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AdvertisingShift
Google Touts Promise of Targeted Political Ads, Despite Turning Off Voters
Last week, Google's "Politics, Elections and Public Sector" team unveiled a "Four Screens to Victory" infographic that highlights new trends in how Americans gather political information. The folks at Google suggest that television may be losing its primacy in the world of campaign advertising, and they hope that political campaigns will begin to shift their ad spends online. But can these...
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Business
Starting a Daily Paper Uniting a Struggling Europe: Crazy or Genuis?
Imagine a Tuesday morning in Rome. A woman dressed in business attire drinks her espresso while browsing the European Daily in a noisy cafeteria. At the same time, imagine in Stockholm, an Erasmus student from Bulgaria is absorbed in a report from the same paper about his country being finally accepted into the Schengen area. Although just a scenario right...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #49: Facebook IPO Mania; Internet Week; 16th Webby Awards
Welcome to the 49th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil as co-hosts. Today is the day for the Facebook IPO, so we've got it covered like a wet blanket. Special guests Debra Aho Williamson of eMarketer and Troy Young of SAY Media talk over the ins and outs of Facebook as it soars into the...
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Business
Can Web-Only Original Programming Finally Stick?
The days of skateboarding dogs holding sway on the web may be numbered. Technology companies and advertisers are professing their belief in the value of professionally produced original content. Portals and platforms like YouTube, AOL, MSN and Yahoo -- once known for aggregating and optimizing video produced by others -- are spending millions of dollars to develop and acquire programming...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #45: Rafat Returns!; Cord-Cutting Rising?; Google Surveys Instead of Pay Walls
Welcome to the 45th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rafat Ali as co-hosts. That's right, Rafat Ali is back in the saddle after a nearly three month trek to India, Burma and Iceland. And he's back just in time to talk cord-cutting once again, this time after new research showed that cable...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #43: Pew's State of the News Media; Yahoo Sues Facebook
Welcome to the 43rd episode of the Mediatwits podcast, this time with Mark Glaser and the Rachel Sklar as co-hosts. Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur, and is filling in for Rafat Ali. She is back from SXSW and slowly recovering from the interactive, music and film festival. The big news this week is Pew's annual State of the...
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MarketingShift
It's True: We Really Are All Publishers Now, Including Brands
Though it's a relatively new idea, the phrase, "We're all publishers now" already has become somewhat of a cliché. Seriously. Let me Google that for you. I'll wait while you go look ... Back? See what I mean? More than a full page of results with that exact phrasing. While it seems very democratizing, and it is, what many don't...
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Business
Tear Down the Wall Between Business and Editorial!
For too long, reporters and editors have been unaware, even hostile to the business sides of their organizations. Those attitudes have helped push the news industry into its current dire state. And that's why I say: Tear down the wall between business and editorial. Before you start sharpening your pitchforks, hear me out. I'm not proposing a free-for-all money-grab that...
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AdvertisingShift
6 Tips to Support Digital News Through Advertising
This is the first in a series of columns on new business models for news and other media. You'll be able to find other stories in the series by clicking on the Business Models tag. One of the toughest ways to support a digital news operation is via advertising. Over my years working in advertising, helping many and talking to...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #20: Newspaper Special: Boston Globe Pay Wall; Guardian U.S.; Philly Tablet
Welcome to the 20th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali, the one and only founder of PaidContent. This week is a special edition on newspapers, newspapers and more newspapers. First up, the Boston Globe launched its new pay-walled site, BostonGlobe.com, which is free for print subscribers but costs $3.99 per week for non-print subscribers.
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MarketingShift
The Importance of Understanding the Growing U.S. Latino Market Online
Rene Alegria, founder of Mamiverse, a website focused on Latina moms, has heard every possible misconception of the Latino market. For years, these misconceptions kept many businesses from tapping into this fast-growing consumer segment.
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Media Usage
Twitter Chat: How to Avoid Ads for Kids, Share Meaningful Media Moments
As part of our ongoing series on Kids & Media, we had a recent live chat on Twitter with a group of parents to talk about how our kids use media. Special guests included MediaShift managing editor Courtney Lowery Cowgill, Common Sense Media's Caroline Knorr and PBS Parents' Tracey Wynne. I was the moderator, and we had a good...
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AdvertisingShift
Search = Content? A Case for Google as a Media Company
With recent reports that Google is in the running to buy video site Hulu, it's getting harder to make the case that the search giant is not a media company. A lot could be at stake for Google in that definition and its ability to co-exist peacefully with media companies that rely on it for traffic from search and revenue...
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AdvertisingShift
NY Times Paywall May Be Working, Could Work Better
There's been a lot of hand wringing about pay walls in digital media lately, but not a lot of discussion on how they're working or how to improve them. The pay wall that's gotten the most press, of course, is that of the New York Times -- instituted on March 28. The Times asks people to pay for access after...
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AdvertisingShift
13 Principles for How Media Companies Should Use Data
Business content on MediaShift is sponsored by the weekend MA in Public Communication at American University. Designed for working professionals, the program is suited to career changers and public relations or social marketing professionals seeking career advancement. Learn more here. Access to, and control and ownership of, data is playing a big role in everything from debates over privacy...
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PoliticalShift
WSJ Series Inspires 'Do Not Track' Bill from Rep. Jackie Speier
We didn't plan it this way, but the timing was perfect. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) introduced a bill today in Congress that would give the FTC the power to create a "Do Not Track" database so people could opt out of online tracking. And her bill comes right during our special series about online privacy, which included a roundtable...
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AdvertisingShift
On Facebook and Online, Privacy Is Only an Illusion
As our public selves merge perceptibly with our private selves on social networks, our notions of what constitutes privacy -- arguably even the very definition of privacy -- is undergoing a radical revision. Mark Zuckerberg audaciously quipped in 2010 that privacy was no longer a social norm. For many of the 600 million-plus users of Facebook, the idea of...
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Business
8 Ways Publishers Can Protect Users' Privacy
In the digital age, there's an inherent tension between running a media business effectively and protecting its users' privacy. On the one hand, the business wants as much information as possible about everyone it touches. It wants to be able to serve them with the most relevant content, connect them to those with similar interests and affinities and, yes,...
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TVShift
The Future of TV (According to Hulu)
Distributors will certainly play a role in the future of TV, but we believe that three potent forces will be far more powerful in shaping that future: consumers, advertisers and content owners. Consumers have spoken emphatically as to what they want and what they do not want in their future television experience.
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AdvertisingShift
2011 Flash Points: Open vs. Closed, Google vs. Apple
We don't know exactly what media and technology stories will occur in 2011. Will Facebook finally go public? Will Gawker Media achieve mainstream respectability? Will Jon Stewart start his own cable network? But we can be sure that a lot of stories will occur around a few areas of tension. Here, then, are flash points I predict will define media trends in the coming year and beyond.
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MagazineShift
Are Magazine iPad Apps Profitable in the Long Haul?
Magazine editors and publishers are excited about tablet devices like the iPad. In them, they see a chance to give consumers the best that digital media can offer -- and to be able to charge them for the content. But does the profit from the apps justify the expense of building and marketing them? And even when the apps are...
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MagazineShift
City Magazines Expand Audience and Revenues with Web, Apps
Even back in 1888, King Kalakaua of Hawaii recognized the power of city and regional magazines. His royal charter led to the creation of the magazine Paradise of the Pacific, whose goal was to display the civilization of the islands and to draw tourists and business. Kalakaua would be amazed by the transformation of the publication now called Honolulu Magazine....
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AdvertisingShift
Augmented Reality Invades Newsrooms, Kids' Shows, Ads
You point your wireless device -- cell phone, iPad, whatever -- at a graphic on a box of unassembled furniture and then the instructions, complete with 3-D diagrams, instantly appear on-screen. Point at a piece of paper and it's suddenly a game board shared by friends across the room or across the world. This is augmented reality, or AR. While...
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AdvertisingShift
Can Social Sharing Survive the Rise of Rewards-Based Campaigns?
Left alone in a room, a group of people were given a complicated seven-piece puzzle, known as a Soma cube, and told to assemble the pieces into specific designs. One group was offered a monetary reward for each correctly assembled puzzle; another group was offered nothing. They worked at the puzzles until being told they could stop. And then the...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Hard News Pays More than Celeb Stories?
4MR is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com. In this week's 4MR podcast I look at new research from Perfect Market that shows news sites earning more "revenues per thousand page views" (RPM) for serious...
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MagazineShift
Revamped Forbes Pushes Advertorials, Social Media, Conflict
Earlier this year Kevin Gentzel, the chief revenue officer of Forbes, took a look at what the chief marketing officers in the Forbes CMO Network were doing with their companies. He realized they were becoming content creators -- and that this had big implications for his magazine and other traditional media. Gentzel said this underscored the massive shift that was...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Examiner.com Execs Push for Quality, Refute 'Content Farm' Tag
Journalists love to categorize, generalize and put everything into easily digestible chunks of information. But in our quest to explain something in simple terms, we also can oversimplify things. That may have been the case with MediaShift's recent series, Beyond Content Farms, where we included Examiner.com in no less than three stories. Examiner.com does create massive amounts of content, with...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: New Twitter Makes Room for Ads
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the newly redesigned Twitter.com, now with a double-pane view, embedded photos and video, and infinite scroll. Some folks say this means Twitter is more of a media company, getting people to pay more attention to its website, where it could serve up more ads. I talked with tech pundit and blogger Robert Scoble, who said he likes the redesign and thinks third party Twitter app makers will need to innovate to survive.
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Hyper-Local
AOL Patch and MainStreetConnect Expand Hyper-Local News
It's difficult for media people to search any job site these days without running into an ad for AOL's Patch. It seems equally difficult to read media news sites without finding a feature story about Connecticut's MainStreetConnect. MainStreetConnect has appeared in recent days in both Columbia Journalism Review and Journalism.co.uk. Like Patch, the community news organization is hiring, though...
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Hyper-Local
Networks Aim to Solve Local Ad Puzzle for Hyper-Local Sites
Local advertising is back in style, at least among some big national media companies, and that attitude shift has fueled changes for hyper-local and micro-local news sites. While small independents might not yet feel the financial benefits of an increased focus on local advertising, some site owners are seeing increased interest in the content they generate and in the tools...
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PoliticalShift
U.K. Conservatives Pushed Online Promotion -- But TV Reigns
The new media evangelists who preached of a revolution in British electoral politics will have to wait until at least the next election to see their prophecies come to fruition. In this country steeped in electoral tradition, the impact of new and social media on the 2010 race was minimal. The British still consume high tea and scones, watch football...
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NewspaperShift
OurBlook Roundup: Journalism Will Survive in Digital Age
OurBlook.com is a website that gathers opinions from today's top leaders in the hopes of collaboratively finding tomorrow's solutions. It is funded by Paul Mongerson, a retired CEO who has a long history of philanthropy in the journalism world. In December 2008, those of us who run the site launched a future of journalism interview series. To date, we have...
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MagazineShift
The Ethics of Digital Magazine Advertising
In my recent discussions with magazine editors, executives and experts, I've heard a lot about how magazines will integrate new forms of advertising, and "monetization" opportunities, into their digital content. From digital editions to social media to mobile apps, magazines are exploring a variety of ways to provide advertisers with novel opportunities to reach audiences, just as they have in...
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4MR
4-Minute Roundup: Apple's iAds; Journo-Programming Degree
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at Apple's plan to enter mobile advertising with its new iAd platform. Apple has been known for hardware and software but has never handled ad sales before, and now finds itself squarely in competition with Google and AdMob in that arena. Plus, Columbia University announced a...
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Philosophy
How Journalism is Getting Better
Michael Arrington's recent TechCrunch post about old media "guys" who don't get it made me realize how far things have come -- and how much better they've gotten -- in the world of journalism. I worked for more than 15 years in what's now called "legacy media" as a reporter, news editor and business person. All along, there were a...
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Digging Deeper
Google News to Publishers: Let's Make Love Not War
In the view of some traditional media execs, Google is a digital vampire or a parasite or tech tapeworm using someone else's content to profit. As that rhetoric heated up in the past year, Google has responded not with equal amounts of invective but with entreaties to help publishers. Google launched Fast Flip to help bring old-style page flipping...
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MarketingShift
For years, the digerati have been declaring the end of email as a useful tool. Back in 2003, experts said RSS feeds would spell the death of the inbox. In 2007, Wired and CNET said younger generations were using IM, Facebook and MySpace instead of email. More recently, PC Magazine's John Dvorak proclaimed "9 Reasons E-mail is Dead," and The...
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World View
GlobalPost Expands Partnerships, Struggles with Pay Service
A year ago, GlobalPost launched online with an ambitious mission to "redefine international news for the digital age...with a decidedly American voice." The idea was to hire freelance stringers around the world to report back to the U.S., and thereby fill the gap left by the closure of traditional media's foreign bureaus. While the site has forged important partnerships with...
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MagazineShift
What to Expect From the 'iTunes for Magazines'
Apple appears poised to introduce a much-anticipated product: the once seemingly-mythical "iSlate" or "iTablet," its first tablet-style touch-screen computer. Though the potential of an Apple tablet thrills many fans of the company, it's also piqued the interest of magazine publishers, who -- long before the device's rumored introduction -- foresaw its possibilities for their industry. The announcement in early December...
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AdvertisingShift
5 Tools to Help Automate Local Advertising
Promises of whiter teeth, IQ quizzes, and digital dancing people clutter online ads these days. At the same time, experts at future-of-journalism conferences are declaring that news will never again be solely supported by advertising. Neither one tells the full story of the present and future of online advertising for hyper-local and other news websites. Experiments with new advertising technology...
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Legal Drama
Will Google Sidewiki Shift Control of Online Comments?
Journalists and news outlets are accustomed to offering comments and criticisms about others, but they're not as used to being the subject of public comment themselves. In the online world, where technology can and does upend established relationships, journalists and online news outlets are joining the ranks of the commented-upon. The shift has taken place due to the increased presence...
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AdvertisingShift
Can Salon's Revamp Help it Stop Bleeding Money?
Salon.com was a pioneering website launched in 1995 by former editors of the San Francisco Examiner, mixing opinion and investigative reporting with a sharply progressive slant. Although the company went public at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, it had lost more than $80 million by 2003, and lost $4.6 million in the fiscal year ending March 31,...
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NewspaperShift
Cats Sleeping with Dogs? Rival News Orgs Share Content, Revenues
Next month, newspapers all over the United States will begin sharing sports stories online and in print as part of an initiative that sprung from the Associated Press Sports Editors. Then, early next year, the Washington Post and Bloomberg will unveil a new co-branded business section on the paper's website that will offer content from both organizations. These are just...
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AdvertisingShift
8 Tips to Make Sponsored Tweets Work
If Twitter the company is not interested in putting advertising in its product right now, other companies have proven they can do it on their own. There has been an explosion of startup companies that place "sponsored tweets" into Twitter feeds and split the ad revenue with Twitterers. The first one to sell ads into Twitter feeds, Magpie, says...
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MusicShift
Record Labels Are Losing Power to Fans, Artists
Over the past month, I received a significant amount of feedback on my recent MediaShift article, What Will Record Labels Look Like in the Future?. People from all areas of the music industry reached out and shared their feelings on future business models, and strategies for moving forward. Regardless of their background, practically every person I spoke with agreed on...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal; Chris Anderson Goes 'News'-Free
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the recent complex search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, with Microsoft's Bing search engine to run queries on Yahoo, and Yahoo getting 88% of revenues. Plus, Wired editor Chris Anderson recently got in trouble with an interview he gave to Der Spiegel, saying he no...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: TechCrunch's Twitter Docs; YouTube Profits?
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. In this week's edition, I look at the controversy surrounding tech blog TechCrunch posting internal documents from Twitter that were obtained from a hacker stealing them. Some people defend TechCrunch as running newsworthy documents, while others think they are harming Twitter too much. I also look at possible profits coming from video...
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Weblogs
Some Bloggers Welcome FTC Scrutiny for Paid Reviews
When it was reported in 2006 that the FTC would begin forcing word-of-mouth companies -- which paid people to hype products to their peers -- to disclose their marketing campaigns, Brian Clark predicted at the time that these rules would apply to bloggers as well. Now it looks like his prediction is coming true -- and bloggers are taking the...
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Weblogs
Newspapers Try Again with Local Blog Networks
Recently, those who visited the front page of the Miami Herald's website began seeing a sidebar item labeled simply "Your Blogs." If you clicked on the link it would take you to a page containing a series of headlines and little snippets of opening paragraphs in a news feed format. If you clicked on one of the links, it would...
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AdvertisingShift
Will Digg Users Bury New Digg Ads System?
Since its launch in late 2004, Digg has tried its hand with several outside advertising networks, going from an off-the-shelf Google AdSense arrangement to working with Federated Media before finally signing a deal for Microsoft to deliver its display advertisements. But in April of this year, Digg announced it would end its deal with the software giant in favor of...
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Legacy Media
WSJ's D Conference Fumbles Transition to Web 3.0
CARLSBAD, CALIF. -- The organizers of the tony, high-priced tech conference known as D All Things Digital, included a manifesto of sorts in the program guide titled "Welcome to Web 3.0." In that treatise, organizers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher define Web 3.0 as "the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple...
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NewspaperShift
QR Codes Connect Print to the Web
Point your phone at a printed page. Take a picture. Get taken to a website. That's the power of QR codes, codes embedded in print that can link cell phones to specific websites. They've been doing this for years in Japan, and now they are starting to do it in Europe. Sooner or later it will get to the States....
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MobileShift
Live-Blogging EconSM Gathering About Social Networking on Mobiles
SAN FRANCISCO -- I am at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center right down the hill from where I live in Potrero Hill. Yes, it is "Bike to Work Day" today in San Francisco, but I couldn't bike down in nice clothes. So I split the difference and walked most of the way here. The topic is how social...
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NewspaperShift
The Fallacy of the 'Print Is Dead' Meme
Common sense tells us that print is not going away. If print is no longer an important part of your life, that is undeniable. But to extrapolate from personal experience to a statement about what is going to happen in the world doesn't work. But that's exactly what many of the people foretelling the death of print are doing. That's...
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Thought Leader Q&A
How Tech Publisher IDG Grows Revenues During Recession
Patrick McGovern, IDG: "[At InfoWorld.com] our audience numbers and frequency of visits soared. Even though we gave up 40% of revenues from stopping print, we actually had 10% more revenue growth absolutely. The online revenue didn't only make up for the missing print revenue, but we actually had absolute growth."
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5Across
Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers...
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AdvertisingShift
MediaBids Could Help Solve Ad Sales Process for Hyper-Local Pubs
In a recent post, I argued that the problem facing newspapers today has nothing to do with the notion that news-on-paper is not viable -- instead the problem is a broken advertising sales process. Since then I've discovered MediaBids, which seems to have a good idea for how to fix that problem. According to their website: Since its online launch...
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AdvertisingShift
Political Blogs' Double Whammy: Post-Election, Deep Recession
This week several major bloggers -- most politically right-of-center -- will see the shuttering of their blog ad network. Pajamas Media, which launched in 2004 and provided advertising for conservative bloggers like Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin, announced earlier this year that it would close down its display advertising for blogs in order to put more focus on its online...
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MarketingShift
'Cluetrain Manifesto' Still Relevant 10 Years Later
When The Cluetrain Manifesto appeared on the web in 1999, neither its supporters nor its authors believed it was trying to say anything particularly new. Rather, the 95 theses and the following chapters -- written in almost a stream of consciousness, psychoanalytic style befitting of something labeled a "manifesto" -- were thought to merely point out the obvious to the...
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NewspaperShift
How Print Publications Can Help Hyper-Local Sites
The New York Times is going into the hyper-local news business, as reported by Zachary Seward at the NiemanJournalismLab. It is just one example of hyper-local -- also called community journalism, beat reporting, or representative journalism -- in action. Other instances include Kennesee State university Professor Leonard Witt's Representative Journalism in Georgia and community news site Patch.com. It's not clear...
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Weblogs
Can 'The Printed Blog' Succeed with Blogs in Newspaper Form?
If the entire media industry is a river that is slowly but persistently moving toward the Internet, then one could picture Joshua Karp as a canoeist paddling against the current, trying to take the online realm and solidify it into print. I first heard of his new business venture, The Printed Blog, from a colleague of mine who runs a...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Rufus Griscom Mixes High, Low Brow on Babble Parenting Site
Rufus Griscom: "Online content, if it's not user-aggregated or user-generated, is seen as rather old and creaky. But I would argue that there are lots of shades of gray. All of the online content sites are becoming a hybrid of user-aggregated, user-generated and edited content, because feedback and citizen journalism and ratings and suggestions are becoming part of these sites."
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AdvertisingShift
College Newspapers Finally Hit by Economic Downturn
As the newspaper industry has struggled with declining revenue, some analysts predicted that college newspapers would weather the storms of the changing media environment better than their peers in the wider industry. (See also this Chronicle of Higher Education article.) Now the national economy indicates that the future might not be quite so rosy: The widespread economic pains in the...
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Business
Live Blog: RJI TalkFest on Serving Entrepreneurial Journalists
I am virtually covering the all-day sessions at the RJI TalkFest today, held at the University of Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute. I will be watching in via Adobe Connect, where I can hear and see what's going on and chat in the chat room. The agenda includes sessions on community-building, advertising and marketing, news and information and mobile. The live-blogging...
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Guides
Your Guide to Alternative Business Models for Newspapers
It's easy to see the problems plaguing the business of daily newspapers in America. The Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor said it would publish weekly instead of daily. Detroit newspapers announced they would be cutting home delivery to three days per week. Layoffs are rampant and newspaper company stocks are down in the dumps.
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AdvertisingShift
Is Six Apart's 'TypePad Journalist Bailout Program' a Gimmick?
The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!" But one advertising and blogging company is...
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AdvertisingShift
Project Wonderful, Blogads, FM Go Beyond Click-Through Ads
For new bloggers looking to build up their reader base, it's not always enough just to write well; you need to advertise, to get the word out. And what better way to advertise than with ads? Unfortunately, most advertising online still leaves much to be desired, both for advertisers trying to get noticed and for host sites trying to earn...
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Thought Leader Q&A
Should Newspapers Become Online Ad Brokers for Local Businesses?
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that's where the newspaper business is right now. With profits slashed, unending layoffs, and online ad growth slowing, newspapers have to be open to new ideas that will help them deal with a media shift like no other. Last week I looked at the concept of crowdfunding, with people paying journalists directly for...
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Digging Deeper
Commenters Mix Conversation, Self-Promoting Links to Defeat Filters
There was a time not too long ago when you could spot spam comments on a blog from a mile away. There were too many links, the comment was off-topic, and they were trying to promote a pyramid scheme website. But as human and automated filters started catching problematic posters, their techniques became more sneaky. Soon, there were comments...
more »MagazineShift
How PaidContent Succeeded in Mining Digital Media Niche
Rafat Ali was just another freelance journalist back in 2002, and wanted to strut his stuff on a blog, so he started PaidContent to write about his take on the business of digital content. Now he is much richer for his efforts, having expanded the blog into a mini-media empire with venture funding and last week selling it entirely to Guardian Media Group for about $30 million.
more »Your Take Roundup
Keep Video Ads Brief, Contextual
Online video usage is exploding online, as people watch everything from YouTube to TV shows to sporting events -- but mainly, YouTube. But the question is how sites will be able to pay for all that usage. Most video viewers would prefer not to pay for them, nor watch any advertising either.
more »Digging Deeper
Online Video Ads Finally Find Their Niche
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads. So many people are watching online videos, but so few advertisers are trying to reach them.
more »TVShift
CBS Considers 'Loyalty Index' Over Pay for Page Views
With so many ways to track a writer's popularity online, should that popularity be tied to a journalist's or blogger's pay? That is a question that's come up quite a few times over the years, and last week I took Gawker Media to task for paying writers based on page views. My basic point was that there should be...
more »AdvertisingShift
Why Paying People by Page Views is Wrong
Recently, Gawker Media, the blog empire run by Nick Denton, made two moves that were curious. One was spinning off three sites that weren't making the cut: Gridskipper (travel), Idolator (music), and Wonkette (politics). The other was slashing the pay-per-page-view rate for Gawker Media writers by 33%. In Denton's go-ahead-and-leak-it email memo, which showed up on Silicon Alley Insider,...
more »Digging Deeper
The Social Press Release: Multimedia, Two-Way, Direct to the Public
Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources. "Press releases are nearly useless," he...
more »Thought Leader Q&A
Front Porch Forum Makes Friends & Neighbors, But Can It Make Money?
We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there's a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get...
more »Your Take
Are Google and online advertising vulnerable to a recession?
As the U.S. moves into a possible economic slowdown, partially caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown, the question is whether the pain will spread to online advertising. Online ads have been booming since the dot-com bust ended around 2003, with 20%+ growth every year. When recession questions arose recently, many analysts believed online advertising would remain "recession-proof" because it's relatively...
more »Media Usage
The Pros, Cons and Weirdness of Microsoft-Yahoo
After years of rumors, it finally happened. On Friday, Microsoft made its buyout offer for Yahoo. But while that was expected to happen, as both companies have had trouble catching online advertising juggernaut Google, what wasn't so expected was that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer would go all Murdoch on Yahoo with a hostile bid at a 62% premium over...
more »Digging Deeper
When Will Google's 'Big Project' YouTube Bring in Profits?
In its brief 22-month history, video-sharing site YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon. The Iraq War has been called the "YouTube War" because of the videos that are regularly uploaded by soldiers and insurgents. The upcoming U.S. presidential race has been called the "YouTube Election" with its own "YouTube Debates" thanks to the questions for candidates uploaded by the...
more »AdvertisingShift
How much do online marketers and websites know about us? Do they save records on what we've bought, sites we've visited, people we've contacted? It's a subject that few of us bother with until we find out our private information has been stolen or inadvertently been made public. And privacy concerns have been front and center lately as MySpace...
more »Digging Deeper
Henry Blodget, Silicon Alley Look for Resurgence
When I mentioned the name "Henry Blodget" to a friend from the old dot-com daze, she wrinkled her nose with disgust. "How can anyone trust what he has to say, when he was the one who caused the bubble in the first place!" she said. Blodget was a financial analyst who mightily predicted Amazon's stock would hit $400 --...
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Business 2.0 Closed Due to Corporate Neglect, Ad Woes
When the dot-com boom fizzled, the business magazines that covered that huge story similarly flamed out. The Industry Standard closed, Red Herring went south, and Business 2.0 was on death's door. But in 2001, Time Warner bought Business 2.0 and combined it with its own eCompany Now magazine. Though Business 2.0 finally reached break even after years of struggle...
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The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 2
With all the web traffic numbers and metrics floating around -- page views, unique visitors, time spent, sessions -- it's a wonder that anyone can agree to a simple advertising sale on a website. Complicating matters is that the advertising world is used to traditional measurement services such as Nielsen's TV ratings that rely on usage by controlled panels of people. Online, those panel-based services can rarely gauge traffic on sites with less than 500,000 unique visitors per month.
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The Problem with Web Measurement, Part 1
On April 19, 2007, the new CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Randall Rothenberg, sent a scathing open letter to the heads of the major web measurement firms, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings, complaining that they better get their act together: Imagine my surprise when I came to the IAB and discovered that the main audience measurement companies are still...
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Widgets, also known as gadgets or mini-applications, are small software programs or HTML code that people can embed onto social networking pages, blogs or computer desktops. Examples include the iLike music widget for Facebook, the MyBlogLog widget to see a blogger's current audience, and the NPR Addict widget to hear favorite radio shows streamed from your desktop. There are even widgets for mobile phones, including Apple's iPhone.
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Your Guide to Online Advertising
The term online advertising refers to ads that are served via the Internet. Early online ads ran on dial-up services such as Prodigy, eventually coming to the World Wide Web in the mid-'90s as banner ads or graphical pictures embedded onto sites such as the Global Network Navigator (GNN) and HotWired. Rick Boyce, the director of business development at HotWired (the online arm of Wired magazine) at the time, helped push through the first banner ad campaigns in 1994, including the AT&T banner ad pictured here.
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YouTube Video Ads Should Be Relevant, Brief
Video-sharing phenomenon YouTube has built up its online business in classic dot-com fashion: Get the eyeballs first, then figure out how to make money. You can say "Web 2.0" all you want, but this is classic Web 1.0 thinking. So now that Google has sunk $1.65 billion into buying YouTube, those banner ads aren't going to pay the mushrooming...
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'Frienemy' Google Not a Threat (Yet) to Traditional Ad Sales
If you browse through Google's job openings, the dozens of advertising sales positions -- from account manager of Print Ads in Chicago to account manager of Google Television in New York -- you'd think Google was a major media conglomerate that owned TV stations and newspapers. Instead, Google has been trying to take its automated online system for selling...
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Every day, I am inundated with unwanted advertisements. If I turn on my car radio to a commercial channel, the ads start squawking at me. If I turn on my TV and am not quick enough to the DVR, the ads start flashing at me. Today's San Francisco Chronicle newspaper had its front page wrapped in a movie ad. And even though I've changed my email address recently, the spam messages for buying hot stocks NOW!! are relentless.
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2008 Candidates Jump Online with Early Blog Ads
There has been a delicate dance between political operatives and the Internet. While activists have been using blogs and new media to spread the word about politics or specific candidates for years, the politicians and their consultants have been wary of spending too much of their campaign chest on online marketing. They have largely stuck to the tried and true: TV ads.
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Marketers Get Weak Signal from Users on Cell-Phone Ads
There is an interesting disconnect between the way marketers view advertising on cell phones and what average folks who use cell phones think about those same ads. Marketers, ad agencies, research firms, cell phone makers and carriers are salivating over the prospect of delivering marketing messages to people via their cell phones. But survey after survey shows that people are not quite as excited about it -- in fact, most people consider it an outrage to be bothered by ads on such a personal device.
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SpiralFrog Misses the Point of Digital Music
First, let's congratulate the traditional music-on-wax industry for trying something new in digital music -- outside of suing its customers. The largest of the music companies, Universal Music Group, announced it would offer free music downloads through a startup called SpiralFrog supported by advertising. The other big music companies are negotiating with SpiralFrog, too. Clap, clap, clap.
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PR People Must Balance Consistent Message with Authenticity
Public relations professionals and journalists often work together, and sometimes they even get along. The goal for the PR person is to represent their product or service well, and make sure it gets positive press coverage. The goal for the journalist is to write a balanced account of the company -- not necessarily all positive or all negative.
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Your Take Roundup::Simplicity, Relevancy Rule in Ads You Want
What can the world of technology teach the world of advertising when it comes to keeping people tuned in? A lot more than I would have guessed. Most technically savvy people I know do everything in their power to avoid advertisments. But lately, it's become more difficult to avoid the ads that have a simple message and are very...
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Digging Deeper::Go Daddy Gives Podcasters Freedom to Create Ads
Advertisers and marketers spend much of their time (and money) trying to pitch the public on their products and services. Their language includes terms like "mindshare" and "branding" and "conversion rates." It's all about convincing you and me to go out and buy their stuff, and how to motivate us to do it, by any means necessary. But imagine...
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Video Blog Sellout::Rocketboom Nets $80,000 After eBay Auction
When Andrew Baron decided to use eBay to sell the first ads on his popular video blog Rocketboom, he was worried that no one would bite. But bite they did. After Rocketboom's 10-day auction, the winning bidder had the screen name of StarFinder5, and paid $40,000 for five ads to be produced by Rocketboom. Rocketboom also retains creative control...
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Rocketboom Auctions Ad to the Highest Bidder
In the beginning, when the web first became popular, everyone talked about disintermediation, the idea that the Internet would help eliminate the middleman or intermediary. You could buy books without going to a bookstore, read newspapers without going to a newsstand, and communicate with like-minded folks without going to group therapy. And that was good. And yet, book stores...
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