Category Archives: Advertising

Browsers spend three hours plus on videos

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More than 140 million Americans watched 10 billion online videos in December says a report from comscore Video Metrix. That’s about 72 videos per viewer. Video Metrix said the average video was 2.8 minutes. Over the course of a month the  average viewer spent three hours and twenty minutes enjoying this new habit that didn’t exist even three years ago.

Google sites had 43 percent of this new attention-getter, followed by Fox (23.9 percent) and Yahoo sites (20.8 percent).

Wired Magazine editor Nancy Miller calls this “Snack Culture.”

Lord only knows what Americans are snacking on, however, because comScore Video Metrix didn’t say.

AdAge job report: marketing rules, news drools

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News media are losing jobs; but Ad Age says marketing broke an employment record in November

If you’re in the news business maybe you ought to slide over into marketing.

An analysis of federal jobs statistics by Advertising Age magazine says media jobs — newspapers, broadcast and cable TV, radio, magazines and internet media companies –“fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services — agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers — broke a record in November (769,000).”

Here are a couple of excerpts from the February 18 article by Bradley Johnson.

Marketing thrives:

“Among all the ad-related job sectors, the hot spot is marketing consulting. Employment in that field in December reached a record 148,500, accounting for the lion’s share of job gains over the past year in advertising and marketing services.”

News writhes:

“Since media employment peaked in dot-com-infused 2000, media companies have eliminated one in six jobs (167,600) . . . The only media sectors to add jobs: magazines (up a meager 400 jobs) and internet media companies (up 9,200) . . . The big problem is newspapers, which account for half (82,800) of media jobs lost since 2000. One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since newspaper employment peaked in 1990 . . . Newspapers, saddled with heavy costs of printing and distribution, last year accounted for 38% of U.S. media jobs, down from 50% in 1990.”

To drill down further into the current numbers, Johnson and AdAge presented a separate page of charts showing 2006 to 2007 job movements for each of the job categories inside of communications – jobs in all news media plus advertising and marketing.

 

Ad networks help small web sites get advertising

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Romulus & Remus are suckled by a wolf

Small websites have similar trouble finding nourishment

Advertising is the mother’s milk of media but so far momma has played favorites online. A 2005 report said 96 percent of advertising revenues went to the top 50 online destinations (details). That doesn’t leave much for the millions of other sites that would like to suckle.

In this vein Diane Mermigas writes for Online Media Daily about OpenX — as in exchange – which she paints as the plucky competitor to Google when it comes to offering “small and mid-sized publishers” search and mobile advertising. Mermigas — I believe she used to write for the Hollywood Reporter — goes on to say that:

“OpenX generally receives singe to low double digit percentage commissions, compared to the booming number of ad networks that command 20% to 80% of the advertising buys.”

For more check out the OpenX blog.

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Lost on me completely is the comparison or contrast between OpenX and ADSDAQ which sounds to me to be a similar type of operation. Perhaps there are so many of these ad exchanges sprouting that online media have trouble telling them apart. Here’s a press release about ADSDAQ.

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Newspaper publishers recently formed a national sales outlet called quadrantONE. Though it was created by newspapers, presumably to serve their interests, I would expect it to reach out to other web sites so I mention it in this context. Here is an article about the new initiative.

Google to media: wake up and smell the synergy

tn_davideun.jpg David Eun

The Google vice president who deals with print and broadcast media recently admitted that his firm cooperates with content companies, it doesn’t compete with them.

“We don’t produce or own content,” David Eun told interviewer Patrick Phillips. “What they do as a company — with journalists, news bureaus, thinking about what people want to read, producing a newspaper — that’s not what we do . . . our business model is based on connecting users with their content and bringing advertisers to their content.”

What a relief! I thought Google was ought to saddle media companies with all the costs of creating content while offering them pay-per-click ads worth just 10 percent of what they used to get from print or broadcast sales. But Eun reminds us that Google is the publisher’s friend:

“What we do is point people to where they can find content. And we make a business by putting relevant ads next to it. Our strength is in understanding what’s out there and then putting ads around it, as opposed to trying to guess what kind of content people would like and trying to sell that content ourselves.”

The full interview offers the complete win-win.

Where eyeballs went on the Internet in 2007

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Web tracking firm comScore released its 2007 Internet Year in Review report showing that the “biggest winners . . . featured some of the top Internet brands inclduing Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Craiglist.”No surprise there. The Internet, which is “democratic” in terms of access to downloads, is a ruthless centralizer of attention and advertising — and thus opportunity to create sites with meaningful traffic and reach. I started to notice this in a 2005 posting (Niche Rule) that summarized elements of a 61-page report from the American Press Institute’s Media Center. Here is one excerpt from the chapter titled “Economics and Investment”:

“If a business plan is based on an advertising model, the recent hype over Internet advertising growth must be tempered by the realization that only a few large Web sites generate a majority of the advertising and that the growth is limited to only a few formats, such as keyword searched . . . The top 50 websites generate 96 percent of all Internet advertising spending, leaving little room for the remaining hundreds of online companies.”

These littler Internet players, it seems, will have to create value in new ways such as those hinted at the the recent posting by cyber seer Kevin Kelly (see Better than Free) in which he advises Web-based businesses to get a patron, for instance.

Any takers?

What killed newsrooms? The Web? Management? Labor?

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There is a palbable gloom in newsrooms today. Newspaper circulation continues its decades-long decline. Layoffs for the rank & file, and job insecurity for their editors, are the order of the day. How did we get here? That’s a darn good question considering that back in 1994, newspaper publisher Frank Daniels III at the Raleigh News & Observer, were bankrolling technical visionaries like George Schlukbier to create what amounted to the first Internet portals, Nando.net. I was a minor participant in a similar experiment pushed by then San Francisco Examiner publisher Will Hearst who worked through WELL-head John Coate to give a Northern California feel to SFGate.com. These are two early and reasonably successful Web sites that nevertheless failed to put newspaper at the vanguard of the Web revolution. What went wrong?

A recent posting on Nando.net drew this response from Howard Owens , director of digital publishing the suburban chain GateHouse Media. Owens suggested that newspapers had an online lead and blew it due to a:

“Critical strategic blunder: Scaling back online efforts circa 2001 after the Bubble burst. Pretty much every newspaper company stopped investing in online and went into a holding pattern. We fell behind and have yet to catch up. And maybe never will.”

That’s interesting. As a rank & file reporter I don’t get to see the annual internal budget at my own paper much less the industry trend so it may be that newspapers were current up through the dot.com era. But I don’t think underinvestment in new media accounts for anything but a tiny part of the current malaise of the newspaper industry. Rather I suspect that there was no way for newspaper leaders to justify the lower revuene-per-visitor they get from online. I think the online viewer is worth about 10 percent of the newspaper reader. I don’t know how any business, no matter how visionary, can willingly substitute a new-fangled, 10-cent-a-head advertising strategy for the tried-and-true 50-cents-per-eyeball  sale.

Of course that’s what newspaper management must now do, and in what may be a recession. Oh, well. Capital always survives. When the dust has settled the Big Money will buy whatever works and continue to be the big money. It knows this and therefore has no reason to listen to the likes of me.

Labor on the other hand, is screwed, and not entirely by a lack of vision from above. Newspaper reporters have become a breed of over-specialized and over-bred dog. We think the job is about scoops. Right? Those rare but delightful days when we walk into the newsroom on a cushion of air because our story is not only being read shamelessly on radio and television — our sources tell us they are getting calls from other, competing dailies which will feel obliged to run a story the next day. That is the acme of daily newspapering — to have a scoop that other papers must follow the next day.

But every aspect of that scenario is obsolete. There are fewer competing paper. Most of the stories any of us read or write come from press releases and the rare few tips that pan out into stories are generally self-serving. And in the network age there is no fact worth knowing that isn’t widely available to the whole damn planet not long after it is known by a few. So if you did score an old-fashioned, paper-down-the-road-gotta-run-it-tomorrow scoop, it’s a non-event when it comes to the survival of your paper or papers in general. Because real news, the stuff that you gotta hafta know — the score of the Giants upset over the Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl, for instance — you learn within minutes by osmosis and there is no psychic nor renumerative credit to being the disseminator of that information. Google, for instance, which hires no journalists but merely aggregates their product by skimming the Web and presenting a list of headlines in a newsreader, is now felt to be one of the most trusted news brands in the world (see the citation on that in this posting).

So I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be doing as newsies to live long and prosper. And perhaps that’s the problem.

Advertising agencies not ready for disruption

The shift to online advertising will turn traditional advertising agencies upside down says AOL advertising exec Dave Morgan. He tells AdWeek.com:  “They’ve got overpaid television folks and underpaid online folks.”

In an article titled, Will Digital Cause Agency Shrinkage? Morgan says short term worries about recession should be partially offset by the unusual confluence of the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. Presidential election.

But the article paints a gloomy picture of advertising as an industry ill-equipped to deal with the disruption that has already hit its communications brethren, the news media and public relations.

“It is amazing how ill-equipped the agencies are to deal with what’s in front of them,” says Jason Klein, president of the National Newspaper Network, a 14-year-old joint-marketing organization that sells print ads into 16 industries whose advertising spend is dominated by television.

Thanks to Paid Content for the pointer to the AdWeek piece.