Articles of the Day
Piper Jaffray Dubs Emerging Media Trend ‘Communitainment’ - Investment bank Piper Jaffray projects that half of all content consumption over the next decade will take the form of “communitainment”–blend of communication, community and entertainment. IM, social networking, photo and video-sharing sites are fueling the trend. Advertisers that want in must find a way to align with consumers’ interests. Separately, the bank projects global online advertising is poised to reach $8.1 billion by 2011
Podvertising To Grow Fivefold, But Remain Niche - Advertising on podcasts will remain a niche channel through 2011–albeit a $400 million niche. New research from eMarketer projects a fivefold podvertising spending increase over the next five years.
Is The Web Headed For A Heart Attack? - You wouldn’t know it, but the world wide Web is bursting at the seams. Thanks to the proliferation of user-uploaded and professionally produced video, large chunks of bandwidth are being eaten up by a Web infrastructure that may be inadequate as rich content usage ramps up. Like clogging arteries, the Web’s pipes are headed for some serious blockage.
NBC Forced To Compensate Web Writers - The Writer’s Guild of America West won a case late last week against NBC Universal over the use of its members’ work on the Internet. The National Labor Relations Board agreed with the association in its dispute against NBCU over worker compensation. WGAW took issue with NBC’s decision last year to create Webisodes, short video clips, for most of its prime-ime shows. It told its writers not to agree to do the work until they’d agreed upon an acceptable fee.
CBS Invests In Virtual Content Creator Electric Sheep - Media giant CBS Corp. has put $7 million behind Electric Sheep Co., the digital content developer best known for its work in the virtual world Second Life. Electric Sheep creates 3D model properties in the popular online role-playing game, in which users create avatars, or alternate personalities. CBS has commissioned Electric Sheep for a series of projects, including virtual sectors devoted to Star Trek, and Showtime’s popular show “The L-World.”
Web Faces Video Ad Conundrum - The Web video advertising conundrum: marketers want to get in front of consumers watching video, but no one wants to be forced to watch ads. Consumers simply don’t have the patience to sit through a 15-second pre-roll — not when they can open a new browser or find something else to keep them occupied. Google, the Web advertising behemoth, hasn’t even tried running video ads yet.
Niche Audiences Serve Web TV Sites - “Rocketboom” was just the start. Shows like “Diggnation,” a “Wayne’s World”-esque daily video roundup of the top stories from Digg.com, are proving that Web TV has wings. Diggnation, which is hosted by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and friend Alex Albrecht, is niche programming aimed squarely at the 18-34 year old tech geek set. Whereas the broadcast networks wouldn’t give a niche programmer like Diggnation the time of day, these niche audiences are exactly what Web video startups want.
AOL Extends $900 Million Takeover Bid For TradeDoubler - AOL is holding firm on its $900 million cash offer for Swedish online marketing company TradeDoubler, though the Time Warner company said it is extending the bid’s deadline by several weeks to March 14, Reuters reports. The takeover bid has been resisted from the start, with enough shareholders opposed to block the transaction given the 90 percent acceptance agreed to by the two companies.
BitTorrent’s New Service To Launch Tomorrow; Service Rife With Restrictions - There are so many ironies in this that I feel bad for Cohen and his team: BitTorrent, the commercial company born out of the P2P software by the same name, is launching its service tomorrow, called BitTorrent Entertainment Network (BET)…it will launch with 3,000 new and classic movies and thousands more TV shows, as well as a thousand PC games and music videos each. The service will sell digital copies of TV shows for $1.99 an episode, but will only rent movies. Once the films are on the PC, they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them.
Online Expatriate TV Channel Aggregator JumpTV Raises $100 Million In IPO on AIM - JumpTV, a Canada-based online TV channel aggregator, focused mainly on the expatriate markets, has announce completion of its IPO on London’s AIM market, and is going to raise about $100 million. The company sold about 13 million of its common shares to a syndicate of underwriters led by Canaccord Capital Corporation and Morgan Stanley Canada and including Paradigm Capital, Loewen, Ondaatje, McCutcheon Limited and GMP Securities.
Facebook’s Sitting Tight; Microsoft Deal Extended Till 2011 - A decent story on Facebook and its decision to remain independent: some details which have been covered in previous stories, and some new ones. Among them, Facebook is on target to generate $100 million in revenues this year. The company has raised about $38.5 million. A new detail: Facebook struck its first major financial partnership last summer with Microsoft, which reportedly guaranteed to deliver about $200 million in ad revenue through 2008. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the advertising contract with Microsoft recently had been extended through 2011.
Google Extends Video AdSense Service; Adds WSJ, Conde Nast - In an illustration of how gray everything is in the media-tech-finance nexus these days, Google has extended its video advertising through AdSense, and included content providers such as Dow Jones & Company, CondeNast and other content companies. The videos appear inside Google ad boxes on sites that are relevant to the content of the videos, and ads run during or after the content. Google shares the ad revenues with the video provider and with the sites that show the videos.
comScore Data Show Yahoo!’s New Ranking Model Has Had Initial Positive Impact on Sponsored Search Click-Through Rates - Using the week ending February 4, 2007 as a baseline for sponsored search click-through rates before the ranking model launched, comScore studied the two subsequent weeks of click-through data to evaluate the impact of the new ranking model. comScore’s data indicate that for each of the two weeks subsequent to the launch (ending February 11, 2007 and February 18, 2007), Yahoo! Sites experienced a noticeable lift in its sponsored search click-through rate. The week ending February 11 saw a 5-percent increase, while the week ending February 18 showed a 9-percent jump.
An Ad Upstart (Quigo) Challenges Google - Google and Yahoo have been fighting it out over which company will dominate the online advertising business, with Google maintaining the upper hand so far. But in the competition for contextual text ads — those small sponsored links that run adjacent to related articles online — both companies are facing a challenge from a tiny but growing adversary named Quigo Technologies, a New York-based ad service that bills itself as an alternative to the giants.
