Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

Avenue A/Razorfish published its 2007 Digital Outlook Report. (Download PDF here).

I haven’t read the report yet, but I did read Paid Content’s overview . Here are some highlights of the highlights:

- Portals thriving on page views
- AOL rebounds on “free”
- Verticals are king
- Communities are strong

…and soon the page view model of advertising will die (due to AJAX, RSS and widgets).

There’s nothing here that I hadn’t heard before, but I thought I’d just share my thoughts…

…we’ve spent the past year trying to figure out an online ad metric that our reps could sell. We settled on the page view even though we knew that its days might be numbered. Now that we’re moving into social networks, the page view is increasingly threatened.

I hope this is a good thing.

Sites like ours will never be able to compete with Yahoo!, MSN and AOL in terms of page views. We don’t have the volume of traffic (audience). But what we do have is a decently large and extremely passionate affinity group. We need to find ways to nurture this community while creating a channel through which sponsors can connect with its members. This will be the key to our online revenue going forward. Somehow, pageviews sounds easier, doesn’t it :-)?