More than a tweet, less than a blog.

On monetizing news

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:53:08 +0100

Advertising craves attention, and apparently news readers spend 95% less attention when reading news online than they do when reading good ol’ print. In the light of this change in behavior I would argue it’s surprising they make any money at all.

Their primary problem seems to be one of user engagement, rather than usage monetization…

Photo

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:03:43 +0100

"The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use the strengths of..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:49:34 +0100

“The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use the strengths of your current situation instead of being so eager to adopt the hassles of tomorrow.”

- From an old 37signals classic by DHH. Worth considering for things beyond software development. Advertising for instance.

"There’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem with ad blockers, where it doesn’t matter if one site shows..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:50:25 +0100

“There’s a prisoners’ dilemma problem with ad blockers, where it doesn’t matter if one site shows reasonable ads if others show crap ads, because those crap ads will drive users to install ad-blocking software, and ad-blocking software casts a wide net and blocks as much as it can. It’s unlikely that most ad-blocker-using Ars readers installed their ad-blocker because of the ads on Ars Technica.”

- John Gruber weighs in on ad blockers. Clever as a fox.

"Find a way for advertisers to reliably audit site-served ads, and you’ve got yourself a business."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:38:04 +0100

“Find a way for advertisers to reliably audit site-served ads, and you’ve got yourself a business.”

- Rob Sayre writes the smartest post in the recent ad blocker discussion.

"No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. ‘There are..."

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:06:35 +0100

“No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. ‘There are 2 billion people on the Web,’ he says. ‘The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.’”

- Marc Andreesen brings things into perspective over at Techcrunch.

Reminds me of evangelizing for customer development, lean...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 12:03:00 +0100

Reminds me of evangelizing for customer development, lean startups etc. at Burt ;)

First decent use case I’ve seen using sentiment analysis....

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:42:46 +0100

First decent use case I’ve seen using sentiment analysis. From Glow.

"Initially, Omniture and Facebook will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:55:07 +0100

““Initially, Omniture and Facebook will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on the social networking service.””

- From Techcrunch. Wow, great business development move by Omniture.

Reducing creative risk in online advertising

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:01:08 +0100

This is a longer version of the thought piece published last week by M&M global.

Research consistently shows that in online media, creative is the most important component for driving effect. Some studies indicate that the quality of an ad can actually be responsible for up to 75% of a campaign’s total impact.

This might sound like much, but the importance of quality is really no wonder considering how the advertising landscape look today - thousands of advertiser messages being thrown at us in an increasing array of channels. In some campaigns it can be tens of thousands of sites. And naturally, we can’t pay attention all the time and remember all of them, or pay it forward to our friends using social networks. We filter the information - the good stuff wins, and the bad stuff gets ignored.

So, for online campaigns to work properly these days, our ads have to be better than ever before. However, media fragmentization not only increase the significance of great creative but also makes it harder to assess which creatives will do a great job. Knowing what works on before hand is getting harder, and great opportunities often have a way of presenting themselves halfway into campaigns that are already live.

The reason is simple - the media landscape is less predictable, and more dynamic than ever before. Complex and unpredictable.

Reaching consumers in more ways, on more places and thru more channels, means an exponential increase in the number of contexts our ads are supposed to work with. And understanding the circumstances and media environment for our campaigns is the key ingredient to gain attention, and drive impact. In fact, the same ad can have the complete opposite effect on the same person, depending on where and when it’s being shown.

It’s obvious we need to align our creative process with the increased complexity of the new media landscape, optimizing our workflow for responding to change, rather than following plan. Launching with a big bang may still work, but it’s an increasingly risky strategy, and in most cases we might be better off by welcoming the changing requirements, even late in the process, and use our ability to harness that change as a competitive advantage.

So online media both increases the need for great creative, as well as make it harder to predict what creative works. This means we we need to tweak our creative process to become more based on continuous learning and modification, rather than huge up front risks and speculation. Luckily, online media enables us to do just that.

Much has been said about how much more intriguing online media is compared to other mass marketing channels. Consumers can interact with ads and brands, purchase stuff immediately and recommend what they like to their friends.

What hasn’t been talked about is the massive opportunity to reduce risk while increasing quality thru a cycle of test, measure, refine and update. Because unlike tradtional, static media channels, online media allows us not only to see what’s working and why in real-time, but also update our campaigns on the fly. This idea - to learn and improve in quick iterations - isn’t something exclusve to online advertising, it’s at the heart of most successful projects and ventures in online media, from social gaming to search engine marketing.

But the advertising industry have been slow in adopting this mindset, the reasons being lack of tools proper tools and that it requires a substantial change in agency-advertiser relationships. Advertisers need to allocate budgets differently, and also participate along the process to ensure that activities are supporting advertiser goals. And agencies can no longer expect a clearly defined point of deliver, and instead they must take responsibility for their work over a much longer period of time.

Together with a couple of other companies, we’re bringing you the tools to improve your feedback loop and let solutions evolve over time. But the organizational challenge is something all you agencies and advertisers will have to sort out by yourselves.

Changing how you structure projects and allocate budgets might sound like very hard work, and it probably is. But first of all, I can tell you first hand I’ve seen it happen over and over for agencies I’ve met all over the world. And second, it’s not like you have any choice. Media fragmentization and more complex consumer behavior makes it close to impossible to predict and plan every campaign up front. There are simply too many unknown factors to take into account. And this problem will not only persist, but increase exponentially.

The most effective way to deliver high-quality advertising is to release earlier, learn from your mistakes and improve over time. The quicker your feedback loop, the quicker you can improve to the point where consumers pay attention you and not your competitors.

On Facebook - revenues, profit, P/E and valuation.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:41:00 +0100

So Facebook is apparently on track to do $1B in revenues in 2010, a growth of 60%, and earlier they’re said to be cashflow positive. I guess one could argue that it’s astounding that it’s not better, considering their massive user base. Maybe Bo Peabody is right, after all.

By comparison, Google managed to maintain triple digit growth rates, for both top and bottom line, well into the billions of yearly revenues. Even more interesting, Google required “only” $25M in venture funding, turning a solid profit on less than $100M in revenues. For some reason, a lot of software/Internet companies that have gone public has required funding in that range, rather than hundreds of millions of dollars.

Facebook actually looks a lot more like Yahoo - massive engagement, and good but not great monetization. Hrm… I wonder what their drivers for revenue and improved monetization will be?

Probably not users, first of all they’re saturating the short term market and second because they’re already top dog in most markets worth monetizing. And getting more time spent from each user probably won’t cut it either, considering that time spent went up by 700% from 2008 to 2009, and they’re already the Internet’s number one time waster by a comfortable margin.

So it seems that a new monetization scheme is in order. I’ve always been a big fan of them creating a micro payment platform or possibly becoming a bank of sorts, leveraging the trust dimension of their assets. Creating an ad network, much like AdSense, by leveraging Facebook Connect would also be an interesting move. As would preparing a decent marketing research packaging.

Maybe they’re hoping to do like Google and let someone else invent it for them?

What do you think?

"Freemium is a marketing tactic, not a business model."

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:11:44 +0100

“Freemium is a marketing tactic, not a business model.”

- http://sixteenventures.com/blog/the-reality-of-freemium-in-saas.html

I love the potential of tablets. And this is just one publisher...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:01:58 +0100

I love the potential of tablets. And this is just one publisher giving it a try. Imagine when 10 000 have tried, learned from one another etc. Awesome.