The "attention market" meme that's been bouncing around for awhile finally finds a concrete implementation in Seth Goldstein's media futures. This is big, folks. We're talking about going from CPC (cost-per-click) to CPL (cost-per-lead): much more valuable and efficient.
In the same way that the mortgage security market transferred credit risk away from the balance sheet of operators and into the portfolios of professional investors, a media futures market will enable non-advertisers (aka speculators) to take on the risk from the balance sheets of publishers. Publishers will be happy to hedge out their inventory, limit earnings volatility, and focus entirely on creating value-added programming; rather than spending their time speculating whether CPMs are going up or down.
Similarly, companies (ie the buy-side) can concentrate entirely on developing better products and service. Their marketing groups can focus on creating and communicating their brand images, while their sales organizations can simply specify the kinds of customers they are looking for and the prices they are willing to pay; the Media Futures market will take care of the rest.
Within these new markets enabled by Internet arbitrageurs, there are billions of micro markets where a query or a unique user path comes into contact with one of more targeted advertisements. A constructive tension emerges between the user who intends to find or do something and the sponsor of the link who is trying to lure her into the sponsor's particular commercial environment. Each one of these tiny interactions feature a buyer (advertiser), seller (publisher) and asset (consumer attention) financed by an arbitrageur (investor).
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