Articles of the Day
PE-Owned DoubleClick In Talks With Microsoft & Others For Sale: Report - This one will be a biggie, possibly the biggest digital media-related acquisition in the last five years if it happens: WSJ reports that online firm DoubleClick is exploring a sale, and is already in active talks with Microsoft, among other potential suitors. The asking price is about $2 billion.
ClipBlast Aims To Simplify Video Search Process - Web video-search platform ClipBlast is letting viewers browse video in ways that make the process easier and more fine-tuned. For instance, die-hard hoops fans can now choose basketball as a category and ESPN as a provider to return real-time clips of the day’s games as well as all previously released video.
Agency Uses Unusual Means To Negotiate Online Ad Buys: Online - In the span of less than an hour late Tuesday afternoon two of the biggest online portals - AOL and MSN - participated in an unusual sales process that netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising budgets that would have otherwise taken them weeks to negotiate. The process was unusual, because it was conducted entirely online, doing away with much of the meeting time, paper-pushing, and back-and-forth haggling that can drag such deals out for days, or even weeks.
American Airlines Uses Social Networking To Reach Alumni - Looking to expand its college marketing program beyond students’ graduation dates, American Airlines has partnered with social networking company Affinity Circles to offer students and alumni discounted tickets and the chance to win free travel.
Gubb Puts A List Twist On Contextual Advertising - Online marketers seeking effective targeted advertising opportunities might consider gubb, a Web-based list-making and sharing application comprised of lists of what people want to do and want to have.
Meredith Puts Child To Bed, Folds Magazine Into Online Portal - Print may not be dead, but print editions are suddenly dying at an unprecedented rate. Meredith Corp. Tuesday said it would fold Child magazine, effective with its June-July issue, but would keep the Child brand alive as part of an online parenting-and-family portal that will also include content from American Baby, Family Circle and Parents. It is the second big magazine publisher to announce the closure of a major print property in as many days, following Time Inc.’s announcement to fold the print edition of Life.
Video Ads on Web Get Twice the Interaction as Standard Image Formats - The results of recent research by DoubleClick Inc, of 300 online video ad campaigns, shows that audiences click the “Play” button more than they click on image ads, video ads are typically played two-thirds of the way through, and video ad click rates are far higher than those of image format ads. Rick Bruner, research director at DoubleClick, said “Online video ads are quickly becoming the medium of choice to drive both brand awareness and sales…”
Yahoo Email First To Reach Unlimited Club - It was bound to happen sooner or later. First it was Google that announced a market-busting 1 gigabyte email storage capacity in 2004, then Microsoft and Yahoo followed suit. Google and Microsoft then upped their storage to beyond 2 gigs, and now Yahoo has become the first to take it to the extreme: unlimited email storage.
Google Translation Well Under Way - Google envisions a world of statistical machine translation, whereby computers instantly translate everything from documents to the things people say to each other in chat rooms across the Web. As ever, the search king believes automated programs are the way to go, not (in this instance) human linguists.
British Web Spending Overtakes Newspapers, Up 41% - Thanks to a huge surge in 2006, online ad spending in Britain has overtaken that of the print newspaper business, Britain´s Interactive Advertising Bureau was proud to report. Web spending, which grew an astonishing 41 percent, was nearly $3.97 billion, while the press industry last year recorded a “barely discernible” 0.2 percent rise, hitting 3.72 billion. In other media, TV revenues fell 4.7 percent, while radio os forecasted to be down 3 percent.
Will Net Neutrality Expand? - Much has been made about a lack of federal regulations possibly leading to an ISP-controlled Internet, where tariffs would be imposed on Web companies for greater broadband consumption–especially as increased demand puts a greater strain on their networks. ISP providers have vehemently lobbied against neutrality regulations, saying that the establishment of rules would only benefit Web giants like Google. They add that tariffs would actually help smaller companies that take up less bandwidth catch up with the Googles of the world.
IDG To Restrict New Magazine Launches To Internet-Only; Readers Can Vote On Whether To Go Print - With all the talk of consumer and entertainment publications becoming strictly internet endeavors, it would seem like a foregone conclusion for tech trades. And for IDG, publisher of InfoWorld, PC World and some 300 other tech pubs, it is.
