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The Seinfeld Ad Microsoft Paid Millions For: Pro and Con Opinions
Microsoft ran its first commercial with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld on NBC this afternoon, to mixed reviews. Seinfeld will reportedly take home $10 million for his part of the $300 million "Windows Not Walls" ad campaign.
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/microsoft/The_Seinfeld_Ad_Microsoft_Paid_Millions_For_Pro_and_Con_Opi';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';Does that seem like money well spent so far? Below you'll find the commercial and two opposing opinions about it from members of the ReadWriteWeb team.
Con: This Was an Arrogant Waste
Marshall Kirkpatrick: The Windows Not Walls campaign is widely believed to be the first response to Apple's high profile Mac guy/Windows guy series. While Microsoft tried to be hip in its response, it's a faux hip based on a pointlessly obscure message.
The Apple ads do direct feature comparison. What is this ad saying? That Microsoft is lead by famous old people who are really just dorks that maybe you can relate to? That Windows is a lovable "tasty" part of everyday life? The only thing I take from it is that Microsoft has more money than it knows what to do with and is making a dorky attempt to be funny in the face of the PR crisis it faces with Vista.
Show me Jerry Seinfeld meeting people around the world doing good work with Vista and liking it - that would impress me. I thought this one was kind of cute, but spending this kind of money on "kind of cute" is cynicism bordering on obscenity. I don't think it will be effective.
Disclosure: I haven't bought Windows software in 10 years, except for Windows mobile on my phone.
Direct response from Sarah Perez: "I'm sorry, but last I checked, nerds were inheriting the earth! Dorkiness is the new cool."
To view or participate in the poll in this post if you're reading by RSS, click here. Please add "other" responses in comments below.
Pro: It Was Funny, Effective Branding
Sarah Perez: I just finished watching the new Microsoft ad and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. Microsoft has long suffered from a dearth of creative advertising, so it was nice to see something different from them for a change. Heck, it was nice to see anything from them. Microsoft TV ads are pretty rare these days.
I also appreciated the fact that the ad was not a direct counter attack against those Mac vs. PC ads. Although those Mac ads are usually funny, they sometimes cross the line into smugness leading to some serious "Mac guy backlash." There won't be any backlash with this Microsoft ad, though - no matter which side of the fence you're on, it's hard to watch Bill Gates in action and not see him as just the goofy, geeky guy that he is. And the bonus shot of his Shoe Carnival card featuring his mug shot? Hilarious! If anything, Bill came across as a loveable nerd, not a ruthless businessman of an evil corporation, as many like to paint him these days.
Now, you can debate how realistic or unrealistic that image may be, but, let's be honest, ads aren't about delivering "reality" - they're meant to communicate a message. They deliver a brand image. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the ad agency behind these ads, aren't known for failures, either. From their odd BK King ads to the frightening images of VW drivers getting creamed by oncoming SUVs, CP+B ads stay with you and cement various brands into your head. So what's the brand message behind the new campaign? From this first ad, it seems to me that the message is that "PC guy" isn't such a bad guy after all. Love live PC guy! And the Conquistador!
Disclosure: In addition to writing for ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez also writes part time for Microsoft's Channel 10.
Direct response from Marshall Kirkpatrick: "Sarah, your take on it makes me feel like an uptight jerk for saying what I did. I stand behind what I said none the less, I think the ad was an obnoxious waste of money."
Do You Want Incoming-Call Ads on Your Mobile?
Your mother's calling - and there are shoes on sale.
A new study released this week in the UK found that 80% of respondents said they were "happy to have [15 second pre-roll] video ads if it meant they could watch free video" on their phones. Almost nothing's shocking in the wacky world of mobile advertising-to be, but one thing we found absolutely horrifying in the discussion around the study was this: incoming-call ads.
Who's Doing This?
A company called Gigafone appears to be pioneering the practice of showing users advertising when calls or SMS come in to a phone. The system is fully opt-in, users provide personal data about themselves and then the ads are targeted to them based on demographics and interests.
RSS readers can click here to see a poll about incoming-call mobile ads.
The benefits to consumers include more targeted ads, discounts and in some cases phone rate subsidies. It's a little reminiscent of the successful efforts by Blyk, a European company that shows ads in exchange for free minutes and text messages.
Consumer Reactions
Gigafone reports that a huge percentage of customers in test markets are satisfied with the system. People we asked, though, seemed to think that they should receive heavy subsidies for undergoing such an experience. No doubt mobile companies are unlikely to offer the amount of subsidies that customers would like - but we can imagine how this would go down. The practice of offering discounts on nearly everything at the grocery store in exchange for personal information and permission to track our shopping activities would provide an excellent model for this kind of mobile advertising.
Are grocery shoppers who participate in such schemes really getting discounts, or are the rare few who do not just paying a tax? We can imagine a de facto tax being levied against mobile consumers unwilling to have ads shown when their phones ring.
Even though it's opt-in, there are lots of consumer controls and it could help pay for phone service, we (this author at least) do not want commercials associated with the Pavlovian response of paying particular attention to our phones when they ring. There's just something disturbing about the idea.
A 15 second pre-roll ad before watching free video? That sounds annoying enough. A personalized ad when I pull my phone out of my pocket to answer it? No thanks.
Main Page - SiteHoppin - View the web like an iPod! Get free traffic to your blog or website!
Long Tail Ad Network Makes Sense for Technorati
Last week, when we heard that Technorati had raised another $7.5 million, bringing their total raised to $30 million, we asked you what blog search engine you use. 41% of you answered Technorati, but it was clear that Google Blog Search has cut into Technorati's marketshare, and some commenters said that they didn't have a need for a dedicated blog search -- Google worked just fine. This morning, Technorati expanded beyond the business of blog search to blog advertising with the launch of Technorati Media.
Since it seems likely that regular people don't read blogs (at least not, er, regularly), the market for a dedicated blog search engine is possibly a very small one. Even Google buries their Blog Search option way down in the "More" drop down menu on their site.
However, blogs are still big business. While most "regular" people might not be avid blog readers, they still read them passively when encountering blog content via links from mainstream sources, links in emails, or search results. All that adds up to a lot of monetizable, niche traffic. That's where Technorati is hoping to score big. The company says that it "collects, organizes, highlights, and distributes the online global conversation," which is short hand for, "we have a lot of data on who's saying what about what."
This morning I talked to Alan Levy, CEO of BlogTalkRadio, which has been an early beta tester of the new Technorati Media ad network. Levy had nothing but nice things to say about Technorati. "There's no doubt that major brands want to be part of the conversation with the blogosphere," Levy told me, and Technorati has a reputation as a company that understands that conversation. Blogs are conversational in nature, Levy said, and the long tail network that Technorati is assembling will allow brands to be part of that via very targeted advertising.
Appealing to the long tail is a smart play for Technorati. As we wrote last November, there's no money in the long tail, but there is plenty to be made on the long tail because there is volume there. That's essentially how AdSense works -- sell targeted ads to specific niches across a huge inventory assembled from low traffic sites. If Technorati, which sells on a CPM basis and is willing to negotiate the revenue split with blogs -- something Google won't do except with its largest publishers -- can out perform AdSense for long tail bloggers, they'll have a real winner on their hands.
Report: Slowing Economy Finally Catches Up to Online Ads
"The Internet is recession proof," is a sentiment we've heard trumpeted over and over and over again the past year. However, guest author Llew Claasen argued on this blog in February that paid search ads specifically are actually not recession proof, and a new report out today appears to confirm that a broad economic slowdown in the United States is starting to negatively effect the online ad industry.
The argument that online ads will generally fare well in a recession usually goes something like this: online advertising cheaper than traditional print and television advertising and offers far more accurate ROI measurement, so when budgets are squeezed, Internet advertising will look more attractive. "The thing we could well see is, a recession could expedite the shift from traditional spending to digital spending," said Jeremy Wright, global director of mobile brand strategy at Nokia Interactive, at Ad:Tech last month.
But a new report from PubMatic appears to indicate otherwise. Their May AdPrice Index, which was prepared by independent statisticians Dr. Albert Madansky and Dr. Michele Madansky, indicates that ad prices are starting to drop.
The report found that ad prices (based on effective CPMs) in April across all sites fell an average of 23%. This was most acutely felt by large sites (over 100 million page views per month), led by social networking sites, which saw eCPMs plummet 47% from March to April. Medium-sized web site monetization was essentially flat, while small sites (less than 1 million page views per month) saw modest gains month-over-month.
Social networking eCPMs sit at 19 cents, according to the AdPrice Index report, below January lows of 22 cents. The technology sector was basically flat from month-to-month, but still well off beginning of the year highs.
This all could indicate that a general US economic downturn is starting to be felt on the web. While the study didn't look specifically at search ads -- which analysts have said would be the last to feel the pain of a recession -- and it didn't differentiate between display and text ads, or between eCPMs from ad network to ad network, it is a general indicator of a slow down in the online ad market. Granted, this is only a couple of months of data, so it would be hard to create concrete trend predictions from it.
PubMatic's AdPrice Index is made up of over 3,000 web sites, about 85% of which are based in the US.
Quantcast Launches Demographic Search
Website traffic monitoring service Quantcast has launched a new search function that lets logged-in users search for sites that have particular audience demographics. Interested in finding websites that get a lot of traffic from young, childless, US "Hispanics" with an annual income over $100k per year? Quantcast suggests you check out HolaMun2, Reggaetonline.net and Power106.fm.
Demographics are extrapolated from user panels and multiplied by traffic numbers gleaned from embed codes and presumably ISP data.
Online ad industry site ClickZ describes the breadth of Quantcast info:
"Quantcast provides traffic and audience reports on 20 million Web sites, many of them too small to be tracked by comScore and Nielsen Online. In addition, the firm tracks audience data directly from 30,000 publishers, which it combines with panel data."
Continued below image of search results page.
The search function is primarily targeting ad buyers, just because no one online is willing to pay for anything except ads promoting more monetized mediums, but it is free for anyone to use after creating a Quantcast account.
There are any number of other reasons you might want to use a search service like this. I might be a nonprofit organization, for example, organizing an event that's particularly relevant to a certain demographic group. In that case, making sure I know what some of said group's most popular websites are could prove quite valuable. Asking some people is a good idea too, but a little Quantcast help could be a good first step.
Demographic information can be a touchy subject outside of the ad world, see for example Hillary Clinton's offensive assertion today that she's likely to fair well in the election because non-college educated white people like her best. None the less, though, demographics better engaged with than hidden from.
Room for Improvement
It's not clear how extensive Quantcast's demographic panels are. The company says it gathers this data from "several million" web users. That's great, though I'd like to see what percentage of those millions fall into the different populations they track.
Geographic filtering would sure be great, too, though then we're likely talking about making the pie even smaller and less accurate.
One of the biggest shortcomings of services like Quantcast is that they tend to limit themselves to estimating US traffic. The internet is global, the ad market is too, and some global engagement with geographic filtering seems like a big, open field.
The search here really is just for numbers. It would be awesome to see these demographics integrated into content searches. Quantcast's competitor Compete recently made their data available to users of the Ask.com search engine. This allows searchers to get a feel for the traffic numbers and trends of any site they find search results on. That's pretty handy.
Finally, the ability to filter by traffic trends would be really nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, many of my top search results were sites with falling traffic. What if I wanted to see sites that were growing in total or growing increasingly popular with my target demographic?
Despite its relatively rudimentary beta status, this new offering from Quantcast looks good. It should prove valuable to ad buyers and others and will undoubtedly increase Quantcast's profile online.
Marketing 2.0: Can Meebo Make it Real?
Cross network web IM service Meebo is announcing today the hire of CNet and Warner Music vet Carter Brokaw as the company's new Chief Revenue Officer. Along with that announcement the company is starting to talk about its plans to monetize a platform that many have said will be impossible to profit from. The plan is very marketing 2.0. Is that what users want? Is the ad world ready?
Meebo's spent six months studying focus groups gathered from their 30 million users per month to see what kind of advertising users will put up with. The response has been unsurprising - users say they don't want impersonal sales messages broadcast at them. They want to be invited into useful or entertaining engagements with advertisers where they, the users, remain in control of the experience. They (we) want utility-based ad campaigns.
Martin Green, VP of Business at Meebo, says that just like the banner ads that used to appear on search results pages before contextual text ads made the thought of banner ads on those pages seem absurd - so too will a new era of invitations to engage with sponsors make banner ads look ridiculous on social media web pages.
Starting next month, Meebo will be rolling out ads in the IM service that invite users to access quizzes, polls, long-form video and other resources. Users will be able to opt-in to sponsored experiences that are targeted to them specifically, based on their demographics and behavior. Negative feedback on a particular ad will teach the ad server not to serve the same ad to a particular user and there will be a leader board on the site displaying the most popular ads according to user response.
Meebo says that in tests, they are experiencing 2 to 4% user engagement with these new types of ads, a far higher percentage than banner ads see. The company says its goal will be to never show users the ads they see on other sites - though they also say that advertisers needn't worry: traditional "form factors" will still be usable here ("You've got Flash video? We show Flash video!")
While behavior tracking has begun to face a growing backlash among web users, Meebo believes that we want the value that can be delivered based on such tracking - as long as information isn't gathered in a "creepy" way.
I asked Green and Carter if they were familiar with APML, Attention Profile Markup Language, and neither said they were. (What blogs do these guys read?) They were interested in the idea, they said. Everyone says they are interested in whatever you are when they are doing press briefings. "If there's some way to make this open and not proprietary," new hire Carter said, "all the better." Just ask Digg or Newsgator and they'll tell you that there is. You can export your history in APML from Digg, for example, and get personalized watch-lists set up based on those interests inside Newsgator's FeedDemon. That's pretty cool.
Meebo needs to come up with some innovative way to monetize their huge traffic numbers, and this new ad model could be it. As things stand, the company is reported to be struggling to either sell itself at a huge valuation or raise more investor money. We've written that they're worth a substantial valuation and that value may be what's rolling out now.
Can Ad Agencies Make Ads That Don't Suck?
Quality advertising is like live streaming video - not very many people can do it very well. General consensus among at least self-appointed marketing 2.0 thought-leaders (!) is that it's all about offering clear value to would-be audiences. Not just the promise of value, in the event that a product is purchased, but immediate value just from engaging with the ad in the first place!
We wrote about Intel's branded PopURLs site targeting the stuffy world of enterprise software last week. That's a great example. The Snoop Dog Twitter transformation machine - that's a strange example of the same sort of strategy. Burger King's Subservient Chicken is the either the stupidest or one of the smartest examples of this strategy, depending on your perspective.
It's hard to design ad experiences that don't end up feeling shallow, vapid, overly commercialized and insulting. The safer bet is to try to be funny. Broadcasting funny at people has been working so far in some media.
Meebo is going to try to do something different, though. They'll offer some amount of consulting and guidance to brands interested in advertising on their platform. They believe that the leading ad agencies are all being pushed to explore this new utility-based advertising model online.
We'll see. If just a handful out of every hundred users are interested in doing more than just IM and watch user submitted videos together on Meebo - then the effort will be a big success. That will be easier said than done, though.
Google Launching AdSense for Video - Minus the Video
After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the program's pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads. Today the video part is gone, replaced by CPM banners and CPC text overlays.
Launch participant Brightcove said in a release tonight that "Publishers and content providers can control which videos get which ads and when the ads play in each video." Am I the only one that hates those damned pop up text overlay ads that show up on other services' videos?
Last October, Google started letting AdSense publishers include YouTube videos as ads on their sites. Last week the company announced that it is experimenting with running video ads on its own search results pages.
There is clearly a lot of room to experiment with video ads.
In some cases even interstitial videos inside a video can be done well, check out almost any of the work of video ad network Castfire, for example. Castfire has a very sophisticated technology for serving up ads in video. While at first blush this San Francisco startup might seem to be in trouble given tonight's news - in reality, AdSense for Video will be about monetizing bulk, remainder and less-than-high quality video more than anything else. That leaves plenty of room in the market for startups taking other approaches, like serving video ads inside of videos - as Google said it was going to do.
Study: 6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks
Though unsurprising, a new study released today by a consortium of big players in advertising found hard numbers to back up what you might have guessed. Specifically, that only 6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements. Starcom USA, behavioral targeting network Tacoda and comScore performed the study.
Those people who click heavily have a number of other characteristics of note. "Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000," the study said, and they "are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers."
The authors conclude that the heavy clickers do shop more online than the population at large, but not at a rate proportional to their click rate influence. In other words, if your ads are getting a lot of click-throughs and you are holding your breath that they will monetize better any day now - you're not likely to find relief any time soon. The study also found that there was not a high correlation between heavy clickers and increased brand loyalty. Search ads were not included in the findings but add in the fact that after a few years online more people won't help but be able to learn the difference between their browser's address bar and search bar - and the overall ad money pot doesn't look terribly reliable.
These numbers probably speak for themselves, and will mean different things to different people, but we do hope that our unusually engaged readers will enjoy checking out the services of RWW advertisers. :)
How Many Times Can This Work? SponsorMyLoans.com
In 2000, Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe paid for their college education by offering their lives up for sponsorship. In 2005, Alex Tew started The Million Dollar Homepage and sold a million bucks worth of ads on a page that was nothing but ads. Last year a web developer tried to sell his name for $250,000 -- he didn't quite make it but still found a buyer for 25 grand. Most recently, Luke Livingston has started Sponsor My Loans in an effort to pay off his student loans -- in $200 monthly increments.
There have been numerous examples of this sort of advertising scheme in the past, where advertising is sold on the premise that the method of advertising is so unique or wacky that it will garner mainstream press attention just for being sold -- and thus make the ads themselves worthwhile. But how long can that keep working?
Apparently, the market is still strong for selling ads based on future press coverage about your ad sales. Livingston has already scored press at TheStreet.com, Young Money Magazine, and The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, and lined up sponsors through May. (He's also gotten press on this blog -- yes, I realize the irony here.)
There appears to be such a market for wacky ads, that a site like Body Billboardz, a marketplace for people willing to sell ad space on their bodies, currently has nearly 50 people willing to sell themselves to corporations.
I'm somewhat amazed that these advertising schemes keep working. And it's hard for me to believe that the ads really garner any sort of return for the companies that place them -- this is about as untargeted as you can get in advertising, and the people visiting these sites are really more interested in marveling at the tremendous luck of the people behind them then at checking out the companies willing to put up the cash for advertising. But as Livingston says in his press release, "Hey, it's worth a shot, right?"
Consumers Ready for End of Pre-Roll Ads
"Pre-roll ads are going the way of popups and other intrusive ads," predicted Fred Wilson a little over a month ago. "They won't be around in a couple years. And the online video services that use them to monetize their audience won't be around either." It seems that consumers agree. Silicon Alley Insider points to a new survey that says that half of Internet users bail at the sight of a pre-roll video ad.
So what type of ads should video sites try if consumers are going to flee at the sight of pre-roll ads? Advertisers worry that post-roll ads won't be watched (who sticks around to watch an ad after a video has finished playing)? Mid-roll ads might work, but while they're tolerable when watching a full-length television show or movie (i.e., on Hulu), they become infeasible for shorter clips, and are problematic for user generated content that doesn't have built-in pause points for advertising.
Last fall YouTube began experimenting with overlay ads, but Jeremy Allaire, CEO of rival Brightcove said that advertisers did not respond well to overlay ads. Then again, he also said users didn't respond negatively to pre-roll ads.
The one bright spot for video advertisers in the Burst Media survey cited by Alley Insider is that younger viewers are surprisingly most amenable to online pre-roll video ads. 35% of of users in the 18-24 age group stop watching videos if they have pre-roll ads. That number increased to 49.6% of 25 to 34-year-olds and to a whopping 60% of users over 55.
Perhaps that indicates that the future generation of web users will be more receptive to traditional video ad formats. Regardless, don't expect to see pre-roll ads disappear any time soon -- advertisers are still hooked on them.
Fox Interactive Media Plans Ad Network Expansion
Reuters is reporting that Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn said Monday that his company is in the discussion stages of creating an ad network, internally dubbed "FIM Serve," that would service all of News Corp.'s online properties. Eventually, the ad network would be opened to non-News Corp. properties.
"We're well down the path in terms of discussions with some of the other News Corp properties to do ad serving," Levinsohn said at the Reuters Media Summit today. "Ultimately we'll take the company off network and become an ad network for assets outside of the News Corporation empire."
Earlier this month, FIM's MySpace unit announced its so-called 'HyperTargeting' ads, which use MySpace user profile data to target ads across 100 categories (with plans to expand to 1000). Could HyperTargeting eventually find its way outside of the social network and on to other Fox Interactive Media or News Corp. properties and beyond?
FIM controls a number of media sites likely popular with the MySpace demographic, such as Photobucket, Flecktor, AskMen.com, IGN, AmericanIdol.com, and FOXSports.com. Their sites reach the fifth largest audience in the US, according to comScore, with 84.2 million unique visits in October. Targeting to users visiting from MySpace based on their profile data could be very helpful for increasing advertiser ROI, and using internal social networking data to target ads on external sites was something that many people speculated Facebook was up to prior to the announcement of SocialAds and Beacon.
FIM Serve could launch "as early as the first half of next year," according to Levinsohn, and if it includes HyperTargeting, would it cause the same sort of backlash that Facebook is seeing from privacy rights groups over its Project Beacon?
Online Advertising Up 25% in Q3 - but is it 80% Google?
PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau released their 3rd quarter numbers estimating total ad buys online today. Big growth continues, but take it with a giant grain of salt. Last quarter the number exceeded $5.2 billion according to the study, up 25% over Q3 last year.
According to the IAB, the glory days are here. "Marketers large and small have come to accept digital media as the fulcrum of any marketing strategy," says Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. That seems like a real exaggeration to me. In fact, Google reported Q3 revenues of $4.3 billion just by itself, that up 57% from Q3 2006. The vast majority of that is in advertising sales, so industry growth is based on Google growth, apparently. Either someone's numbers are off or we're all insane trying to make a living in this industry. All of us but Google, that is.
As time on the television continues to drop and time online rises, I think we've only seeing the beginning of the online advertising economy. It's hard to get too excited about the health of the industry, however, when one company's own growth makes up so much of the story.
AdBrite: Full Page "Skip This Ad" Units Now Available for Everyone
Ad network AdBrite announced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you've no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers' time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site.
Unlike the standard full page ads, though, the AdBriteunits aren't passive Flash commercials - they are like an iframe or a redirect directly to the advertiser's live, interactive website. Advertising pays the bills, and thank goodness for it, but I usually find these kinds of ads cause to feel pity for the website owner running them; do they have to hit me over the head with it? It's certainly a better ad type than those wretched double underline link ads.
While the self-publishing revolution brought on by blogs was supposed to challenge the push-advertising model as well, it seems that push-advertising will not go down without a fight. I expect that many bloggers will welcome AdBrite's new full-page ads.
You can test out the unit and see how it works at www.adbrite.com/fullpagead.
Winksite Launches Mobile Ads with 100% Rev Share
In related advertising news, mobile page publishing service Winksite has launched an advertising feature that lets publishers retain 100% of ad revenue for either AdSense or AdMob mobile ads. That's a formula also being used by Facebook ad network Lookery, a new company founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer. Rafer is the chairman of Winksite.
In your browser or on your phone - the ads are coming. Cynicism aside, it's a good thing for publishers to be able to make a living. We'll see if all the rhetoric about new advertising models is just hot air.
Here Comes the Money: YouTube Videos Coming to AdSense
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According to early reports from the Associated Press and Variety, Google is set to make a major announcement tomorrow concerning YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads.
The AP offers auto websites selecting topical videos from YouTube about cars to run along with AdSense banner ads on their sites. If the report is correct, there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.
Monetization of YouTube has always been the big question since Google Acquired the site. While other video hosting companies sought content first and then tried to build out their ad networks, it's only logical that the biggest online ad network in the world would fold the best content from the biggest video site in the world into its offerings. For more industry background see Liz Gannes's post at NewTeeVee.
Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web. Google has run very limited video advertising already but nothing like what it could do with YouTube's huge catalog. The ads will be persistent banners outside the frame and fading in-frame overlays.
It's a simple story, but if it is true it is going to blow the world of online video and advertising wide open.
Update: Google has confirmed this: "AdSense isn't just for ads anymore; it's also a place to get video content for your site -- and earn extra revenue at the same time." There is an accompanying video:
Survey: Young Adults Think Facebook is #1; Women More Into it Than Men
A new survey released this week by the marketing analysts and consultants at Anderson Analytics found that Facebook is now the #1 most liked website among US respondents between the ages of 18 and 24. In other words, it's not just tech bloggers talking about Facebook all the time.
The sample set for the survey consisted of 1,000 young people suckered into answering questions and viewing ads at the "analyst" company's website, Brandport.com, and 500 Facebook users - for a total of 1500 respondents. Perhaps our headline should then read "Young Facebook Users Think Facebook is #1." The release is here, I found it via Kathleen Mazzocco.
Last year's #1 spot was held by MySpace and presuming the study surveyed 1/3 of its respondents on Facebook then as well, this is a big change. I can say anecdotally that everywhere I look I see laptops (other than mine) on Facebook all the time. You can read our in-depth comparison of MySpace and Facebook here.
Gender Differences
Gender differences in the survey were marked; use of social networking sites was twice as high in self-identified women as it was in men, only 33% of women said they were satisfied to use just one social networking site and MySpace was the #2 favorite for women while falling out of the top 5 for men.
The survey's authors say they believe this shows that the social networking world is set to change drastically when today's youth replace contemporary adults in the workplace. Social networking is currently believed to be much more common among adult men.
Microsoft Tafiti Is Beautiful, But Will Anyone Use it?
We’re pretty big fans of Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform. And just about everyone will agree that Tafiti, a new Microsoft search site built on Silverlight, is pretty darn easy on the eyes. They even got the Jackson Fish Market team (they are creating new visually stunning products) to help out on the project.
But will many people use it? It still uses Microsoft search, which in my opinion is not as relevant as Google or Yahoo. And the site, while pretty, runs very slow.
I think people want fast results served on a clean white page with as little clutter as possible (example). Bells, whistles and pretty graphics are fine, but functionality rules.
That being said, Microsoft isn’t out there claiming that this is their new search paradigm. It’s an experiment to show the power of Silverlight, and at that it succeeds.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Ex Microsoft Team Launches “They’re Beautiful”
A team of ex-Microsofties left to create Jackson Fish Market, with the tagline “Handcrafted Software Experiences,” in November 2006. In their introductory blog post, co-founder Hillel Cooperman talks about his grandfather’s fish store, Jackson Fish, a “small businesses was run by family, with everyone pitching in as best they could” and which sold “handcrafted products” that “that both address a core customer need, but also make them feel emotionally satisfied, content, and… happy.” They credit 37 Signals with much of the inspiration behind the company.
They’re working on a number of projects, and “They’re Beautiful” is the first to launch. It’s a free virtual flowers site. Users can send a virtual bouquet to any email address (even without registering). The recipient sees the bouquet and can choose to put it in their Greenhouse on the site by registering. They then must return every few days to “water” the flowers and keep them from wilting.
The coolest feature is the ability to embed the virtual gifts in another website, as I’ve done above. The “products” are visually stunning, and if they can get significant enough distribution through the widgets it would be a simple step to add premium, limited edition items in the future for a fee.
The timing of the launch is perfect, as Facebook and others are testing virtual goods (HotOrNot has sold virtual flowers for years) and the market seems set to explode.
I’m going to refrain from watering my flowers. I’m hoping the wilting process is as visually interesting as the flowers themselves. Can’t wait to see if they actually show dead flowers in the widget.
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