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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 --...
more »Digging Deeper
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...
more »Digging Deeper
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.
more »Digging Deeper
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...
more »Digging Deeper
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.
more »Digging Deeper
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.
more »Your Take Roundup
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...
more »Digging Deeper
'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...
more »AdvertisingShift
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.
more »PoliticalShift
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.
more »MarketingShift
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.
more »MusicShift
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.
more »Digging Deeper
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.
more »AdvertisingShift
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...
more »AdvertisingShift
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...
more »AdvertisingShift
Insider's Take::Why Public TVs Won't Go Away
You never know where a rant might lead you. Last Monday, I was ranting and raving about the annoying CNN Airport Network as well as other "place-based media" -- TVs that you can't avoid in elevators or checkout lines or airplane gates. I was happy to see that many of you agreed with me, and found the idea of...
more »AdvertisingShift
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...
more »AdvertisingShift
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...
more »Tags
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