The idea I was trying to get at was “quality” of audience for an advertiser, which may or may not include the idea of Trust, but it seems to me Trust is perhaps an individual or secondary filter. For example, the overall audience on a social platform may be of low quality, but the individual audience of a specific participant may be of high quality.

The quality of an audience from a media perspective is typically a function of barriers or thresholds to access the media. For example, magazines get the highest CPM’s because people pay for access to the content, and in fact, *want* to be exposed to the advertising. Free media generally have the lowest CPM’s because the audience is untargeted and not committed.

To be an active participant in a discussion board or list is such a threshold, so the quality of the audience should be pretty good as long as the group is focused on a specific topic. The social platforms tend to aggregate audience for other reasons than focusing on a specific discussion topic, so the quality of the audience should be lower, on average.

Your point on Trust is well taken, and would clearly affect the general statement above. Question is, how do be aggregate the “Trusted” for the purpose of buying media? An easy answer might be the various voting schemes, though we have seen how relatively easy it is to corrupt those.

This is why I have said that ultimately, if these social platforms want to make any money in display ads, they must “go vertical”, forcing at least some threshold of audience quality.

With the information given to me in scenarios A/B/C, I go with C due to the levels of trust that, I assume, one has for a friend’s opinion. Trust is a complex topic/not easily defined or codified (though some companies/bodies have complex algorithms/processes to do just that) and will in my opinion define where this comment would bring you the most benefit.

Having said that, one can garner a lot of trust on a forum or a discussion list through various categories, such as in the case of a forum, their posting habits (amount of posts, reputation ranking via certain +/- mechanisms, your own experience of how cogent/viable their arguments sounded in the past, etc). I think this discussion also touches on your “media/social” distinctions– the reason one is the antithesis of the other, is that one has little to no trust and is understood as a mechanism to sell you something, the other, presumably, is far more objective/trust worthy in their opinion and can’t really be one and the same (save for examples such as, say, Consumer Reports etc).

Thus, I assume that scenario C would derive the most benefit, but am too much of a wuss to rule out that A/B could easily do so as well.

With regards to question #2 I tend to think that display ad’s almost inherently indicate “media” rather than “social” and thus may call for a different venue than say a text recommendation.