NBC chief discusses future of online video

Variety: "Zucker expressed concern about the anemic revenues from online video distribution. 'The economics around these digital properties are not yet fully formed -- that's five years away,' Zucker said."

Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize

New York Times: "Joshua Micah Marshall started small as a blogger, gained a following, sought donations, built advertising and hired staff members."

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Wired: "Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they're distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media."

Microsoft to test new measure of Web ads

Reuters: "Microsoft's 'Engagement Mapping' is due to begin in beta form on March 1 and departs from a standard that ties sales, leads and traffic to the last ad that a user clicked on online.

Instead, it attempts to take into account all the Internet interactions that lead a consumer to buy a product and give advertisers a more accurate assessment of how to plan a campaign online."

How Video Ads Will Change Google's AdWords Forever

Advertising Age: "Didn't Google have video ads already? Not on its search-results pages. Google video ads appear within YouTube clips and on pages across the web that carry Google AdSense units. But video ads in the sacred Google search results? This is a revolutionary change."

Game-Ad Boom Looms as Sony Opens Up PS3

Advertising Age: "Sony is opening up its in-game advertising platform -- likely providing a boost to the already-burgeoning $400 million in-game-ad market and sparking a battle among the three key players who sell these ads."

Web socialites succumb to ‘Facebook fatigue’

Web socialites succumb to ‘Facebook fatigue’: "Analysts are speaking of “Facebook fatigue” after figures showed a 5 per cent decline from 8.9 million unique visitors to the website in December to 8.5 million last month. The fall could be a seasonal dip - Facebook’s audience is still 712 per cent higher than it was a year ago and 9 per cent higher than three months ago."

Google founder speaks out against Microsoft bid for Yahoo

CNNMoney.com: "'The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies,' Brin told The Associated Press after the event. 'And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving.'"

Why Most VC-Backed, Ad-Supported Companies Are Doomed to Fail

HipMojo.com: "Yet, many angel investors or VCs lack operational media experience in general and advertising sales experience in particular. I’ve always noticed that most VCs come from technology backgrounds. Increasingly, many have worked in media companies. But very few have ad sales experience. Sales people get respect, reluctantly."

GoogleTV – the 30-second spot ain’t dead yet

Churbuck.com: "We might finally be realizing some of the sci-fi predictions made about the future of advertising a decade ago."

David And Googliath

MediaPost Publications: "Switzer says his 'five-year laundry list' includes initiatives to help publishers grab a bigger portion of text, video and mobile online advertising dollars, partly by aggregating them into like-minded Web communities. OpenX believes it can help 'long tail' niche publishers more than double their 20% take of advertising spending over the next five years, and immediately quadruple the revenues they generate on their own simply by rotating through different ad networks."

L.A. start-up seeks to make online ads much more effective

SiliconValley.com: "Cue the Rubicon Project. Through complicated math, its service assesses in real time which ad networks will provide a given Web site with the most relevant ads, and sends ads from those networks. Web sites use this service to receive the ads that pay the best and those that are the most relevant to their readers, which are more likely to be clicked on."

Gannett, NYT, Tribune, Hearst in online ad sales venture

USATODAY.com: "The sites that quadrantONE represents reach about 50 million unique online visitors a month, including 27 of the 30 largest markets, the companies say."

Google Tests Video Ads on Search Results Pages

Bits - New York Times: "“The big insight of Google wasn’t text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format,” Ms. Mayer said. “We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don’t work in that format.”"

Online Video: The United States of YouTube

Reuters: "We don’t work exclusively. We don’t require it. It’s old school. I call it (creating) a false scarcity."

Sorry for being quiet for the last few days

I was down and out with a fever, but am on my way back now. Thanks for your patience!

New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics

comScore: "The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.

While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."

Online Advertising Grows by 27 Percent in 2007

ClickZ: "Internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion for the fourth-quarter of 2007, about 28 percent more than the same period in 2006, according to IDC. For the 2007 calendar year, it reached $25.5 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 27 percent."

Google May Get EU Approval on DoubleClick

Bloomberg: "Google Inc. hasn't received formal objections from European Union regulators about its proposed $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick Inc., three people familiar with the case said, indicating the EU is close to approving the deal."

Publicis Chief Outlines Tie-Up With Google

MediaPost: "Who knows the consumer and who knows best the advertisers' needs? We do. So we are bringing our knowledge to Google. They are bringing their technology and we are trying to see what is best for the future of both of us."

Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up

BusinessWeek: "'What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,' says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites."

My thoughts on this: Social networking: In search of a business model

Social Media Marketing's Disease: No Follow-Through

MediaPost: "Overall, the study finds that social media marketing did play an increasingly important role in holiday sales, and it expects that to increase in the months ahead. What seems to work best, Kauffold says, are marketers tweaking and evolving plans while still staying within the brand's personality."

My thoughts on this: Social networking: In search of a business model

Social networking: In search of a business model

Graham Jenkin on New Media: "Contextual advertising works great for search. Contextual advertising sucks for social networking."

Google Aims to Crack China With Music Push

WSJ.com: "The U.S. search giant is in the late planning stages of a joint venture with a Chinese online music company that would permit it to provide free -- licensed -- music downloads in China."

Google Likely Out, And Happy

Forbes.com: "After dominating the U.S. wireless spectrum auction for months, from influencing the terms of the auction to bidding, it looks like Google is off the hook."

Social Sites Don't Deliver Big Ad Gains

WSJ.com: "While announcing disappointing fourth-quarter earnings Thursday, Google executives said the company was having a harder time than it expected generating ad revenue on social-networking sites and figuring out the best ad formats for its YouTube video-sharing service. Social-networking phenomenon Facebook Inc. also has been publicly grappling with how to make money amid its massive spurt in usage. Microsoft, which owns a 1.6% stake in Facebook, has a long-term deal to sell ads that appear on the site -- and analysts estimate that arrangement is losing money for Microsoft."

My thoughts on this: Social networking: In search of a business model

Google "Social Network Inventory is Not Monetizing as Well as Expected"

SEO Book.com: "Social media has little to no value to advertisers. There is little to no implied intent. It is the exact opposite of focused marketing like search marketing, direct navigation domain names, and targeted affiliate sites. You simply can't put a value on a social media connection like you can on search."

My thoughts on this: Social networking: In search of a business model

What you all are missing about Google

Scobleizer: Robert Scoble argues that the battle over Yahoo is really a battle over the mobile space.

MySpace Users Build Up Ad Immunity

BusinessWeek: "While News Corp. is thrilled about its social network's ad-revenue growth, Google and many marketers are frustrated about click-through rates"

My thoughts on this: Social networking: In search of a business model

Newspapers Turn to Online Networks for Display Ads

MediaPost: "LOCAL NEWSPAPER WEB SITES ARE seeking safety in numbers and convenience, joining large networks for online display ads. These networks are proving to be a key part of online strategy for newspapers, which must build their display ad revenues to offset slowing growth in online classifieds."

Interview: David Eun "Google Won't Become a Media Company"

I Want Media: "The head of Google's content partnerships insists that the Internet behemoth won't be a competitor to traditional media. Producing content is 'not our business,' he says. 'Journalists, news bureaus -- that's not what we do.'"

IDG revives The Industry Standard online

Computerworld: "...once known as The Bible of the Internet economy, with a new publishing model that includes editorial content, a community-driven prediction market and social networking components."

Emmis' Smulyan Calls Tagging Radio's 'Killer App'

MediaPost: "He concluded with a bold vision: 'We want to have a radio tuner in every mobile phone, every PDA sold in the U.S. That's 400 million devices in the next five years. The industry is pulling together, and we're going to do it.'"

Network's pursuit of youth falters

Los Angeles Times: "The CW could be a canary in the coal mine for the broadcast television industry. Declining viewership, shifts in consumer tastes, increased competition from video games, cable TV and the Internet, as well as the rising use of digital video recorders, are affecting ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. But they are hitting the CW harder."

Google Says Microsoft's Bid for Yahoo Is `Troubling'

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "``This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,'' Mountain View, California- based Google said in a blog posting on the Web. ``It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.''"