Rubicon Project - next gen ad placement

Another high tech company poised to eat newspapers' lunch - the Rubicon Project, talked about here by the LA Times.
By using this dot com's technology, clients get much more relevant ad placements on their web sites, better tied to the content on the sites.

The heart of it is here:

The firm specializes in an arcane technology called ad optimization, which addresses a major leak in the online rowboat: About three-quarters of ad inventory (places where ads could go on Web pages) goes unsold by publishers. To fill those spaces, publishers turn to ad networks, whose automated systems try to approximate the right kind of ad for the particular audience, based on the page content -- fishing-boat ads for "Field and Stream," for instance -- the viewer's geographic or demographic information, or his or her previous online behavior, what's called the click-stream. The more cogent and relevant the ads are to the user, the better the return on investment for the advertiser.

Rubicon does this ad optimization really well, and thus they're ranked the 3rd largest advertising company in the world in terms of reach, behind only Google and Yahoo!, according to this story.

The best thing papers can do, perhaps, is index their content as best as possible to let the machine intelligence of Rubicon Project, news aggregators, and other whizz-bang Internet companies associate the content with the audience that seeks it.