Articles of the Day
IAC And HealthCentral Partner For New Ad Network — Barry Diller’s IAC and the HealthCentral Network, a collection of over 35 health and wellness sites, have partnered to launch an ad network for pharmaceutical and health-related marketers. The network’s reach combines the 45 million monthly unique visitors across IAC’s e-commerce sites—including Match.com, Evite and Ticketmaster–along with the 10 million monthly visitors across HealthCentral’s condition-specific sites.
AT&T, Vizible To Launch Firefox-Based Browser With Ads — AT&T has gone Pogo. The telecommunications giant has partnered with emerging tech firm Vizible to develop Pogo, a Web browser that adds a visual dimension to searching for and organizing info on the Web. Pogo is built on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the free, potentially ad-supported application isn’t geared toward the tech-savvy digerati. AT&T is aiming for the everyday users of the Web with Pogo–a factor that pits it head-to-head with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. But according to executives from both AT&T and Vizible, the goal is not to start a browser war. “We’re trying to improve the way people find, collect, organize and manage info on the Web,” said Todd Finch, president and CEO of Toronto-based Vizible. “Humans are visual, and Pogo adds a visual layer to the browsing experience that’s intuitive to use.”
MySpaceTV’s Market Share Plummets As YouTube Soars Ahead — MySpaceTV’s share of US visits to top video sites was down 48% last month compared to Mar 2007 and now accounts for just 9.21% of visits, says Hitwise. It is a poor second behind top site YouTube which had 73.18% of visits, a 32% increase year-on-year. Google Video ranked third with 4.06% (down 52%). Overall, Hitwise found that the 68 video sites it analysed accounted for 1.09% of all US traffic in March 2008 - a 7% decline compared to Mar 2007.
AOL Launches In Hong Kong And Taiwan — AOL has launched local web services in Hong Kong, two days after rolling out in Taiwan. The beta versions of each website combine AOL’s email and AIM messaging services alongside regional content in Chinese. Each portal will also use partner content from United Daily News (udn.com) and Phoenix New Media, with AOL.hk also using China News content.Both country launches will include Chinese-language Google powered searches, a Truveo.com video search tool and AOL toolbar. The sites will also feature Hewlett Packard branding.The launches follow the introduction of a Mexican AOL portal in Feb and are the latest of 19 regionalised sites. By the end of 2008, AOL aims it will have expanded into 30 countries.
MindShare Restructures Into New Integrated Agency Model — In what North American CEO Scott Neslund termed a major worldwide “reinvention,” GroupM’s MindShare has been transformed from “the global media agency” into a “new model, full-service marketing agency powered by best-in-class media services.” As a result, MindShare Interaction, winner of OMMA magazine’s Silver Agency of the Year for 2007, will cease to exist–along with all the other agency units added in recent years to meet the demands of a changing media landscape.
Wall Street Journal To Relaunch Website — The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is relaunching its website in the next few weeks with a new design and navigation structure, reports paidContent. The company has reportedly spent millions of dollars on the changes with a New York design agency according to an unnamed source. The changes to WSJ.com include increased navigability to other Dow Jones sites such as Barrons.com and MarketWatch.com.Other changes, which have already been phased in, are a separate sports section and design tweaks to sections such as law and media. WSJ.com is also due to offer more content in non-subscription areas of the site, such as politics, food and travel, claims a separate report by Conde Nast’s Portfoio.com. It also claims that WSJ has been working on better search engine optimisation.
YouTube Users Earned More Than USD1m From Ad Revenue — YouTube claims to have paid out more than USD1m to users as part of its video payment scheme, barely five months after it first started. Launched in Dec last year, the scheme, called ‘partner program’, allows users whose videos reach a certain pageview to monetise them using ads, and sharing the revenue with YouTube. The scheme, available in North America and the UK, is now extending to users in Australia, Japan and Ireland. The Google-owned video-sharing site, however, does not break down revenues or reveal how many users have benefited from the initiative. Last Sep another video-sharing site, Revver, claimed to have given out USD1m to more than 25,000 of its user in a similar ad-revenue sharing scheme. However Revver, which splits revenues 50-50 with the video owners, took a year to reach the USD1m treshold.
