You’re right. Nailed it… I’ll just clarify a few points.

Adroll actually has a referral program that ensures publishers DO get a percentage of the spend going to the other sites in the network when they sell it. The Wakeboarder.com example is perfect. If you’re already selling advertisers directly on your site, now you can a) attract larger advertisers due to your increased scale and b) get a cut of the increased sales across your community. In fact, you don’t even have to “own” the community to sell into it. Adroll shares a cut back to anyone who sells inventory through the system, and you get the cut from OUR cut, so no one else loses out.

As for repping ads, “actively” selling it, and promoting it to advertisers, we follow the wishes of the community. Because communities can be exclusive, semi-exclusive or open, we allow publishers to rep their own communities/ad space (if they want), to allow a media company to rep it on behalf of the community through a partnership, to have the members sell it, to have someone else on the web (not in the community) sell it (and get a commission) – or to have Adroll.com sell it through our small (but growing) agency relations team. All models work – it’s your call.

Of course the inventory is always available in the marketplace on Adroll.com for smaller advertisers – that are looking for smaller buys with specific products. We hope there’s some altruism out there too, but making sure people get compensated for the value they create is part of our credo … earn more together.

Keep posted for more details coming on our site… We’re excited by what we’re doing too, and hope to be a good alternative for a lot of the bloggers and niche publishers out there. Let us know what more we can do too, we need you to tell us what you want, and what isn’t clearly explained…

– Adam

PS - Sorry you feel that way Doug. Did you know that Adroll.com is the only way for small advertisers to have publishers discover them in an open marketplace – and offer them a free trial campaign? Check it out sometime.

Yes Adify has been doing this for years and is probably the top player in this space. There are many others that have been doing this in some form or another, including BlogAds, Kanoodle and of course Glam.

The concept of AdRoll is actually not going to work for advertisers that care about control. I like the general idea of an open market on both ends, but this is going the wrong direction.