Is your attention worth more than mine?

Today, most advertisers pay the same amount to serve 1,000 ads to a hyper-connected super-influencer as they do to my granny (granny only rarely uses the Web and has relatively few followers on Twitter). The CPM, or ‘cost per mille’, is undifferentiated from user to user – despite the fact that some users are very much more influential than others: the value is crudely determined by the advertiser, the site and the quality of your sales team.

It’s true that there are snazzy behavioural targeting technologies that allow site owners to gain a higher degree of individual insight – for example, by tracking which sites and what type of content they have been visiting and consuming before arriving at yours – but the basic, flat-rate same-CPM-for-everyone is still the prevailing model for monetising online visits in the UK and US.

One of the most interesting ideas discussed at last week’s SxSW was the idea of ‘Personal CPM’. The idea was mooted in Charlene Li’s talk on The Future of Social Networks as a natural consequence of:

“Social networks becoming like air – not as in ‘sites’ like MySpace and Facebook, but in terms of relationships and connections being available anywhere and everywhere”.

The trend towards greater interoperability and technologies that allow us to port and share our online identities and social graph in more sophisticated ways across any and all of the digital services we use mean that it is only a matter of time before a site we visit knows how influential we are as individuals.

How? By understanding a very great deal more about us as individuals from our social behaviours: namely, our social identities, contacts/network and activities. From this, as Charlene says below in an earlier video interview about the social algorithm, machines will be able to understand who’s important to us, what’s important, when and where and serve up more relevant and interesting recommendations.

Of course, this will rely upon us opting in to share a whole lot more of our data, but there are huge incentives to do this. In a few years social technologies will be baked into everything around us and a social algorithm for sharing our data with this dynamic, smart-cloud will be like an invisible passport to access content and services wherever we are. Can you imagine stopping to log in to each individual service when *everything* is connected? And how many of us are already treading a dangerous and slightly chaotic line between public and private on Facebook, Twitter and other services? We certainly need help managing all this stuff, and it seems likely that we’d swap a key to our personal social algorithm for convenience and access. Of course, we’re not about to hand the keys to anyone, we’ll need trusted brokers. Charlene thinks Google is uniquely trustworthy and well-placed to be one of these brokers.

Screenshot of a slide from Charlene Li’s Future of Social Networks presentation at SxSW09 on Slideshare

One of the most interesting possibilities of a ‘personal social algorithm’ like this would be the ability of participating sites to analyse the value of your personal network on the fly. Advertisers would get charged more if you were particularly influential and less if you weren’t. Sites would also be able to serve more tailored and personalised ads, and also to show you what people in your network think of the content, services and products you’re looking at. As TV, Web and mobile converge this kind of personal CPM would become quite powerful, with the most connected and influential people generating significantly greater value than others. In this scenario, wouldn’t it be fair for the most connected and influential people to receive a share of the revenue?