Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Murdoch To Create Digital Newspaper
According to Felix Salmon of Reuters, “Rupert Murdoch is launching a new national newspaper, which will be ‘distributed exclusively as paid content for tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad and mobile phones’.” Salmon notes that Murdoch wants the iPad/pod/phone app newspaper to be PAID unlike the vast majority of other apps. Salmon then identifies why success will be “against all odds.” Read it.
The Lemon Market
What happens when all the inventory in a market steadily declines in performance? From his personal blog, Greg Linden points to a post by an NYU professor on the declining quality of Amazon’s MechanicalTurk and the associated declining wages of those enabling the marketplace. Linden summarizes the professor’s take: “His theory is that spammers and cheaters have turned MTurk into a market for lemons. The quality is now so bad that buyers demand a risk premium and require redundant work for quality checks, splitting what might be a risk-reduced fair wage three to five ways among the workers.” Read more from Linden. And, read Professor Panos Ipeirotis’ post.
Recessionary Effects Linger
The Nielsen Wire team offers a few stats and graphs on the recovery from the recession of 2008 and 2009 as the economic doldrums continue to linger according to Nielsen data. “While consumer confidence in the U.S. improved modestly in the second quarter according to Nielsen, confidence is well below pre-recessionary levels.” See the stats.
In an interview in Wireless Week, Rhythm NewMedia CEO Ujial Kohli is reporting that his company’s video ad network grew 30% in Q2 2010 and is very bullish on mobile saying, “I have said and I maintain that search and banner ads on mobile were just the warm-up act. The real show is going to be rich mobile video ads.” Read more.
Broadband Penetration Slows
Pew Research Center has produced a new study on broadband use within American households. Pew’s Aaron Smith provides the top line, “Two-thirds of American adults (66%) now have a broadband internet connection at home, a figure that is little changed from the 63% with a high-speed home connection at a similar point in 2009.” Read more. And, download the study (PDF).
The Privacy “Freakout”
Scott Rayno, Publisher of The Rayno Report, writes on The Business Insider that if advertising technology types think self-regulation is going to work, they are mistaken. He warns, “Big changes are likely coming in Internet privacy. The Internet media business, interactive agencies, and behavioral advertising companies had better start paying attention.” Read more.
X+1 On Fox Business
In a segment titled “Calculating Customers” on Fox Business News, X+1 COO Ted Shergalis makes a TV appearance and discusses a bit about X+1 business momentum but primarily it’s all about challenges around consumer privacy and whether the data-driven ad industry is going too far. See it. It’s refreshing to see a public face advocating the benefits of ad tech in the mainstream media.
More Net Neutrality
Noam Cohen writes in The New York Times that the recent proposal/agreement on net neutrality between Google and Verizon may be a threat to privacy and cites as an example a company which enables the websites of a host of grassroots, political organizations. The company’s fear with no net neutrality is that there would be an “additional level of monitoring — they call it surveillance.” Read more.
Google Might Like Visual Search
TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington says that Google is on the verge of buying Like.com, a visual search engine, for a rumored $100 million. But the acquisition doesn’t make sense to Arrington, “What we can’t quite figure out is why Google is buying Like.com. It doesn’t fit neatly into mobile or their new social strategy like so many of their recent acquisitions.” Read more.
SlideShare Goes Freemium
If you’re a user of SlideShare (the popular business presentation site), take note. If you’re curious about pivoting business models take note. SlideShare announced a new “pivot” yesterday as it will move toward a “freemium” model. On his Lessons Learned blog, Mr. Lean Startup Eric Ries explains, “SlideShare rethought its approach to premium accounts and ultimately performed what we’d call a ‘value capture pivot,’ one where the company changes the way it collects revenue from customers.” Read about it.
Offer Free Stuff To Sell Stuff
David Skok, General Partner at Matrix Partners, notes on his For Entrepreneurs blog, that “free” remains a powerful component of the customer acquisition model. After reviewing HubSpot’s WebsiteGrader, he concludes saying, “Think hard about your audience and whether there is an opportunity to build a similar free web service that would draw them in, and provide great value.” Read more.
Search + Display + PR
On the Resolution Media blog, Account Supervisor Bergen Rebello writes about how search engine marketing, PR and display can work together -but some brands just don’t get it. Rebello says, “An example of a brand that isn’t using paid search or display advertisements (but would benefit from doing so) is Domino’s Pizza. As many may remember, there was a scandalous video of Domino’s Pizza employees that was posted on YouTube. It created tremendous negative media attention for the brand and was considered a ‘PR nightmare.’ However, when I searched for the video, there were no paid search results or display ads. Domino’s could use these opportunities to defer attention to positive messaging about the brand.” Read more.
Bing Bigger Than Yahoo!
According to new stats from Chitika, Yahoo!’s search share finally dwindled enough to allow Bing to overtake it beginning in January 2010. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land covers the news and notes that Chitika’s numbers are the only ones in the industry showing Bing leading Yahoo!: “One key differences is that the [other] ratings services (…) generally measure activity at the search engines themselves, the number of searches happening at each of them. In contrast, Chitika is measuring how many visitors leave a search site and come to web sites in its network.” Read more.
eMarketer On Social Spend
eMarketer continues to crank out the graphics as it predicts the coming ad spend through social networking. The research aggregator ups its 2010 estimates for U.S. ad spend on social media to $1.6 billion from a previous estimate of $1.3 billion. “Strong performance from online ad spending in general, and Facebook in particular, has resulted in the increased forecast.” See it.
Leading While On Fire
Former VC-turned-CEO-coach Jerry Colonna brings his metaphorical insights to leadership in a post on his personal blog called, “Standing Still While Your Hair’s on Fire.” Did your head just get warm? The key to controlling “the fire” begins with “standing still.” Read more.
CMO Talk
Epic Media Group CMO and blogger Mike Sprouse addresses recent industry discussion about the chief marketing officer role – especially at big brands – in the increasingly confusing digital age. Still, he says, “The challenges facing CMO’s today are fundamentally the same as they have always been. How can we do more with less? How can we build a brand? How creative can we be in reaching or engaging the audience? How do we lead or aid the sales process to bring in new customers or partners and retain the relationships? What is fundamentally different are the tactics available to answer those very same questions.” Read more.
