Steve Hall points out that because links to individual postings often produce the traffic to weblogs, there needs to be an advertising system for weblogs adaptable to variable traffic to individual permalinked items. The notion of advertising at the ‘page’ level is meaningless for weblogs.
I believe the permalink model will inevitably extend to all web publishing – a web page is a virtual rendering of one or more items, individual postings have self contained meaning and therefore value.
To put it another way, the web is a web because of links. Links point to information elsewhere, and information exists within content, not pages. If there are no permalinks to individual pieces of content, then the advertising model of the web will never be able to fully take advantage of linking. Eventually everthing on the web will have a permalink.
“Slate wrote an article about a post on Gawker that then linked to a post on Adrants about the PUMA Ad Sensation. Traffic to Adrants sky rocketed. Ten thousand visitors, in fact, yesterday and 3,000 so far today. Normal daily traffic is between 500-800 visitors a day. If Adrants had an ad program up and running that placed ads only at the top of the page, the advertiser, and Adrants, would have lost out big time on that bonus traffic. Worse, those ads would be counted as served impressions when, in fact, they would never be seen. Not a good ad strategy. What is needed is the ability to “embed” ads (graphic and/or text) dynamically within individual posts based on traffic level so that any ad is always “served” to the most highly viewed area of the site.”