree to Be Successful? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:35" My son's going to take this video, so he's going to love this one. The question is: "Do my sons need a degree and why?". This is a really interesting question because both my sons stepped out of schools and one is going back. I think there's this push in the US that you need a degree in order to make a decent wage. But I look at what I do now, and a lot of what I do now has been formed by things I've learned since I left school. So, I think it depends on how motivated you are and how much you're an ongoing learner. I think there's definitely a place for certain kinds of degrees but... everybody? I don't know!

Will We Need Degrees in the Future? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':17" "Would someone need a degree in the future?" I think in the future we will learn from multiple sources, from multiple people, from multiple information systems, and also from the past as well as current future. In that world we will also provide degrees not based on one single source: the university. But we will gather these fragments which happen in interactions online. When I'm going to one school, to one course, to one conference like LeWeb, or I'm blogging, whatever these different events are, someone could go through that and provide me some kind of evaluation for my future boss: "This guy has been really thinking about these things many years." It's not just what he's done and written down, and what kind of numbers you got in tests, but also what other people are saying about him. It's also about what other people say about you, what is your impact on the network, and how you manage to do that impact, that is going to get you forward.

Will We Need Degrees and Certificates? - Stephen Downes

Duration: 1':02" We can ask: "Do my sons or my daughters need a degree to get ahead in tomorrow's world?", and the question really depends on what they're trying to do. if they're going to be involved in academic employment where they'll be judged, lacking if they don't have a degree, then they're going to have to get that piece of paper. That's a matter of pragmatic practicality. But if they are involved in creative or artistic fields, in fields where your work is your calling card, where you can prove your worth with good code, good work, good writing, whatever, then NO, they are not going to get a degree. I think in the future we're going to see more and more scope for employment in the creative fields, and less for employments in more traditionally academic fields. So I think they'll be able to get by without a degree. But, again, it would depend on their choices.

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of my friends:

• George Siemens - eLearnSpace
• Jay Cross - Internet Time Blog
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Teemu Arina - Dicole
• Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 6, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift? - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?"]]> It\'s all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov Why has it that advertising, marketing and new media have been able to rapidly deeply transform their own survival paradigms and have embraced principles exactly opposite to those that made them rich before but none of the discoveries and realizations we have made in this paradigm shift have contaminated our world wide educational system? Too early to ask? Why? Is it because we have often no direct business interest in education? Or is it because we have long stopped asking some good questions about what kind of value such school systems really provide? The tacit assumption here is that it is that we have been realizing for a while that true, useful, memorable learning takes place when there are conditions and a setting very different from the one offered by a classroom: Focus on the learning, not on the teaching, getting away from information stuffing and realizing the value of direct understanding and engagement, discovery work, exploration, opportunity to make lots of mistakes, interaction with elders / experts, passionate peers, are just some key elements we have realized make a true difference in creating a setting where true learning can take place. And the internet itself offers so many great opportunities to bring together those who really want to learn with those who know and want to share. Why then do we need to compromise for second-hand experts and hand over the greatest amount of official learning time our kids will spend with someone whose only credentials are mostly made up of certifications of tests sHe has taken? Given the times, wouldn\'t reputation and work produced be better "metrics"? I think it is about time that each kid wanting to learn something seriously should have the opportunity to do so by accessing the real world, he is supposedly being prepared for, and being granted a passport to access it as an explorer / assistant / lurker / collaborator depending on the situation. Newsrooms can open up to those who want to learn how to online media, just as much as a shoe shop or an auto mechanic can reserve days or time slots for having people who are there to watch, help, learn. For what are more theoretical matters students should be free to choose their teachers, and not be forced to be matched by sheer chance to instructors and peers who have nothing do with their interests and preferences. If the learner is the one who needs to come out with something of value from this long forced confined training, sHe should at least have the option to choose from whom to be instructed and be given the opportunity to do that learning path with other people cultivating the same interest and preference. Or not? Collaboration, conferencing and video technologies offer the opportunity to any student to potentially attend and make up a personalized curriculum of instructors and experts to learn from that doesn\'t require moving to Stanford, California, nor to wake up everything morning at 5 to take a train and two lousy buses. Or not? So, what\'s up everyone? Besides the few guys out there spending serious time researching and lecturing on today\'s educational challenges what are you doing to harmonize a little more what you have learned in the world of media and communication to the universe of learning and education your kids are immersed into? Feel free to shoot me back your criticism or ideas in the comments section of this post, and allow me to share with you a first short set of very brief video clips I have asked a few friends to record while I was preparing my LeWeb08 presentation: Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina have all accepted to record a few short videos for me while addressing some of the issues relating to our educational system and its future. In this first part (tomorrow Part 2) my questions are targeted at understanding what kind of education system we have, what do we really get out of it, and whether the infinite exams, tests and pieces of paper we get from them are really useful for living a successful / meaningful life. Well, here are some interesting views to start.

Is Our Educational System Broken?

The Paradox of 2.0 - Robin Good

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2\':35"

What I Learned in the School System - George Siemens

Duration: 1\':16" Most of what I\'ve learned in the formal education system, especially at a K-12 level, doesn\'t necessarily have a huge impact to where I am and what I am doing today. If I was to say what\'s the one skill that\'s most critical, I\'d have to say typing. That\'s the one skill that I learned in K-12 system that, to this day, serves me on a daily ongoing basis. Otherwise, so much of what I need today, I encounter, whether it\'s a skill that I need to develop, which is driven by passion and interest, sometimes by work requirements, or whether it\'s knowledge that I need to complete a particular task, whether it\'s in work or just through my personal hobby or interest, almost everything that I use on a regular basis today has come as a result of me wanting to learn it, rather than being forced to or being put in a position where it was part of a curriculum. So if anything, our schools system today should foster the creation of a passion, it should encourage individuals to pursue what it is that they most love doing and eliminate barriers to achieving what people actually want to do.

Are Schools Useful Learning Environments? - Jay Cross

Duration: 0:44" ..... is what I\'ve learned in school. Schools are for socialization, not for learning. I was happy to have a good sendoff with school, but I have learned more in every six months on the Web that I\'ve learned for instance in Princeton and Harvard, I can tell you that. It\'s not what people teach anyway, It\'s what people learn, and learning is the responsibility of the learner not the teacher. I\'m a little down on universities, although I know it\'s good to have resource centers and things like that, but increasingly the knowledge of the past is not the wisdom of the future.

What Interests Do Universities Serve? - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0:52" "Whose interest do school and universities currently serve?" I think of course in many cases they kind of serve their own interest and... well, maybe not entirely serving their own interest, but it is something of course that has become a self-perpetuating thing. I think academia general needs to really open up and see what\'s out there in terms of knowledge and intelligence that\'s not part of this kind of world yet. To me learning is something that goes on everywhere between people, not between authorized professionals. Of course the question of quality comes up here. I think that is a real concern that we create peer pressure, so to speak, about quality and merit which we have on the Web in many cases. I do think that there\'s a huge trend towards the Web becoming the open learning platform. I hope it\'s not going all be about "Google.edu", but chances are that is going to be a substantial part of it.

What Kind of Education Do We Get in Schools? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:21" "What kind of education do we get in today\'s school?" I think I\'d have to turn the camera around at my son to answer that question, but I know that by watching as a parent, I\'m worried about what I see in school, I see people trying to get in the "test score mode" rather than really learning. And if learning is to become a life-long practice, which I believe it is, we need to change the way we\'re teaching in schools.

Whose Interests Are Universities Serving? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1\':21" "Whose interest schools and universities serve?" I think that schools who have adapted something like learning management systems, are not really serving learning, but they\'re serving teaching and control. And from that point of view, these systems are none the best methods for learning. There are more like good methods for managing people, courses, information. But not learning. On the Web people have been talking about personal learning environments. That\'s the idea that you construct your own learning environment. And in that world I see the future of these institutions and universities to be more like learning resource centers. Where you go, it provides a meaningful environment networks, and the people who are working on these things, may be even coaches who can help you to find the right communities, sort of tap into the right information. This come up with your own way of understanding these things. It\'s about scaffolding. These institutions will be about scaffolding, and it\'s not a tight-up environment with walls, but rather part of a network itself and interacting with the networks at the same time.

Do We All Need a Degree to Be Successful? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:35" My son\'s going to take this video, so he\'s going to love this one. The question is: "Do my sons need a degree and why?". This is a really interesting question because both my sons stepped out of schools and one is going back. I think there\'s this push in the US that you need a degree in order to make a decent wage. But I look at what I do now, and a lot of what I do now has been formed by things I\'ve learned since I left school. So, I think it depends on how motivated you are and how much you\'re an ongoing learner. I think there\'s definitely a place for certain kinds of degrees but... everybody? I don\'t know!

Will We Need Degrees in the Future? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1\':17" "Would someone need a degree in the future?" I think in the future we will learn from multiple sources, from multiple people, from multiple information systems, and also from the past as well as current future. In that world we will also provide degrees not based on one single source: the university. But we will gather these fragments which happen in interactions online. When I\'m going to one school, to one course, to one conference like LeWeb, or I\'m blogging, whatever these different events are, someone could go through that and provide me some kind of evaluation for my future boss: "This guy has been really thinking about these things many years." It\'s not just what he\'s done and written down, and what kind of numbers you got in tests, but also what other people are saying about him. It\'s also about what other people say about you, what is your impact on the network, and how you manage to do that impact, that is going to get you forward.

Will We Need Degrees and Certificates? - Stephen Downes

Duration: 1\':02" We can ask: "Do my sons or my daughters need a degree to get ahead in tomorrow\'s world?", and the question really depends on what they\'re trying to do. if they\'re going to be involved in academic employment where they\'ll be judged, lacking if they don\'t have a degree, then they\'re going to have to get that piece of paper. That\'s a matter of pragmatic practicality. But if they are involved in creative or artistic fields, in fields where your work is your calling card, where you can prove your worth with good code, good work, good writing, whatever, then NO, they are not going to get a degree. I think in the future we\'re going to see more and more scope for employment in the creative fields, and less for employments in more traditionally academic fields. So I think they\'ll be able to get by without a degree. But, again, it would depend on their choices.

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of my friends:

• George Siemens - eLearnSpace
• Jay Cross - http://www.linkedin.com/in/jaycross">Internet Time Blog
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Teemu Arina - Dicole
• Stephen Downes - Stephen\'s Web

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 6, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift? - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?" ...]]>

]]> Tue, 6 Jan 2009 17:26:00 GMT http://www.masternewmedia.org/education-and-learning-a-paradigm-shift-part-1/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Robin-Good-Latest-News/~3/Ekj9NnDf1UM/ When ad networks alone are not enough to sell all of your ad inventory, ad exchanges step in to help you maximize the money you make. Put simply, ad exchanges work on the same idea as stock markets. They allow buyers to bid on your inventory, and the demand for your inventory determines the price at which you can sell it. Photo credit: Travel Aficionado edited by Andre Deutmeyer Making a living as an independent web publisher means that you have to do one thing very well: monetizing your content. Google AdSense is where most publishers start because it is easy to set up. But how do you do ensure that you are getting top dollar for your ad inventory? Joining a vertical ad network to sell your inventory is a good idea. But the problem with ad networks is that even if they are good, you will have a hard time selling 100% of your ad inventory all the time, and there is no easy way to know if you are getting the most you can out of your available ad inventory. Ad networks play an important role in bringing you and similar web publishers together with online advertisers. But because ad networks are typically disconnected from the rest of the market (i.e. any given network only works with a small percentage of the available advertisers and publishers, rather than the whole market), they can limit profitability because they offer limited supply and demand. For publishers who link or daisy chain ad networks together, manually prioritizing ad inventory to networks can be a hassle. And there is no way to guarantee that your set up is making you the most money. This is where the ad exchange steps in. In the exchange, all market players - advertisers, publishers, and networks - are interconnected on a common platform. If your ad spot can't be sold at a premium price set by you, it is auctioned off in the exchange. You set the minimum bid price and then simple supply and demand economics take over. All advertisers have access to and compete for your ad spots in real-time. The advertiser with the highest bid purchases any given ad spot and the process begins anew as your ad inventory opens up. Currently, ad exchanges seem to be relegated to the remnant ad market (the leftover ad inventory spaces available on your site). But the real potential for online ad exchanges lies in not just maximizing the return on your remnant ad inventory, but in opening up your entire ad inventory to real-time bidding. If you have ever considered using an ad exchange... or even if you have never considered using an ad exchange and you have no idea where to start and what to look for, then there is no better place to start than here. In this article I have brought together some of the largest ad exchanges - AdBrite, ContextWeb's ADSDAQ, Yahoo's RightMedia Exchange, and Google's DoubleClick Advertising Exchange - with some of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space - TRAFFIQ and Turn - for a comparison of their unique traits and characteristics. If you are looking for ways to improve the monetization of your existing site and are caressing the idea of opening up your ad inventory placement opportunities to real-time bidding then you may find some useful information in this guide.. Here all the details:

Ad Exchanges Reviewed

The ad exchanges reviewed below were selected because they allow independent publishers to submit their ad inventory directly to the exchanges.

• AdBrite

  AdBrite ad exchange aggregates more than 45,000 publishers including big names like LinkedIn and the Drudge Report as well as thousands of long tail small niche publishers with over 7000 advertisers including big brands like Verizon and the US Navy. Additionally, AdBrite teams up with over 20 of the leading ad networks, thus helping to ensure a dynamic marketplace for ad trading. Every ad that is served is served on a eCPM (effective CPM) basis. So it doesn’t matter whether or not the ad being served is a CPM, CPC, or CPA ad, each is converted to eCPM to determine which ad will be the most profitable for you. Each time there is a page view, AdBrite calculates the demographics and geo-location of the user, the contextual meaning of the page and other factors, and runs an auction for all interested advertisers. The AdBrite ad exchange service can be integrated with other ad management platforms. And AdBrite serves both your standard graphical display ads and rich media ads; text ads like Google AdSense; as well as interactive interstitial ads (full page ads). Publishers have complete control over the ads to be displayed. You can review and if necessary remove any ad before or after it appears on your site. Furthermore to maximize revenue you can set your own reserve price. For example, if you believe that you could make a minimum of $2 CPM for a specific ad spot, you would set your reserve price at $2. If AdBrite can’t beat the reserve price, your backup network (Google AdSense or another of your choice) will fill the ad spot. Additionally you can control the look and feel of ads so that the ads best fit your site design. Unique Feature: With one snippet of AdBrite HTML code, each publisher has the choice of displaying banner ads, rich media ads, text ads, inline ads (double-underlined words that display a relevant ad when the mouse hovers over it) or full-page interstitial ads. Additionally, AdBrite InVideo enables ads in videos, and BritePic enables advertising on still images. All AdBrite features can be accessed by anyone, instantly, using a self-service interface at http://www.adbrite.com/.





• ADSDAQ

  Since its inception in early 2005, the ADSDAQ (think NASDAQ for ads) ad exchange was built by offering a CPM AskPrice to publishers. ADSDAQ offers a self-service desk for publishers, which allows smaller, long-tail publishers to take advantage of market dynamics to sell off their ad inventory. The ad exchange brings together more than 7,000 publishers, including 100 of the comScore 250 websites, including Fox News, Accuweather, and Belo Interactive Media and many smaller niche sites with interactive ad agencies, including Digitas and Modem Media (Publicis), Agency.com (Omnicom), and more than 350 advertisers run on the ADSDAQ exchange, including some of the biggest brands in automotive, pharmaceuticals, travel, consumer electronics, insurance and financial services. ADSDAQ only sells graphical display ads. ADSDAQ support standard IAB sizes and runs standard graphical and various rich media formats. If ADSDAQ is unable to clear inventory at the publisher AskPrice, ADSDAQ enables each one to specify backup networks such as BURST, Tribal Fusion, Google AdSense and many others to sell your remnant inventory. However, ADSDAQ touts itself as an ad exchange for premium ad inventory, not remnant. Since the publishers will set their CPM AskPrice, the ADSDAQ exchange is a first stop for inventory prior to a publisher's ad network remnant alternatives. Unique Feature: One of the things that make ADSDAQ unique is that it has focused on direct relationships with ad agencies, advertisers and publishers rather than working with existing ad networks like the other ad exchanges do. Contact one of the ADSDAQ representatives for more information at http://exchange.contextweb.com/sellingdesk/





• DoubleClick Advertising Exchange

  Bought by Google in 2007, the DoubleClick ad exchange brings together some of the largest publishers on the web with advertising from top firms representing a broad range of established Fortune 500 companies and newer, upstart brands. Additonally, DoubleClick works with ad networks to ensure a dynamic market driven trading environment for all. Although, the DoubleClick ad exchange tends to focus on large scale publishers, smaller niche publishers can also use the marketplace to sell their inventory. For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange attempts to generate maximum possible revenue for every single ad impression. The system enables sellers to dynamically allocate inventory to the highest-paying sales channel, rendering obsolete the arbitrary "premium" vs. "non-premium" (or "remnant") inventory distinctions. Publishers will always get the highest paying ad in the market. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange now supports the buying and selling of all standard types of online display advertising. However, the exchange was built to support a range of inventory, including graphical, video, and even in-game ads. The advertising exchange is tightly integrated with DoubleClick's existing DART ad management platform, enabling yield maximization across sales channels for sellers, as well as shared creatives, advertisers, Spotlight Tags and audience targeting for buyers. Dynamic allocation: For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange automatically determines how to generate the highest return for every impression by dynamically allocating to the highest paying sales channel. Publishers benefit from complete control over to whom impressions are sold, what ads are run and at what price. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served, regardless of the number of buyers. DoubleClick ad exchange does not integrate with other ad management platforms easily, but if you use DoubleClick's ad management platforms and DART then the integration is seamless. In order to sign up for DoubleClick, you must contact a representative at http://doubleclick.com





• Right Media Exchange

  Right Media Exchange is considered to be the founding father of the ad exchanges. Launched in 2005 and bought by Yahoo in 2007, Right Media Exchange works with top-tier publishers like Tickle, Looksmart, Fox, Yahoo! (obviously), and thousands of smaller, niche publishers on their direct media exchange platform. On the advertising side of this equation, Right Media works with the top 10 ad agencies in the US, as well as a range of ad networks including Revenue Science and Adtegrity. Right Media facilitates transactions for all rich media, graphical, and text based IAB-approved ad units. Right Media provides an extensive set of classification and protection mechanisms for both buyers and sellers in the exchange. Ads and sites can be filtered using approximately 160 different attributes. Furthermore, before any ad is served it is scrutinized by an automated (creative tester) and human review process to stop potentially harmful creative from flowing through the exchange and ending up on your site. Like most of the ad exchanges featured here, Right Media makes its money by taking a cut of each transaction from ad networks and publishers. Unique Feature: Right Media offers APIs to outside developers. The APIs allow businesses to seamlessly plug into and develop technology for the exchange so that a tremendous amount of new services and value can be brought to the exchange community by third party developers. To sign up for the Right Media Exchange, go to https://direct.rightmedia.com/tour/index3.php





• TRAFFIQ

  TRAFFIQ is one of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space, but has already been selected for the Silicon Alley Insider 25 list honoring the world's most valuable digital startups. TRAFFIQ is a self-serve platform designed to help publishers of all sizes sell their inventory to advertisers. Since launching in August 2007, TRAFFIQ has brought together 1,500 brand name and quality niche publishers with more than 400 leading agencies and advertisers. TRAFFIQ partners include most of Fortune 1000 advertisers, mid-size advertisers, and premium and niche publishers, including: Federated Media, Healthcentral.com, Sky Sports, PerezHilton, and more. Using TRAFFIQ publishers can setup storefronts, segment, bundle, and list their inventory according to highly targeted premium and niche attributes. TRAFFIQ also offers full-path conversion tracking and reporting which allows publishers to completely capture of the full path of user engagement allowing publishers to gain a deeper understanding of the role of their inventory relative to other touch points, and price their inventory accordingly. Because TRAFFIQ allows publishers a lot of flexibility to describe their audience, advertisers can more easily match their preferences with your ad inventory. Advertisers are happy because they can easily launch highly targeted advertising campaigns ensuring that the ads are placed on a pre-approved list of sites and publishers. Publishers benefit because they get highly relevant ads. Like DoubleClick, TRAFFIQ handles all reconciliation and billing, so that publishers receive one check with all their ad revenue, rather than having to receive a separate check from each advertiser. And like the other ad exchanges reviewed here, there is no upfront cost to join TRAFFIQ, instead sellers pay a fixed percent commission on ads sold. Unique Feature: Using the publisher storefront, TRAFFIQ can serve as a rudimentary futures markets, letting publishers sell ad space several months in advance. To find out more about TRAFFIQ check out https://itx.traffiq.com/register/default.aspx





• Turn

  The Turn Smart Market is the other new entrant into the ad exchange space. Turn targets mid-size to larger publishers typically generating at least 100,000 ad impression per month. But any publisher can technically become a participant in the market, regardless of size, if the site is well built and serves a targetable niche. The Turn web-based publisher console gives you control over which advertisers, ad types, and ads are delivered to your website. Turn provides a single billing and payment point for all transactions, so you receive a single aggregate payment for all ads served within 30 days of the last day of the month in which ads were served. The Turn Smart Market is a “revenue ranked” auction, in which the ad with the highest predicted eCPM (effective CPM) wins the auction. As such the ad exchange can basically any type of ad, regardless of pricing structute (CPM, CPC, and CPA pricing). For every ad served, Turn automatically calculates the eCPM real-time, ranks every eligible ad, and the one with the highest eCPM wins the auction. To find out more information about Turn, visit http://www.turn.com/corp/publishers/publishers-overview.jsp

N.B.: One ad exchange that I would have liked to include in this guide is Microsoft's AdECN. Although Microsoft’s AdECN is one of the largest ad exchanges, AdECN Exchange offers membership only to advertising networks, advertiser and publisher brokers, and agencies. According to their website, in order to remain "neutral and not compete with its members, AdECN does not work directly with advertisers or publishers". Because AdECN does not allow publishers to join the ad exchange directly, AdECN was not reviewed here.

Would you like to suggest other ad exchange solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the ad exchanges reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 5th 2009 as Advertising Exchange: Ad Exchanges Open Up Your Ad Inventory To Real-Time Bidding - Best Ad Exchanges Reviewed]]> When ad networks alone are not enough to sell all of your ad inventory, ad exchanges step in to help you maximize the money you make. Put simply, ad exchanges work on the same idea as stock markets. They allow buyers to bid on your inventory, and the demand for your inventory determines the price at which you can sell it. Photo credit: Travel Aficionado edited by Andre Deutmeyer Making a living as an independent web publisher means that you have to do one thing very well: monetizing your content. Google AdSense is where most publishers start because it is easy to set up. But how do you do ensure that you are getting top dollar for your ad inventory? Joining a vertical ad network to sell your inventory is a good idea. But the problem with ad networks is that even if they are good, you will have a hard time selling 100% of your ad inventory all the time, and there is no easy way to know if you are getting the most you can out of your available ad inventory. Ad networks play an important role in bringing you and similar web publishers together with online advertisers. But because ad networks are typically disconnected from the rest of the market (i.e. any given network only works with a small percentage of the available advertisers and publishers, rather than the whole market), they can limit profitability because they offer limited supply and demand. For publishers who link or daisy chain ad networks together, manually prioritizing ad inventory to networks can be a hassle. And there is no way to guarantee that your set up is making you the most money. This is where the ad exchange steps in. In the exchange, all market players - advertisers, publishers, and networks - are interconnected on a common platform. If your ad spot can\'t be sold at a premium price set by you, it is auctioned off in the exchange. You set the minimum bid price and then simple supply and demand economics take over. All advertisers have access to and compete for your ad spots in real-time. The advertiser with the highest bid purchases any given ad spot and the process begins anew as your ad inventory opens up. Currently, ad exchanges seem to be relegated to the remnant ad market (the leftover ad inventory spaces available on your site). But the real potential for online ad exchanges lies in not just maximizing the return on your remnant ad inventory, but in opening up your entire ad inventory to real-time bidding. If you have ever considered using an ad exchange... or even if you have never considered using an ad exchange and you have no idea where to start and what to look for, then there is no better place to start than here. In this article I have brought together some of the largest ad exchanges - AdBrite, ContextWeb\'s ADSDAQ, Yahoo\'s RightMedia Exchange, and Google\'s DoubleClick Advertising Exchange - with some of the newest entrants into the ad exchange space - TRAFFIQ and Turn - for a comparison of their unique traits and characteristics. If you are looking for ways to improve the monetization of your existing site and are caressing the idea of opening up your ad inventory placement opportunities to real-time bidding then you may find some useful information in this guide.. Here all the details:

Ad Exchanges Reviewed

The ad exchanges reviewed below were selected because they allow independent publishers to submit their ad inventory directly to the exchanges.

• AdBrite

  AdBrite ad exchange aggregates more than 45,000 publishers including big names like LinkedIn and the Drudge Report as well as thousands of long tail small niche publishers with over 7000 advertisers including big brands like Verizon and the US Navy. Additionally, AdBrite teams up with over 20 of the leading ad networks, thus helping to ensure a dynamic marketplace for ad trading. Every ad that is served is served on a eCPM (effective CPM) basis. So it doesn't matter whether or not the ad being served is a CPM, CPC, or CPA ad, each is converted to eCPM to determine which ad will be the most profitable for you. Each time there is a page view, AdBrite calculates the demographics and geo-location of the user, the contextual meaning of the page and other factors, and runs an auction for all interested advertisers. The AdBrite ad exchange service can be integrated with other ad management platforms. And AdBrite serves both your standard graphical display ads and rich media ads; text ads like Google AdSense; as well as interactive interstitial ads (full page ads). Publishers have complete control over the ads to be displayed. You can review and if necessary remove any ad before or after it appears on your site. Furthermore to maximize revenue you can set your own reserve price. For example, if you believe that you could make a minimum of $2 CPM for a specific ad spot, you would set your reserve price at $2. If AdBrite can't beat the reserve price, your backup network (Google AdSense or another of your choice) will fill the ad spot. Additionally you can control the look and feel of ads so that the ads best fit your site design. Unique Feature: With one snippet of AdBrite HTML code, each publisher has the choice of displaying banner ads, rich media ads, text ads, inline ads (double-underlined words that display a relevant ad when the mouse hovers over it) or full-page interstitial ads. Additionally, AdBrite InVideo enables ads in videos, and BritePic enables advertising on still images. All AdBrite features can be accessed by anyone, instantly, using a self-service interface at http://www.adbrite.com/.





• ADSDAQ

  Since its inception in early 2005, the ADSDAQ (think NASDAQ for ads) ad exchange was built by offering a CPM AskPrice to publishers. ADSDAQ offers a self-service desk for publishers, which allows smaller, long-tail publishers to take advantage of market dynamics to sell off their ad inventory. The ad exchange brings together more than 7,000 publishers, including 100 of the comScore 250 websites, including Fox News, Accuweather, and Belo Interactive Media and many smaller niche sites with interactive ad agencies, including Digitas and Modem Media (Publicis), Agency.com (Omnicom), and more than 350 advertisers run on the ADSDAQ exchange, including some of the biggest brands in automotive, pharmaceuticals, travel, consumer electronics, insurance and financial services. ADSDAQ only sells graphical display ads. ADSDAQ support standard IAB sizes and runs standard graphical and various rich media formats. If ADSDAQ is unable to clear inventory at the publisher AskPrice, ADSDAQ enables each one to specify backup networks such as BURST, Tribal Fusion, Google AdSense and many others to sell your remnant inventory. However, ADSDAQ touts itself as an ad exchange for premium ad inventory, not remnant. Since the publishers will set their CPM AskPrice, the ADSDAQ exchange is a first stop for inventory prior to a publisher\'s ad network remnant alternatives. Unique Feature: One of the things that make ADSDAQ unique is that it has focused on direct relationships with ad agencies, advertisers and publishers rather than working with existing ad networks like the other ad exchanges do. Contact one of the ADSDAQ representatives for more information at http://exchange.contextweb.com/sellingdesk/





• DoubleClick Advertising Exchange

  Bought by Google in 2007, the DoubleClick ad exchange brings together some of the largest publishers on the web with advertising from top firms representing a broad range of established Fortune 500 companies and newer, upstart brands. Additonally, DoubleClick works with ad networks to ensure a dynamic market driven trading environment for all. Although, the DoubleClick ad exchange tends to focus on large scale publishers, smaller niche publishers can also use the marketplace to sell their inventory. For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange attempts to generate maximum possible revenue for every single ad impression. The system enables sellers to dynamically allocate inventory to the highest-paying sales channel, rendering obsolete the arbitrary "premium" vs. "non-premium" (or "remnant") inventory distinctions. Publishers will always get the highest paying ad in the market. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange now supports the buying and selling of all standard types of online display advertising. However, the exchange was built to support a range of inventory, including graphical, video, and even in-game ads. The advertising exchange is tightly integrated with DoubleClick\'s existing DART ad management platform, enabling yield maximization across sales channels for sellers, as well as shared creatives, advertisers, Spotlight Tags and audience targeting for buyers. Dynamic allocation: For publishers, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange automatically determines how to generate the highest return for every impression by dynamically allocating to the highest paying sales channel. Publishers benefit from complete control over to whom impressions are sold, what ads are run and at what price. DoubleClick Advertising Exchange provides a single billing