Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Yahoo! Announces Earnings
On the earnings call, Yahoo! announced its “revenue was $1,601 million for the third quarter of 2010, a two percent increase from the third quarter of 2009. Income from operations for the third quarter of 2010 was $189 million, an increase of 107 percent year over year.” Excluding restructuring charges the company made $6 million in the third quarter. Read the earnings release (PDF). See the earnings slides (PDF). According to InternetNews.com, the company beat per share earnings expectation with 29 cents but it was helped by a one-time benefit of 13 cents a share from the sale of HotJobs. Search and the transition to Microsoft was a big topic of the earnings call, but what about display…
The Yahoo! display ad highlights were as follows:
- O&O display revenue grew 17% year-over-year in Q3’10.
- Owned and operated display advertising is up 18% so far this year.
- Asia was outperforming anywhere else in the world.
- European display grew in single percentage digits.
- Strength in retail and technology vertical; weakness in the Telecom vertical.
- From the analyst Q&A on the call: For Q4, “Pretty good sequential growth but not as strong as last year.”
- The call: In the next year, “the guaranteed and non-guaranteed market will be unified with APT (…) which will help sell audience instead of just placement.” CEO Bartz also mentioned the importance of mobile and video.
- The call: A huge Q4 2009 makes comparables for this upcoming Q4 more difficult, according to Yahoo!. They want to improve on growth and hope video will assist along with brand campaigns.
- The call: Though Yahoo! page views were down 4% for the quarter, CEO Bartz alluded to the importance of engagement and minutes spent on the site especially as it relates to blogging, comments and video.
- The call: Regarding competition in display, Bartz stressed the creativity that is available through Yahoo! as well as data helping advertisers finding the right audience. They’re “running hard” in display.
Reinventing Display At Microsoft
Mediaweek’s Mike Shields profiles Microsoft’s new corporate ad sales exec in a piece on Mediaweek. He begins, “After her first 100 days on the job, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of global ad sales Carolyn Everson has reached this conclusion: banner ads stink. With this in mind, she’s planning to reach out to a partner less familiar to the software/media giant — the creative community — for help.” Calling all cars.
Congressmen Question Facebook
The recent Wall Street Journal piece on Facebook user ID usage has led to a congressional inquiry. ClickZ’s Kate Kaye reports, “Representatives Joe Barton of Texas and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-chairs of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, said answers Facebook gives in response to a letter they sent yesterday will inform discussions surrounding pending privacy legislation.” Read more.
PaidContent’s David Kaplan reports that Publicis Groupe is merging the digital and magazine media buying operations of Zenith Optimedia. What’s more – it looks like digital will be in charge as he says “the new unified division will be run by John Nitti, SVP, managing director for digital.” Read more. It echoes moves being made at Publicis’ MediaVest which was outlined in a Q&A with MediaVest execs on AdExchanger.com this week.
What Publishers Need
Bleacher Report CEO Brian Grey preaches to (sports) website publishers about his thoughts on the importance of direct sponsorship and the keys to maximizing the opportunity. He concludes, “Ultimately, the success of the collaboration between a brand and publisher — and the effectiveness of any sponsorship — is measured on multiple levels, but none more important than whether brand equity increases in the minds of a publisher’s audience.” Read about the keys on MediaPost.
The Agency Profiting
Agencies continue to be on an upward tilt as profits at Omnicom rose steadily (5.4% y-o-y) in Q3 2010, but not dramatically (about $9 million more than last year). Ad Age’s Michael Bush covers the earnings release, “Omnicom, home to ad shops BBDO Worldwide and TBWA Worldwide, media shop OMD and PR agencies Fleishman-Hillard and Ketchum, saw a bump in all of its businesses and nearly every marketer category except travel and entertainment.” Read more.
What Is: Angels, Super Angels, VC
Start-up incubator Y Combinator’s Paul Graham gives his ground-level view on what he’s seeing in the world of early stage start-up investment. It’s good news for startups as more capital is available. For the deep pocket crowd, it’s more competition. He begins, “There used to be two sharply differentiated types of investors: angels and venture capitalists. Angels are individual rich people who invest small amounts of their own money, while VCs are employees of funds that invest large amounts of other people’s.” Read about what he’s seeing now. Nice definitions included.
Looking At Consumer Attitudes
Attitudinal targeting company Resonate Networks says in a release that marketers targeting 18 – 34 year old consumers will find little success if they’re always messaging the valuable demo in the same way. Resonate says that according to its research, “This group is more passionate about social issues like energy (36% more than the 35 plus online population), climate change (48% more) and animal rights (24% more). However, in general they are 15% – 25% less likely to make purchase decisions based on their issues of importance.” Read the release.
Google Ending Chinese Contracts
Google announced yesterday that it was ending contracts with seven resellers of its products in China. Total revenues for this group was estimated at $226 million last year. According to Reuters who quotes Google rep Cindy Qin, “The letter was sent out to them on September 27… We gave them a month’s notice.” Analysts see Baidu as the beneficiary of this exit. Read more. Wonder what display is looking like over there now? Early days – maybe. A sleeping giant at the very least – for sure.
The NY Times Reports, Display Grows
The quarterly earnings cavalcade continues as The New York Times confirms that its print edition will not turn to online-only any time soon. There was earnings, too. From the release, a familiar refrain, “advertising and circulation revenues declined 1.0 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively. Increased digital advertising revenues, which rose 14.6 percent, partially offset a 5.8 percent decrease in print advertising revenues.” Good news for display at About.com as “About Group revenues increased 5.5 percent to $32.5 million from $30.8 million as growth in display advertising was offset in part by lower cost-per-click advertising.” Read the earnings release.
Peak Oil? How about Peak Data!?
Paul Kedrosky finds a helpful, doom-and-gloom graphic that says there will be no more room on the world fiber networks by [drumroll] 2020 as data fills the pipes to their data miniscus. Don’t throw out those 14.4 modems! See the graphic. And, read the Science research paper called “Filling The Light Pipe” by David J. Richardson which inspires the prediction. Read more.
Playback
Recent events have yielded video and downloadables for the data-driven public. PubMatic released its Ad Revenue 2010 Report which it says “Identifies the Five Biggest Ad Revenue Opportunities For Publishers in 2011.” Get the report here (sign-up required). Lead Critic covers TargusInfo’s recent Interactive Insights summit here and notes, “The show has a nice mix of educational/best practice-related sessions and technical sessions surrounding display advertising, targeting and scoring.” Read more. Exchange Wire’s Ciaran O’Kane has made available presentations by Quantcast (here) and AdMeld (here) from the recent Ad Trading Summit. And, ContextWeb has video available from its Advertising Week panel with media trading experts from across agency trading desk world. See it.
Fox Buys Yardbarker
Fox announced that it is closing the loop on its original content-sharing deal with blog network Yardbarker from a couple of years ago as it has acquired the company. Douglas Quenqua of ClickZ writes that Yardbarker aggregates “800 sports blogs that claims 16 million unique monthly users and 100 percent growth over the past 12 months.” No terms were announced. Read more about the sudden expansion of Yardbarker’s 5-person sales team.
Better Advertising Makes The Tube
Better Advertising CEO Scott Meyer appeared on CBS News to offer his views on the recent Facebook user ID blow-up. The Better Advertising blog writes, “The key takeaway from the segment can be summed up with Meyer’s quote: ‘…the industry is acknowledging that they have to do better.'” See the segment.
