Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Google TV to Start Selling NBC Universal Inventory

Advertising Age: "if Google can sell the inventory more effectively and cost-efficiently than the current sales force efforts, we believe that it could set an important precedent that other cable networks may follow"

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Old media will never be as profitable again, warns WPP's Sorrell

Brand Republic: 'The painful thing for old media is it will never be the same again,' Sorrell said. 'It will never be as profitable as it has been.'

...

He said the seeds of the problem were sown when the people who created the new-media industry in the early Nineties, decided to give it away for free."

YouTube Will Soon Let Big Content Partners Bring Their Own Ads

TechCrunch: "The ability to sell their own ads on YouTube is a big deal for larger media companies, especially those which are already selling Web video ads across their own sites. Media companies with lots of video tend to have large advertising sales teams that are typically able to command better ad rates than what YouTube can get. The prospect of selling ads against all of their videos on YouTube at those higher ad rates has them salivating, even if they have to share the spoils with YouTube."

Twitter to integrate search

Times Online: "Biz Stone, one of Twitter's co-founders, told The Times: 'Search integration is a way of introducing relevancy to people. This is not just about 'What are you doing?' but about what everyone else is doing. Twitter is about finding out what is going on out there right now in real time. This is a powerful new way of repositioning the product.'

Within the next 10 days, Twitter will start putting search into the Twitter home pages of about 1 per cent of users, to test the waters and ask for feedback, before rolling it out across the network, Mr Stone said."

Free Newspaper Venture Depends on Local Blogs

NYTimes.com: "The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities."

Monday, January 12, 2009

Web 2.0, Revenue Models and Profitability

The Drama 2.0 Show: "The most popular Web 2.0 creations have not been cheap to grow and operate. They’re still struggling to find revenue models that will serve as the foundations of self-sustaining businesses and even those startups that generate significant revenue in absolute terms (namely Facebook) cannot justify the valuations they’ve been given. And profitability is still largely a pipe dream."

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Social networks must focus on monetisation, says Deloitte - NMA

New Media Age: "Deloitte claimed social networks need at least 100 users to generate the same revenue as one user on traditional media. It also pointed to large operating costs of social sites, particularly those with video streaming."