Articles of the Day
Jivox Launches Video Platform For The Masses - Are smallish local advertisers ready to branch out beyond text ads and search marketing? Betting they are, Web video startup Jivox is launching a do-it-yourself platform for businesses of lesser means to create, target and deliver video ads online. The Jivox platform providers advertisers with video ad creation tools, targeting technology, reporting capabilities, and a network of publishers.
CBS To Power AOL Radio - CBS Radio and AOL are set to expand their partnership with a new deal that will make a broad array of content available to AOL users, including over 150 music, news, talk and sports stations. In addition to providing content, CBS is assuming responsibility for ad sales for all of AOL’s online stations, which number over 200, as well as the 150 stations it brings to the table.
Sports Site MaxxAthlete Gets $3 Million Funding; Buys Three Small Sites - MaxxAthlete, a sports social network and online video network based in Manhattan Beach, CA, has raised about $3 million in first round of its funding…it didn’t disclose the investors but said they were “four former technology entrepreneurs that have successfully monetized their businesses by selling their companies to Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO), IBM, Veritas and McAfee.” The newly formed company has also bought three small sports sites: VisionSports, HoopTV.net and MaxAthlete, three providers of online and event-based youth sports services. The company’s brands now include online video site for youth sports (GrassrootsTV.com); a social network for athletes (JoxxStop.com); a recruiting network for college coaches (MaxxInsight.com); and an online sports media site (MaxxScoreCard.com), among others.
Hulu.com Launches Wednesday; New Deals With WB, Lionsgate, NBA, NHL, NCAA; Network Needs - I started to write a post about hulu.com‘s upcoming launch over the weekend, then a visit turned into two episodes of House. It’s that easy. Even when it crashed while I tried to create a very brief clip for embedding, the site remembered where I was when I reloaded. So far, so good. But this is the week where life gets tougher for News Corp-NBCU JV Hulu, which plans to officially launch hulu.com Wednesday (never mind the premature publicity) after 18 weeks in beta. For one, hulu.com still has to work as new users come in. CEO Jason Kilar and team have been careful about scaling, working up from a relatively small number of initial invites to extending access to employees of News Corp (NYSE: NWS) and NBCU to seeding invitations through blogs to offering each registered user 10 invites. There probably have been blips but not as noticeable as those at equally hyped start-up Joost. That has to remain true as more people pile on.
Apple in Talks with Sony about Blu-ray Drives - Financial Times reported that in the wake of Sony’s Blu-ray win over HD-DVD, that Sony is in talks with both Microsoft and Apple about inclusion of Blu-ray with future machines. Microsoft had previously been shipping an HD-DVD accessory for their Xbox 360, so their adoption of Blu-ray would represent a significant turnaround. Apple, however, has not yet shipped any high definition drives with any of their computers. They’ve instead focused on distributing digital content through their iTunes Store. With the demise of the HD-DVD format, it seems only a matter of time before Apple adopts Blu-ray drives in their machines.
More Behavioral Targeting Than Even Savvy Users Might Expect: Study - when it comes to behavioral targeting, the prevailing ethos among marketers and ad agencies is “what consumers don’t know, won’t bother them.” As a long NYT piece on the subject shows, there is a lot more targeting going on than consumers might suspect. The paper commissioned a study from audience measurement firm comScore, with the intent of providing a snapshot of just how much data on consumers’ online activity is collected in an average month. From an ad agency standpoint, the gargantuan amount of data collected will mean that media companies will be increasingly dependent on Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, which have the systems in place to best analyze and organize the user information they collect. Here’s a rundown of some of the findings from the commissioned report: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace recorded at least 336 billion “data transmission events” - namely, instances of any user activity on their sites - in a single month. That number doesn’t include what their related ad networks recorded. The information being compiled might include a person’s ZIP code, what they searched for, or what they bought. Advertisers will pay more for certain types of data - for example, search tend to command higher prices than other bits of user data.
