Now, and especially in 2003, Inventory Management of advertizing will be key. The concept of inventory management is central to our attempts to sell advertising. In the past, we've allowed weight based and open ended campaigns. Very difficult to keep track of and determine what value we have provided. Even harder to explain to the customer. So IM will require that we move to units - either impressions, or possibly a meta-unit of some sort. There will be a circular feedback loop to manage. digraph IM { ad_definitions -> ad_delivery -> ad_stats -> ad_definitions ; } If we know how many impressions a given position generates for a given month, we can sell those in blocks of 100k, or so. If we run out of ads for the position, house ads should rotate in. The stats on the house ads will be an indication of how well we are selling. May answer questions about appropriate rates, selling techniques, etc. Total inventory is defined in terms of impressions. ie We have 10 million slots to fill. A given position may have 100,000 impressions to fill. An advertiser may buy 25,000 of them. We may combine positions into packages, for example section sponsorship. Section sponsorship get the advertiser a coordinated ad at the top and bottom of the pages in that section, along with a square on the front page. The inventory for the package would be (top-impressions + bottom-impressions )/2 + frontpage-impressions. Sales reps may need near-real-time reports on inventory availabilty so that rep's do not oversell a given position. Creating package will be impossible without good stats to begin with, so appropriate chucks of various position inventory can be bundled.