Articles of the Day
24/7 Real Media To Launch Online Ad Network — 24/7 Real Media today is expected to announce partnerships with four major B2B publishers to launch BBN, a broad-reaching B2B online ad network. Cygnus Business Media, Nielsen Business Media, Reed Business Information and McGraw-Hill are joining 24/7’s network. Former CBS executive and MarketWatch co-founder Derek Reisfeld has been appointed Chairman of the new venture. 24/7’s digital media offering consists of over 1,500 sites serving ad impressions in countries around the world. 24/7 Real Media’s network reaches around 150 million unique viewers each month.
Google Looks To Wireless To Compete In China — Google may be trailing Chinese search leader Baidu.com by a wide margin, but the worldwide search leader is redoubling its efforts to compete in both China and Asia by focusing on the nascent mobile search market. Google expects to process more local Web search queries from mobile phone than computers in Asia by 2011. It’s a fast-growing and potentially huge market, said Google’s China President Lee Kai-Fu. “In some quarters, our mobile traffic will double, whereas it will take perhaps a year to double on the PC side,” he said. After gaining exclusive rights to process queries from China Mobile Ltd., the world’s biggest phone company by users, Google now leads Beijing-based Baidu.com in mobile search. However, overall, Google still earns less than half the ad revenue of Baidu.com in China. At last count, Baidu’s market share was 60 percent, up 2 percent from a year earlier, compared to Google, which had a market share of 26 percent, up 17 percent from the year before.
MySpace Tool Allows Marketers To Manage Their Own Profiles — A few months after opening its platform to outside application developers, the company plans to announce today that it will let advertisers directly manage, through a self-service tool, their branded profiles on MySpace. This is a vast change from the tightly controlled, often laborious process brands previously had to endure to have a presence on the social network. The idea is to eliminate much of the pain of using the social network, which should, of course, get more people to use it. Previously if a marketer wanted to launch a brand profile on MySpace, it had to go through a rather cumbersome process of sending all of its assets to MySpace designers, who would try to interpret the advertiser’s vision for the profile, send that interpretation back to the client, wait for it to send back additional revisions, and so on and so on. Now advertisers will have access to a self-service tool to upload assets and design profiles, allowing marketers to change up the content in that profile at any time.
GoFish Expands Ad Network — GoFish Corp., a youth entertainment and media network, has expanded its network with the addition of three entertainment sites: Urbaniacs and Cookie Jar Entertainment’s Doodlebops and Spider Riders. The addition of the new sites puts the GoFish measured audience at more than 20 million visitors, according to the company. As the exclusive advertising partner for these sites, GoFish will aggregate and distribute age-appropriate, blue-chip advertising across the sites to enhance users’ experiences and generate additional branded inventory that will support all forms of online advertising including rich media and video.
Yahoo! Inks Search Ad Deal With UK’s Media Corp — Yahoo! will provide search results and advertising to Media Corp as part of a partnership with the London-based media and ad firm. Under the deal, Yahoo!’s ads - mostly display and banner - as well as search function will be added to Media Corp’s publishing network, which includes Gambling.com, Onthebox.com, Flightcomparison.co.uk, Creditcardexpert.co.uk and Sport.co.uk. These attract more than 3m unique monthly users and generate more than 15m advertising impressions, mostly in the UK, says Media Corp. “Adding Yahoo!’s paid search and content match solutions to our in-house publishing network will enhance our users experience and drive new revenue to our bottom line,” says Media Corp CEO Justin Drummond. Also this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo! is close to outsourcing its search advertising to Google, after a first week of trialling the scheme delivered “positive results”. The search engine launched a two-week trial of Google AdSense platform for 3% of its searches last week, as it seeks ways to leverage its position vis-a-vis Microsoft.
WPP Digital Acquires Stake In HDT Holdings — WPP Group this morning said its digital investment arm, WPP Digital, has acquired a minority stake in rich media advertising and technology firm HDT Holdings Technologies Inc.
