Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Microsoft Reports Fiscal Q4, Ch-Ching
They aren’t opening their own Federal Reserve, yet, but maybe they could. Microsoft reported over $16 billion in revenue with $4.52 billion in net income which comes to $0.51 per share. See the IR release. Was Wall Street happy? Jay Yarow of The Business Insider writes, “The company beat revenue expectations in each division except for Online Services, where it reported sales of $565 million and a $696 million operating loss.” Read more.
IBM, Analytics And Marketers
MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan writes about new analytics suite that IBM is working on for marketers. There’s even a “practice.” Sullivan writes, “Using statistical methods and measures, IBM continues to build a practice supporting advertisers and marketers. The company has a small group of people called a “practice” to support statistical analysis for large databases filled with 50 to 100 million clients.” Read more.
Digital Beginning To Rule At NY Times
The Wall Street Journal’s Nat Worden reports on The New York Times’ Q2 earnings release as “The publishing company’s second-quarter revenue inched up 1.2% to $589.6 million, as a 21% spike in digital ad revenue offset a 6% decline in print-ad sales.” Read more. According to Reuters, NYT beat analyst earnings per share estimates by 8 cents which explains the stock’s 2% jump. Read more. It likely helps that 2009 comparables were low. All Things D’s Peter Kafka reports that digital is now 26% of revenue, but that costs are coming, namely, “increased promotional spending and other costs associated with the launch of the NYTimes.com pay model.” Read more.
The early paywall results are in for the Times Of London’s website. Digiday Daily’s John Gaffney writes that traffic has fallen 58% at the newspaper’s website since they launched a paywall on July 2. Gaffney notes the two sides to this story: “On one side are the pundits who say keeping 33 percent of your circulation after you’ve gone from free to putting everything behind a pay wall is a good indicator. Then there are those who point out the obvious: The Times lost far more than half its circulation.” Read more.
Dapper Display Data
Dapper introduced a new product called DapperDR and shared some of the results its seeing when it combines its dynamic creative technology with real-time bidding. Looking at campaign’s for client products within a “If the average conversion rate was to dictate the price of media (…), each impression would either be too expensive (driving up cost) or too cheap (driving down volume). The optimal strategy is not a static set of bids, but rather a function (represented by the Optimal Bidding Curve) of each product’s unique conversion rate.” See the curve and full presentation.
In-Text Performance
Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost covers the results of Universal McCann’s implementation of Synapse, an audience engagement measurement product, as well as a ComScore study across Kontera’s network which showed that Kontera’s in-text ads may have a leg-up. Quoting the ComScore study, Sullivan writes, “Twenty-one percent of consumers strongly agreed the in-text ads are “related to content,” compared with 14% for rectangle ads, 14% for interstitials, 10% for video, 15% for Google text ads, and 11% for banners.” Read more.
More Privacy Legislation Stuff
Kate Kaye covers more privacy legislation machinations on ClickZ. In the Boucher and Rush bills, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is the “regulatory guide and enforcement authority” according to Kaye. But some lawmakers think this is a bad idea: “‘I think we need to be very careful about the latitude that we give the FTC in this area,’ said Rep. Ed Whitfield, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, the body that hosted today’s hearing. Rush chairs that subcommittee.” Read more.
Relevant To The Career
Quoting from the recent Right Media Open, Greg Hills writes on his personal blog, “Dave Zinman from Yahoo pumped on the brakes, saying that if you believe exchange-based inventory will become dominant in a ‘career-relevant timeframe’, you need to ‘step back from the punch bowl.'” Hills adds, “For me, ‘career-relevant timeframe’ is the most important phrase I’ve heard today.” Read more.
AOL: Google Over Apple
If mobile platforms are an indicator, GigaOm’s Kevin Tofel says AOL may have just made a key strategic decision for its mobile platform writing, “AOL today matured its mobile platform with a two new applications for Android handsets and an HTML5 version of the AOL Mobile website for smartphones. (…) While it’s not surprising that AOL is looking to support advanced devices such as smartphones, the selection of Android over iPhone for the new software title is notable.” Read more.
Rapleaf’s Anonymouse
The Rapleaf engineering team takes the microphone on the company’s development blog to introduce what it calls “Anonymouse” and how it tackles privacy requirements. From the blog: “The goal of Anonymouse is to selectively exclude data from the cookies we drop so that our users are sufficiently indistinguishable.” Take a deep dive here.
Preparing For The Future
AdMonsters’ Rob Beeler challenges ad operations leaders to start trying to figure out the blueprint for new solutions so that their ad ops teams of today can overcome outdated or unrelated internal systems that are inhibiting success. Beeler writes that for starters, “Excel needs to be relegated to the role of a sticky note: a useful but temporary solution. Like any addiction, the dependence on Excel needs to be addressed.” Read more.
