A few good friends know that I’ve been on a new revenue models in advertising for at least five years, didn’t find it yet, but sure that it’s over the current “Free, Free+ADs or Fee” models because we’re in the Web 2 context and the value of revenue should be set by the public.A very general reading of latest “Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals” by a couple of Harvard Business School’s authors shows a scenario which is not the right one: one model is fighting another.We have to understand that any current model will necessary evolve and only the winning evolution will prevail.IMHO the way to discover which one will be the “winner” starts focusing on the basics. We are now in an era where:

• our public increases in quantity (and it’s not only duplication, as the overall population increased and new areas started to be exposed to communication media);
• those individuals are no more mere passive actors but active ones and the trend (with technology lowering the financial access point to media) is an exponential increase of the the Web 2 attitude.

So the first conclusion could be: the value of our communication is not the number of eyes who see our ad but the number of people that interact with it.The second issue which should be taken into consideration is the ability of measuring any digital activity, made by communicating and made by interacting.I don’t want a “Orwell’s 1984″ world, but I accept that our current technological situation enables us such control.So we can be sure we have the means to determine the “new” value of communication (if we want to).The third issue is the benefits that our public gets from our action.We could measure it summing the value of purchased goods or (and that’s possible: it’s called knowledge evaluation) of acquired knowledge.In the first case we can collect data from a company, in the second case the knowledge value will generate further communication, which will be measured, which will create benefits, which will be measured, which …It’s not a virtuous circle, I think it’s a different way to see the process and, mostly, a more “natural” one, as it consider the way things go in the current system and simply apply a measurement system to them.