The Syndicate has a simple guiding principle: the best way to promote what you do is through an interesting and unique story, handcrafted for your readers. We’re excited to allow sponsors to buy Fusion Ads & The Syndicate placements at a discount to further extend their exposure.

Be sure to check out our new partnership page to learn more.

If Facebook wants to play in the ad game of the “open web”, they should have an advertiser centric approach.

The advertiser is already their customer, spending real ad dollars with them right now. The value that they can bring to those advertisers right now is more scale. There’s only so much an advertiser can spend on Facebook. Ad prices on Facebook have been skyrocketing over the last couple years, and at some point they will see advertisers start to pull spend away from them unless they can offer more scale.

Regardless of their advertising philosophy and how they will look to innovate advertising (at scale) on the open web, Facebook is leaving billions in fast and easy ad dollars on the table. Here’s how they could double their revenue with a single checkbox:

That’s it. Yes, they would need to have folks upload three additional ad sizes for this to really work: 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600. But that is all they would be asking for from the user — a single checkbox and a few additional ad sizes that the vast majority of them already have. Some will say “no way, Facebook is more innovative than that” and “why would they just make ads as we know them today marginally better?”. Two words: Wall Street.

Wall Street doesn’t care if they are only making ads on the web marginally better. What Wall Street cares about is the additional 4 billion they’d put on their income statement next year.

The systems are already in place for them to execute these additional buys for advertisers. No publishers relationships to manage, no ad code to help publishers install, no nothing. All they have to do is put a few engineers (like, literally 3 people, and no more than 3 people), give them 3-6 months, and they will be poised to double revenue in 2013. Easy.

The irony of it all is that their good friend Google has already laid the pipe to make this happen for them: AdX.

It sparked an interesting discussion in Campfire this morning. This is why:

1. We have a team who can.
2. It’s faster, and we accrue less technical debt.
3. Any company who has a long term focus would build their core products in house. If you aren’t pushing the boundaries of existing solutions, what is your company doing?
4. It’s fun.
5. We know how to fix it when it breaks.
6. It breaks less.

The first step is to stop Googling things like, “how to make money online.” Not because you shouldn’t want to make money online, but because the stuff you’re going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of liking asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas…

Just that first line alone is worth giving him a solid link back for the post. The world would be a better place if his post ranked #1 when folks search “How to make money online”. The post goes on to list 21 solid bits of advice. Definitely worth the quick read.

It’s real-time so you will never have to update your Advertise page again. The widget has a strong call to action to help convert potential advertisers.

You can find this within your BuySellAds account for each property on the “Tools” page:

This is the first iteration of this feature, and while we have a few ideas of what we will be adding to the next version, please be sure to share any thoughts you have with us below.

UPDATE:

We have added two options to hide the page title and page description that we include by default. We also changed the default sort on the zones such that sold out zones will always appear at the bottom.

These checkboxes are on the same page where you grab the widget code. All they do is append the widget URL with &title=false and/or &decs=false. So, if you already have the widget installed, you can either go to the tools page and grab the code again, or just append script URL in the widget with these options.

We’ve discussed responsive advertising in the past but it is always exciting to see it in the wild. If you’re able to read this post before the Boston Globe promotion ends in 9 days be sure to go check it out on http://www.bostonglobe.com.

I can imagine that sometimes you’d love to… ‘unlike’ a post, but hold on in there, because pretty soon Facebook’s analytics tool for ads will measure actions other than ‘likes’. Careful though, as new research highlights the need for businesses to implement HR and IT social media policies. It looks like one in six organisations have fired an employee due to social media posts. So, get ready to face the Timeline with this complete guide to protecting your Facebook privacy. However, according to ReadWriteWeb, it’s not all mainstream social media networks out there, as we’re witnessing the rise of the niche social network.

More news from the Google camp this week. On Wednesday, it introduced a plan to measure online advertising that it hopes will become the industry standard. There is also a new way to unlocking interesting data from your Gmail account, and it’s called Gmail Meter.

More gossip than news, but it looks like Foursquare aims to launch a paid-media platform in mid-June and is pitching brands to become launch partners. Twitter proves it loves all smartphone users equally, as it has now extended its service to Blackberry devices, allowing businesses and brands to target RIM users alongside iPhone and Android users.

I know it’s weekend, but you might still want to open your agenda and find some place for these 5 hot new events in business, mobile, social media and more. To relax (sort of), check this New York Times article on ‘disruption’ (yep, something to do Instagram in there), it will teach why innovation isn’t easy, especially midstream. With the Olympics round the corner, Mashable came up with this infographic about how social media will change… the Olympics. Have a fab week!

Relevant? Arguably so. NHL… lots of fights. UFC… definitely lots of fights.

Timely? Most definitely, it’s for tomorrow.

Am I going to click on it? Probably not, in fact I didn’t even check to see if it was clickable. But does a click here really matter?

Valuable for the advertiser? I’d certainly think so. Coincidentally, I received an email earlier this morning reminding me to watch this fight tomorrow night. This ad only reinforces that earlier message. A nice tie between marketing and advertising.

What I truly love about this ad is that it caught me totally off guard. I wasn’t upset by it because it was so unobtrusive. I love creative placements like this. Well done SeatGeek, well done.

Go on, check it out: BuySellTweets.com

We’ve been pushing our Twitter sponsorships in a strong direction by bringing on celebrity tweeters like Paris Hilton and Ronnie Magro (of Jersey Shore fame) and doing our best to elevate the success of our tweet sales across the board. We’d love to help you too!

If you have an account with us and realize you haven’t been monetizing your Twitter stream, please consider it. Read this post if you’re hesitant.

Always wanted to monetize your tweets with us, but didn’t have a site to apply with? Now is your chance! Sign up, generate a URL, and submit your twitter account!

Talking about social media, TripAdvisor unveils next phase of Facebook tie-in,  with friends of friends included in reviews. As if you don’t have enough on your mind already, you might want to know what crooks and companies learn when you overshare.  Google+ redesigns and says 100m of its 170m users used it in past 30 days. It looks like search engine’s catchup social network grows number of users rapidly but engagement data remains sketchy, according to The Guardian. LinkedIn will launch two new functions for companies who have followers on LinkedIn, both of which will be of interest to marketers and advertisers: “Targeted Updates” and “Follower Statistics.”

Business Insider report that a new study according to which the CPM on Twitter is much, much higher than what you’ll get on Facebook. In short, Twitter’s ads perform 14 times better than Facebook’s.

You might be surprised, but, according to The Wall, bad online reviews are actually good for business. While you’ll still pondering this, here you have some ideas about how to make the most of the Timeline, and a question via BBC: is life after Firefox? For those into infographics, don’t miss this interesting article about things you can learn from the New York Times data visualizations. And I bet you didn’t see this coming, but there’s a new iPhone app which aims to sweeten dreams (?!). Sleep on it over the weekend. Have a great one!