Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later . . . The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch: "The journalist in me has been avoiding this post (too navel-gazing, too self-absorbed), but the blogger in me can’t help it. Media is changing—how it is produced and how it is consumed. The worlds of blogging and journalism are colliding and I want to get some thoughts down on this transition before I forget what the old world was like or feel too comfortable in the new one."

Bronstein: The future of news, and other buzzwords

Reuters.com: "Anybody who tells you they have the answer to that question, or the answer to the question, “what’s the successful business model for journalism, is lying to you.” Because no one has it."

PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future

New York Times: "Michael Arrington and Rafat Ali are both forceful, sharp-tongued, quick-tempered and plugged in, and both have built successful technology blogging ventures. So it’s no surprise that there is more than a little sparring between them."

How To Bring Internet Advertising to TV—The Long View

TechCrunch: "Over the past couple days, conversations I’ve had with two different video-startup CEOs—Suranga Chandratillake of blinkx and Nick Grouf of Spot Runner—has got me thinking about what needs to be done to make TV advertising as relevant as video advertising."

New media expected to get more ad dollars

USATODAY.com: "Advertisers and marketers, struggling to keep up with changing consumer habits, are about to make massive investments in new digital and out-of-home media platforms, according to a forecast out today from research firm PQ Media.
It says that companies will spend more than $160.8 billion in 2012 — up 82% from 2008 — on 18 emerging markets including online videos, store-based TV screens, sponsored events, TV and movie product placements, cellphones, video games and digital video recorders."

Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes

New York Times: "WePlay can also be seen as an attempt on the part of the professional athletes to gain more control over how their images are used commercially — in other words, why let ESPN run video of their Little League games free, when they can do so and sell advertising alongside it?"

Japan: URL's Are Totally Out

cabel.name: "Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement?

Search boxes! With recommended search terms!"

Google Pushes FCC to Develop TV Airwaves for Web Access

WSJ.com: "Google said that the white space, located between channels 2 and 51 on TV that aren't hooked up to satellite or cable, offer a 'once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to provide ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans.' In addition, opening up the spectrum would 'enable much-needed competition to the incumbent broadband service providers,' Mr. Whitt wrote."

Name That Tune-In: Who Will Emerge as The Future of Radio?

washingtonpost.com: "As the audience for AM and FM radio declines, start-up entrepreneurs and giant media companies alike search for the 'next radio' -- a way to make money by helping listeners discover new music. Online music providers such as Pandora, Imeem and Last.fm provide an early glance at that next chapter in radio history."

Taking on the Godzilla of video-sharing sites

International Herald Tribune: "The company was incubated in the French equivalent of a Silicon Valley garage, a Parisian apartment, with six partners pooling together €6,000, or $9,260. They opened for business in the living room of one of the founders, Olivier Poitrey, who says that their experience belies the stereotype that French red tape stifles start-ups and innovation.

'Over the last few years the government made some changes.' Poitrey said, 'Administrative tasks are easier now. There's a central place where you can go to do all the paperwork to start a company. It used to be far more complex and you had to go to a lot of places and you needed a lot more capital at the beginning. Now you can make a start with €1 and before it was €10,000.'"

ESPN Turns Off Ad Nets to Protect Brand, Content

Mediaweek: "Top Web publishers are planning a revolt. Even as more prominent sites experiment with selling remnant inventory through online ad networks, and in some cases ad exchanges, ESPN.com is saying thanks, but no thanks.

The site recently cut ties with Specific Media and several other unnamed ad networks, and is taking the bold stand that ad selling that relies heavily on arbitrage and algorithms is not for them."

Media cos. battle Web portals on ads

Yahoo! News: "Traditional media companies trying to stem the flow of advertising dollars to Google and other large Internet companies are increasingly building ad networks of their own, anchored by their brands."

MySpace Still Beats Facebook, Per Nielsen Online Data

MediaPost: "DESPITE THE RISE OF FACEBOOK, MySpace.com continued to record year-over-year growth of 4% as of February when it attracted 55.4 million unique visitors, according to new Nielsen Online data.

Year-over-year, Facebook's usership grew by 102% to just over 20 million unique visitors last month.

Also of note, business networking site LinkedIn grew an impressive 271% from about 2 million unique visitors in Feb. 2007 to 7.4 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008."

Google Tests New Barcode Tech in Newspaper Ad Program

ClickZ: "After spending about $500,000 in 2007 to test Google's print offering, eHealth has begun experimenting with new response methods the search firm has introduced. Among those is a 2D barcode technology so cutting-edge, it's unlikely to get much play here in the U.S. anytime soon. In Google's case, the QR or 'Quick Response' code technology connects its newspaper print ads to mobile Web sites. Mobile devices with the appropriate software scan the codes which link to specific mobile site URLs. News Corp. has used the technology for ads in its U.K. tabloid newspaper The Sun.

'We recognize this is a technology that is probably a year to 18 months out,' said Spencer Spinnell, head of sales strategy for Google Print Ads, referring to the QR codes."

Losing wireless battle may be Google win

Yahoo! News: "Yet Google still positioned itself to profit from the newly available airwaves by ensuring the bids for the so-called 'C block' escalated to $4.6 billion. Reaching that price triggered a provision that requires the new wireless network to accommodate all mobile devices, including equipment using a software package called 'Android' that is supposed to give Google a better opportunity to sell more advertising."

MySpace, Facebook Unlikely to Make Money

Economist: Big media and Internet companies are driving up the valuations of social networks like MySpace and Facebook. "But that does not mean there is a working revenue model," according to The Economist. Social networking will become "ubiquitous" and may "never make oodles of money."

Read more...

Arbitron Finds Online Listening Up 14%

MediaPost: "Among the findings released by the research partners, 63% of online listeners maintain a profile on sites like MySpace, Facebook, or Linked-In, compared with 24% of all Americans 12 or older. Twenty-eight percent of online listeners have a MySpace profile and 24% a profile on Linked-In. What's more, they're heavy users of these sites, one-third of the overlapping cohort visit the sites nearly every day, if not several times a day."

CBS Exec Wants Combined TV, Internet Ratings

MediaPost: "BIG VIDEO content producers need to come up with aggregate ratings that combine television viewing with online video consumption, says Patrick Keane, vice president and chief marketing officer for CBS Interactive, speaking Monday morning at MediaPost's OMMA Global conference in Hollywood. The combined rating would provide media buyers with a cross-platform option that's simpler and more detailed in terms of data, because of online metrics."

Online Games by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins

New York Times: "media companies are increasingly entering the marketplace for online games — called casual games — and treating them as new programming, not just online add-ons to their television properties."

comScore Finds Online Generates 50% More GRPs Than Television

MediaPost: "THE INTERNET has already surpassed television based on one significant statistic--the number of gross advertising impressions served. And if online publishers can figure out how to properly measure the worth of those impressions, they ultimately will overtake television in an even more important statistic: share of marketers' advertising budgets."

What's This Fascination with Ad Networks? (Or, the Online Media Business Will Be About Brands First, Technology Second)

John Battelle's Searchblog: "neither the publishers nor the brand marketers believe that a magical ad platform will somehow address their needs online."

Google Sucks Life Out of Old Media: Check Out The 2007 Share Shift

Silicon Alley Insider: "The year-over-year growth of revenue on Google.com (US)--approximately $2 billion--was more than twice as much the growth of ad revenue in all of the offline media companies in this sample combined."

China overtakes U.S. as top Web market

Reuters: "China has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest Internet market by number of users, a research firm said on Thursday. The estimate by Beijing-based BDA was based on data from China Internet Network Information Center which indicated that the country's Internet users totaled 210 million at end-2007."

Zuckerberg pitches the wrong value proposition

GJ on New Media: "So the story is that, on a social network, when enough people are looking at what other people are doing, and the social network blends into that experience ads that relate to what those people are doing, you'll have yourself an effective marketing platform. That seems reasonable, but I doubt that this is where the true value of a social network lies. In fact, I believe that this model is a poor deal for advertisers when compared to what's already out there in the online advertising marketplace."

Google to Unveil A New Ad Service For Web Publishers

WSJ.com: "The new Ad Manager service, which a limited number of Web sites are testing, will provide the ad serving free, where companies such as DoubleClick have traditionally charged Web publishers to serve up their ads. Even when they sell their own ads, publishers usually rely on such ad-serving companies to actually insert the ads in a Web page when a consumer pulls it up.

Google is hoping that Ad Manager users will agree to carry some ads Google sells in ad spots on their Web sites they haven't filled themselves. Google would take a commission on revenue from any ads it sells."

Google: Travel Advertisers Experiment With TV, Radio, YouTube

MediaPost: "Keller said that in addition to transplanting their TV spots starring William Shatner as the 'Negotiator' to Gadget Ads and YouTube, Priceline had been testing Google TV Ads, which are distributed via EchoStar Communications' set-top boxes nationwide. 'The TV ads have provided us with new methods of creative learning. We can run different forms of creative through the platform and look at dropoff rates in viewerships by spot, network or program,' Keller said. 'We can also identify which pieces of creative work best and use that info for our traditional media methodology.'"

GigaOM Interview: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO Facebook

GigaOM: "People go to a content site to see a specific kind of content and will trust those ads relate somehow to it. On Facebook, people aren’t coming to see content from Facebook; they’re coming to see what other people are sharing, so the most natural analog would be having the ads be information shared among the people. Because so much of our society has some commercial component it seems like there will be a way to both share information and line that up with what advertisers want.

Some amount is happening as advertisers pay to accelerate that distribution of information. The amount they’d be willing to pay is proportional to how much it is accelerated."

Mag publishers push engagement (again)

Crain's New York Business: "In the new system, magazine readers would be measured on an issue-by-issue basis to exposure and demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, income and family status; engagement with particular attention to individual ad recall; and self-reported consumer purchase intent based on reader response to advertising."

EU Clears Google To Buy DoubleClick

WSJ.com: "The commission said that contrary to competitors claims, it didn't believe that the combined company could marginalize Google's competitors, mainly because of the presence of credible alternatives to which customers can switch, 'in particular vertically integrated companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL.'"

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You

New York Times: "These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisements people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates. The analysis, conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides what advertising executives say is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies."

Google Ad Adjustment Threatens Bloated Web Pages

InformationWeek: "Later this month, Google plans to begin weighing Web page load time as a factor in assigning search keyword Quality Scores, which influence ad placement on Google and Google Network pages and search keyword bid prices. This means that ads leading to landing pages that take a long time to load will perform worse than ads linked to svelte pages."

Cable Firms Join Forces to Attract Focused Ads

New York Times: "In an effort to slow Google’s siphoning of advertising dollars away from television, the nation’s six largest cable companies [Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Cox Communications, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks] are making plans for a jointly owned company that would allow national advertisers to buy customized ads and interactive ads across the companies’ systems."

Cell Phones Beat Out Internet, TV As Must-Have

InformationWeek: "Some 51% of those surveyed said their cell phones would be the hardest to give up, followed by the Internet (45%), television (43%), and landline phones (40%).

Among its other major findings:

• 62% of all Americans have either used a mobile handset for a "nonvoice data application" (text, e-mail, picture taking, maps and directions, or recording video, for example) or accessed the Internet wirelessly
• At 73%, Hispanics send or receive text messages most frequently, followed by African Americans (68%) and whites (53%)"

CBS: Media Are Hiring More Tech People

MediaFile: "Recent hires, he told a press luncheon in New York, have come from eBay, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Oracle, Netscape, Sun, and Microsoft, among others."

Marketers Tread Slowly into Emerging Media

ClickZ: "While 45 percent of the integrated marketers surveyed by database marketing firm Epsilon said they haven't spent marketing dollars in emerging media, they're interested in doing so. Social computing/word-of-mouth marketing tops the list with 67 percent interested in incorporating it into their campaigns."

Google's Armstrong Unveils 'Top Secret Strategy' To Agencies: Dashboards, Tools To Scale Media Buying

MediaPost: "Unveiling what Armstrong referred to as Google's 'top secret strategy' for helping agencies transform the way they plan, buy and manage media - not just online, but across all their media options - Armstrong show a new 'dashboard' approach it has developed for agencies for managing buys across media."

NBC Says Online Ads Are Recalled Better Than TV Ads

TVWeek: "According to a survey conducted in the fourth quarter, NBC Rewind viewers said ads streamed online with full-length episodes were less disruptive than on television and that they had a strong desire to interact with advertising."

Google Likely to Get EU Approval to Buy DoubleClick

Bloomberg: "European regulators plan to approve Google Inc.'s proposed $3.1 billion takeover of DoubleClick Inc. without conditions, rejecting complaints by Microsoft Corp. that the deal would hurt competition"

Nielsen: Consumers Warming To Mobile Ads

MediaPost: "Among the findings, nearly a quarter of all U.S. mobile subscribers (23%) say they've viewed mobile advertising in the last 30 days. The Nielsen study also found that the number of mobile data users who recalled seeing advertising jumped 38% from 42 million to 58 million between the second and fourth quarters of 2007."

MMO Games Are The Evolution Of Social Networks

MediaPost: "PROPERTIES LIKE FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE don't just have to deal with issues like user attrition from 'social network fatigue' or inventory monetization challenges. According to Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision, they also face a growing threat from an unlikely source -- massively multiplayer online (MMO) games."

YouTube to launch its own live channels

Telegraph: "Video-sharing website YouTube is preparing to challenge established television broadcasters by offering its own live channels."