ESPN has made headlines today (via MediaWeek) by announcing that they will no longer be working with ad networks. Specifically, Eric Johnson (EVP Multimedia Sales @ ESPN) said:

We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks

Not surprisngly, the blogosphere is clamoring about the news. Including Jason Calacanis explaining “ad networks are for losers.” As the Media Week post points out, this is actually a continuation of a theme from Millard’s comments at the IAB Meeting that: “we must not trade our advertising inventory like pork bellies.”

I continue to be very bullish on the networks and exchanges. (Although, I’d like to see them take a more open approach — come on OpenX!!) Regardless if we end up with an open or closed solution, as I pointed out in my fourth 2008 prediction on RWW this is ultimately about developign new metrics:

4. Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

Unfortunately, when networks are selling ads against crappy metrics (cough … CPM .. cough) it is really hard to be deliver value back to your publishing partners. This is due to you not appropriately measuring that value from your advertising clients. Once they have better metrics, I think ad networks and exchanges will feel like better partners to publishers.

One metric I’m finding particularly compelling is that of a ‘personal CPM’ originally posted by Marian Salzman (of JWT) and advanced at Graphing Social Patterns by Charlene Li.