Archive for October 8th, 2007
Google just hit $600 a share, which is amazing in itself, but Terry Heaton breaks down a few stats that illustrates Google’s gigantic influence on online advertising. For starters, approximately 40% of all online ad dollars go to Google. And Google advertising is growing 45% year-over-year. So when you count Google in the online revenue numbers, you come out with 26.5% growth. Without Google, it’s 15.4%. “So Google is like an enormous mountain rising up from the bottom of Lake Advertising, its mere presence raising the water level and giving the appearance of a rising tide that’s lifting all the other boats,” writes Heaton. “(But) it’s not.” Heaton says that the IAB should not include Google in its revenue calculations because it’s misleading, and he offers a five-point plan for media companies to “compete with Google at the local level.”
October 8th, 2007
Google Adsense will now allow publishers to embed selected YouTube clips for a cut of ad revenue. Explains News.com, “Site owners can choose whether they want a static banner ad that sits on top of the video player or a text overlay ad that appears 10 seconds into the clip and covers up 20 percent of the bottom of the screen. Those ads are site or keyword targeted.” Publishers can also choose from three different player sizes and custom color schemes. (Keep in mind that this new program is different from the video overlay ads Google is testing on YouTube.)
Brightcove has been doing something very similar to this. “Any Web site that is medium to large typically doesn’t want arbitrary content showing up,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s chief executive. “The sites that take it are typically very small sites with limited traffic,” so the system can generate only modest revenue. True, but YouTube’s massive scale might take it to a new level. Stay tuned…
October 8th, 2007
CBS bought the UK-based social networking site Last.fm in March, and now network prez Les Moonves is offering up some details of how they plan to utilize the site. “It’s our first venture in to social networking. It’s social networking about content - we’re a content company. They have great technology. If there’s social networking around music, there should be about sports shows, about news shows,” he said, as quoted by PaidContent. While this is just a quote — not a strategy, per se — it seems a little too TV-focused for me. If the plan is to expand Last.fm beyond music to sports or news, it shouldn’t revolve around TV shows, but sports teams and news stories, for example. CBS should be careful to empower Last.fm to continue to thrive on the web without derailing its focus to promote TV.
October 8th, 2007
Creating new products in an old-fashioned media universe is all about reaching consensus, minimizing risk and hitting prescribed goals. But a new model has emerged. “The Web 2.0 movement–powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be ‘always in beta’–learning and evolving along the way,” writes Tim Leberecht on News.com. “Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.”
I love that line: “out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition.”
October 8th, 2007
Broadcasting & Cable has a good cover story on the rush by many local media companies to compete in the high school sports arena.
October 8th, 2007
