Starting with February I will stop displaying advertising banners. Never favored, I have been using them to bring in some income only on the Kolabora.com site, where you can still see a few. MasterNewMedia.org, Kolabora.com and masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com will not run anymore traditional interruptive advertising banners nor side-column "promoboxes".

Yes, for what I can, I want to walk my talk and move decisively away from intrusive and interruptive advertising.
The new passwords for those wanting to promote on my sites are:
text-based, targeted, relevant, and/or providing free access to additional and high-value "premium" complementary information.
Yes, you read it right, against all of the mainstream odds I will not be accepting anymore traditional banner ads nor any other kind of visual, distracting, grab-my-attention graphical display that competes with my own content for attention and physical display space.
This conflict has no need to exist.

Let's give good value to information.

Why write or provide a great article if you have then to break it, split it, or force into unnatural layouts in order to fit ads that many times don't even fit the content published?
I just rejected $80 for a weekly ad from tailor/dress company wanting to have it displayed on my masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com web site. MasterViews provides information about presentations, PowerPoint and related matters. What does a tailor have to do with this content?
For those who like me, are taking this online publishing road as their main one, it is indeed difficult to give up money like this, believe me. But my feeling is that I do need to shoot for quality and value before anything else.
So, I will not sell myself out just for ad money. (For those asking themselves why I then joined the Marqui blogosphere paid program, it is because I am indeed an explorer and an early adopter of new trends. So, as I have been touting myself the advent of paid assignments before, I took the Marqui opportunity to verify first-hand what it really meant to be paid to write while disclosing it).
I am here to provide high-quality content, reference, support and news services while defending freedom of choice ethics, open access to information, and intelligent grassroots use of such powerful new media communication technologies. I want to be good and I want to be profitable as well. I want to provide quality content, reviews and opinion without making my site become a visual advertising nightmare, like I see it happening on most any "major" site out there.
But then, you say, how are you going to make that profit Robin, if you give up on using banners and other traditional intrusive ad formats?
Well, what I have thought out, is a small revolution on how, on my online media properties, I will give space and exposure to selected products and services. And here are my humble new key ingredients for a new approach to better advertising:
1. No interruptive ads. No interstitials, no pop-ups, no banners.
2. No grab-your-attention visual ads. No animations. No special colors.
3. No marketing hype: best, fastest, cheapest, etc. I want the facts.
4. No irrelevant products.
5. Yes to complementary, contextual, topic-relevant ads.
6. Yes to text-based advertisements.
7. Yes to extra-info, try-outs, demos, tutorials.
8. Yes to products I endorse, not to anyone who can pay for it.
9. Yes to advertisers/sponsors who pay for providing free access to additional high-quality content sections.
And here a short initial list of my initial "open for sponsorship" offerings in this direction:
a) Good conversations. These are audio interviews with experts,
thought leaders and power-users on themes and topics relevant to the site industry. Recordings are delivered through a Web-based media playback device (compatible with all OS and browser types) which provide a friendlier and more engaging user experience, space for providing complementary information and resources, and valuable sponsorship options both in the media playback device,
in the areas reserved to complementary info and in the audio (or video) stream itself.
b) Topic-specific News Channel. This is what I have been calling newsmaster feeds. Based on RSS, these is nothing less than a Web-based news page capable of automatically aggregating all of the most relevant news, articles and online resources appearing on the Internet on a specific pre-designated targeted topic. It is like a live newspaper that works in real-time by searching, filtering and aggregating only newsbits relevant to the theme selected. Obviously it generates an RSS feed too. This is probably the hottest item on the plate.
c) Premium Reference. At the end of Web articles there is a growing need to provide related and complementary information helping the task of those readers, who, having enjoyed the main content, want to go for more. This is true for two reasons:
1) Readers like what they have read and want to find out more about it. Related articles, reference resources, relevant products and services, etc.
2) More and more readers land on your pages coming directly from search engines. They see your article and have no other awareness of the rest of your site. By recreating a bit of home page-like guided navigation, you can help distribute home page functionality to all of the individual articles, while enriching significantly each individual page value.
By providing a high-quality Premium Reference section that contains annotated links to other valuable articles and resources online, to selected books, or to previously published material on the same topic, a high-value content area is therefore created which can be positioned and offered as an ideal sponsorship opportunity. Selected sponsors appear on Premium Reference sections of selected content categories only, as to provide maximum relevance and targeting.
d) Focus On: ... Mini-Guides. I have now sufficient content on quite a number of specific topics and research areas, that there is tangible and immediate advantage in selecting, editing and collecting all of my articles on a certain issue, adding my up-to-date on it and release it as either a PDF eBook or a print-on-demand physical mini-guide. This is existing content that gains tremendous value by being selected, aggregated and packaged into a whole. Again, another perfect sponsorship opportunity for one or two brands.
There is indeed more to come, that is already cooking. But, yes, this is how I see the near-term future of online advertising. High quality, sell-side driven, contextual, relevant, non-interruptive and providing access to premium complementary info.
What are you thinking?