Podcasting advertising revenues are expected to nearly quintuple in the five years, according to a report to be issued this week by eMarketer, Mediawe

Podcasting advertising revenues are expected to nearly quintuple in the five years, according to a report to be issued this week by eMarketer, Mediaweek reported. That would mean marketers will spend $400 million dollars on podcasts in 2011, which would be only 2% of spending expected this year in the interactive ad market.
James Belcher, the eMarketer analyst, credits most of the ad growth to Google (GOOG :
GOOG458.29, -3.60, -0.8%) . He expects the company to develop an audio version of AdSense which would allow any podcast producer to include ads in their shows. Podtrac's Mark McCrery, who has been building an advertising sales network for podcasts, was quoted by Mediaweek saying companies are buying spots in podcasts., "They are investing...getting some good learning and coming back for more," he said.
Meanwhile Oneupweb said its podcast audience measuring technology has been scaled up for use within a corporate environment and has begun to attract attention of major media publishers. CEO Lisa Wehr said its technology for smaller publishers has been in use about six months by about 25 clients. She detailed some observations about podcast use:
Evergreen content attracts an audience long after it's initially uploaded. Credit visibility in search engines for additional downloads.
Corporate podcasts, those done by companies, are downloaded primarily during lunch hours. Podcasts of an educational or entertainment nature are most popular at 4 p.m., presumably when people are getting read for the commute home.
Mondays and Tuesday are the most popular days for podcast downloading, probably due to their promotion via banner ads and press releases early in the week.
Having statistics on podcast consumption helps persuade decision makers to support podcast production.

Generational Shift in Media Habits

Advertisers must embrace change in order to draw new audiences
Jeff Dickey & Jack Sullivan
FEBRUARY 12, 2007 -

Now that blogging, YouTube and MySpace have made it possible for anyone to become a reporter, producer or social advisor, what used to be a frightening possibility for advertisers and marketers has become a startling reality. Gen X, Gen Y and other emerging decision-makers cannot be "wished" back into a 50-year-old media world no longer relevant to their personalities, lifestyles or interests. Using traditional media to reach today's new decision-makers is as appropriate as thinking one's dusted leisure suit still has some wear in it. Companies have little choice but to ditch the leisure suit and plunge warily into new venues.

Online games, satellite radio, iPods and smartphones have elevated mobility, community and choice to higher positions in any campaign's list of key considerations. Companies must measure, understand and embrace this permanently changed landscape. If they don't, they risk degradation of brand equity and failure to draw new audiences.

Once a marketer realizes the only way to build a relationship with this generation is to accept who they are (much like their parents have been forced to do, begrudgingly), where they exist in the media universe and what techniques are most effective to bridge the gaps, they can move forward. Marketers that will be successful in reaching Gen X and Gen Y grasp that media choices can—and must—be customized to reach individual decision-makers. The keys to unlocking the generational secrets are:

Creativity New generations of decision-makers are "digital natives." Text and graphics are a bigger part of their digital world than audio and video content. Advertising will evolve to deliver dozens of targeted creatives instead of a few "one size fits all" commercials.

Language They use instant messaging as a primary communications vehicle. They have evolved a very different "language," whereby they communicate in new abbreviations and slang. Marketers must "learn" their language and use it to communicate.

Formats They consider themselves leaders in the adoption of new messaging formats. Marketers must stay close to rapidly changing trends and tendencies.

"People call our generation apathetic. We're not apathetic toward the news, we just don't want to hear the same old bull crap all the time," said John Fiske, a 22-year-old law student in San Diego and a classic Gen Yer. "Nobody caters to us," he said, adding that the big television news cable networks—CNN, Fox News, MSNBC—"think they can attract young people by playing rap music at the beginning and end of their shows. We see right through it."

Media expenditures since the 1950s have gone primarily to television, followed by newspapers, magazines and commercial radio. But this 50-year trend has now realized its apex, with generational declines in consumption among Gen X and Gen Y.

Where we used to have only Web portals and sites, we now have VOIP telephony, digital signage and mobile media. The "descending triangle" of traditional media is being displaced by the "ascending triangle" of Internet-enabled media, composed of all Web-based media, e-mail, mobile media and digital-signage media. We at SeeSaw Networks call this the "Outernet" (or OOH networked media). The Internet is now blending with the "Outernet" to form this rapidly integrating media cluster, which is displacing the descending media triangle of television, print, and commercial radio.

The ascending triangle, digital devices and evolving demographics are driving this change in how media is consumed and the corresponding volume of that consumption. The aggregate consumption of media is rising by generation, as access is no longer tied to the constraints of a physical location. In addition, new technologies provide media consumers new channels of access to information and entertainment. These technologies include a dizzying array of digital music, video players, handsets, DVRs and an almost daily introduction of new and different devices.

Gen Yers are "Influencers" by nature, and they will influence younger and older decision-makers. New devices and services will be bought by/for them, they will encourage older populations to "get with it" and join them, and they will be emulated by younger generations trying to be like them.

The increased usage of multiple devices and services will continue to erode time available for more conventional media choices as media becomes more of an "on-demand" experience—as opposed to a time- or location-based experience. The phenomenon of media multitasking is now in effect: Young influencers regularly watch television, text message and Web surf simultaneously—creating a very convoluted media experience.

The Internet and associated applications are dominant media sources in their lives. They seek out new and improved media that have different consumption patterns than other groups. In order to reach, connect and engage these emerging decision-makers, marketers must first embrace them.

Is MySpace Making Money?

FEBRUARY 9, 2007 MySpace appears to be on track to meet or exceed the $525 million that eMarketer projected the site would generate on ads this year.

Fox Interactive Media (FIM), the News Corp. unit that contains MySpace, generated $125 million in revenues in the fiscal second quarter of 2007, News Corp. said on Wednesday. FIM is on track to break even on at least $500 million in revenues in fiscal year 2007, which ends June 30. News Corp. executives expect that in 2008 FIM will turn a profit margin of at least 20%, and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch said, "I think we can do a lot better than 20%."

eMarketer estimates that MySpace had US ad revenues of $190 million in 2006, rising to $525 million in 2007. eMarketer's estimates are for the calendar year, not News Corp.'s fiscal year, and do not include international revenues, which thus far have likely been minimal.

News Corp. executives did not specifically break out MySpace's revenues, but they suggested that MySpace accounts for the lion's share of FIM's revenues. In response to a question from an analyst, News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin said that an estimate of $75 million in MySpace revenues for the fiscal second quarter of 2007, which ended Dec. 31, was "reasonably accurate." Earlier in the call, Mr. Chernin said MySpace's revenues were up 25% from the previous quarter, which, if the $75 million figure is on target, works out to $60 million. That would indicate a total of $135 million in revenues for the period of July-December 2006.

International revenues will kick in more substantially in 2007 as MySpace continues its expansion. eMarketer estimates that worldwide online social network ad spending will reach $1.125 billion in 2007.

During the call, News Corp. also responded to a Wall Street Journal article in Wednesday's edition that stated that a $900 million search advertising deal between MySpace and Google had not yet been formally signed. The holdup, according to The Journal, centered on MySpace's interest in forming an e-commerce partnership with eBay, a Google competitor.

Mr. Chernin said, "The Google deal, you know, which there's an article in today's Wall Street Journal, we do have a binding letter of intent. We are over-delivering on our impression guarantees, and there are places where we're looking to mutually benefit each other."

MySpace continues to generate sizable traffic: It had 60.9 million unique visitors in the US in December, according to comScore Media Metrix, or 35% of the total US Internet audience.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING FIRM ICROSSING plans to acquire Spannerworks, a U.K.-based company, for around $18 million

OnlineMediaDaily has learned.
Spannerworks, a 10-year-old search engine marketing company based in Brighton, England, has done work for clients including Best Western Hotels, car insurance site Confused.com, SN Brussels Airlines, and nursery company Kiddicare.

In addition to search engine marketing and optimization, Spannerworks maintains a marketing practice around social networking. Similar to buzz monitoring companies, Spannerworks offers a "social media audit," which tells companies how their brands are perceived online, and who the key influencers are.

With the deal, iCrossing will gain its first office outside of the United States. Currently, the company maintains offices in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Dallas, San Francisco, and Scottsdale, Ariz.

The move marks one of several recent iCrossing expansions since it tapped Don Scales, former CEO of Omnicom's Agency.com, for president. Late last year, the company acquired a San Francisco-based search agency, NewGate Internet, Inc. In addition, last year iCrossing hired three industry veterans with ties to Madison Avenue: Ian Baer, formerly chief strategic officer for TBWA's Tequila; Christopher Marquardt, formerly head of client services at Omnicom's Organic; and Lance Williams, from Agency.com.

An iCrossing spokesman said only that the company intends to make an announcement regarding "corporate activity" on Monday.

Google's Personalized Search Shifts SEM Landscape

With the expanded implementation of its Personalized Search, Google has quietly but significantly altered the search engine marketing (SEM) playing field, according to Search Engine Land (SEL).

Because Google now weighs a variety of new and ever-changing variables in determining what to return for a search, some established SEM techniques no longer apply, or at least must be altered.

Google's algorithm now takes into account searchers' click history as well as their Personalized Homepage when it returns search results. The changes are designed to offer results that are more useful to the searcher, with each new user behavior becoming a new factor in future searches.

For search engine marketers that means the days of trying to divine that one secret formula for scoring high among search results are now gone. Now there are an unlimited amount of variations in search results even for a single search term, because search results in part depend on the click history of each user.

Also being factored into returning search results are the types of sites in users' Google Bookmarks, a social tagging tool analogous to del.icio.us. SEL speculates that Google Reader feed subscriptions or feed click history are not being used for Personalized Search, but the RSS aggregator could provide yet another data set for Personalized Search.

SEL provides tips on how best to approach optimization in this new search world, in general ensuring that sites are optimized for Google's services, specifically, and social search and social networking, in general.

New tech puts online ad measures to test

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer Fri Feb 9, 2:13 PM ET

NEW YORK - At Yahoo's finance site, stock quotes update automatically and continually, the numbers flashing green and red as prices rise and fall. Wall Street investors can easily leave a single Web page up all day.
ADVERTISEMENT
Real people. Real success stories. Yahoo! Personals. See Stephanie and Mike's story.

Ajax — the software trick used on the page, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s e-mail service and elsewhere — is enabling flashier, more convenient sites. It's also contributing to Yahoo's decline in page views, a yardstick long used for bragging rights and advertising sales.

"These technologies have outgrown the metrics," said Peter Daboll, Yahoo's chief of insights and the former chief executive of comScore Media Metrix, the measurement company that declared Yahoo second to the online hangout MySpace in page views. "It's really important as an industry to come back down to earth and off this chest-thumping about who's biggest."

More important than "truckloads of page views," Daboll said, are visitors' loyalty and their willingness to respond to ads — qualities harder to measure. If a page updates on its own without reloading in its entirety, people may be sticking around longer than the measurements suggest.

Experts say the stubborn attachment to page views also may be keeping some sites from improving their usability.

Jakob Nielsen, a Web design expert with Nielsen Norman Group, notes that many news sites force visitors to click multiple times to read longer stories in sections, even though he would much prefer scrolling down a long story and avoiding interruptions.

"Because you are measuring the wrong things, you are driving your project in the wrong direction," Nielsen said. "You are not maximizing what causes value. You are maximizing the things a computer can count easily."

Many Web sites and advertisers, however, continue to value page views, and MySpace officials say their users continue to return frequently even as the site requires full page reloads for just about everything.

"Over time, page views have been a pretty accurate measure of a site's popularity," said Michael Barrett, chief revenue officer for Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. unit that oversees MySpace. "A page view doesn't necessarily equal an ad opportunity, but (is) an important barometer."

The leading measurement companies aren't about to abandon page views, either, even as they develop supplemental measurements for gauging consumer interaction and loyalty.

"People kind of cling to it, even if they know it's flawed," said Gregory Dale, chief technology officer of comScore. "They want to see this familiar metric."

According to comScore, MySpace managed in just three years to edge out Yahoo as the busiest Web site in the United States by page views. In December, MySpace had 41 billion page views compared with Yahoo's 36 billion, down 2 percent from a year earlier.

Yet Yahoo remains arguably the Internet's leading brand — both in terms of the number of unique monthly visitors and the average time spent, according to comScore. Over the past year, Yahoo's monthly audience grew 3 percent. To throw even more confusion into the mix, rival Nielsen/NetRatings has Yahoo leading in page views as well.

Even before Ajax, techniques for measuring Web audience have come into question.

Through much of the 1990s, Web sites touted "hits" — the number of elements pulled from a server. But that rewarded sites heavy with graphics and photos, even though too many can be distracting, especially with dial-up connections the norm at the time, design expert Nielsen said.

Companies like Nielsen/NetRatings — no relation to the consultant or his firm — started refining which hits should count, said Dave Osborn, a director at Nielsen/NetRatings. All elements in a single page are counted as one, and thus "page view" was born.

It became a good gauge for advertising potential because it's roughly proportional to the number of ad impressions — whether a site typically displays one, two or more on a single page. Advertisers look to it in deciding where to place ads.

Marketers also turn to unique audience — the number of visitors to a site in a given month, whether that person visits once for 10 seconds or several times. The measurement is reflective of a site's reach as advertisers like to know they aren't displaying ads to the same people over and over, even if the site draws significant page views.

Together, the two measures have served Web sites and advertisers adequately, despite frequent inconsistencies between comScore, Nielsen/NetRatings and often a site's own logs. Adjustments were made along the way to account for new techniques such as pop-up ads, which appear to a computer like a regular page view and thus could artificially inflate a site's count.

But now comes Ajax, "the first that has changed the model of page views from an impression measurement perspective," said Sheryl Draizen, senior vice president with the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau. Her organization has convened a working group to set industry standards on how ad impressions should be counted in light of Ajax.

Other technologies that could deflate page views include Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which pulls a news site or blog's new entries, allowing a visitor to bypass a site's home page — and ads — for the item of interest. Likewise, someone can watch a three-minute video clip without needing to retrieve a new page.

In such cases, visitors may view fewer pages, but they are more engaged and thus more likely to pay attention to any advertising, said Steve Rubel, senior vice president with the public-relations firm Edelman Worldwide.

"It's easy to get eyeballs now but it might not be the right eyeballs," Rubel said.

Page views have their roots in traditional media, comparable to a newspaper's circulation or a broadcaster's viewership. Although measures for those media have had to adapt to developments such as the rise of video recorders, they were seen as the best available.

With the Internet, it became possible to measure not only how many people viewed an ad but what they did with it. Google Inc., in particular, has been adept at pushing an alternative model of charging only when a visitor clicks on an ad.

Jesse James Garrett, the Adaptive Path LLC president who publicly coined the "Ajax" term two years ago, suggests scrapping page views entirely.

"Page views have been a broken metric for a long time, and the industry has tried to put a good face on that," he said. "Now a new technology has come along to force the industry to deal with the fact that page views are ... not a good way of measuring audience engagement."

Mobile TV standards vye for acceptance

By Kate Mackenzie at the 3GSM Congress in Barcelona

Published: February 16 2006 12:56 | Last updated: February 16 2006 12:56

With promises abounding of sports events, reality TV and celebrity broadcasts, there was no shortage of exuberance around delivering television to mobile phones at this year’s 3GSM Congress in Barcelona.

Almost every large mobile network operator and handset maker at the trade show was demonstrating or talking about their mobile TV plans, and content producers were equally excited.

Strategy Analytics, a technology consultancy, has predicted mobile TV will be worth $3.5bn by 2009, and mobile TV trials carried out late last year in the UK by BT and O2 showed encouraging interest in the service.

The mobile telecoms industry reasons that “everyone likes TV”, while the television industry is also showing strong interest in mobile phones as it faces fracturing audiences for its traditional services.

However it’s far from certain how mobile TV would work, says Jessica Sandin, a senior consultant at Fathom Partners, which provides strategic advice on convergent media and technology. There is still little known about how customers will use the service, while commercial issues have yet to be determined. “No-one knows what the successful formula will be,” she said.

DVB-H, a mobile version of a widely-used digital television standard used in O2’s trial, is widely expected to become the dominant mobile TV technology, at least in Europe and parts of Asia. New services announced this week by BT and Virgin Mobile in the UK will be based on DAB, the digital radio technology.

Meanwhile in South Korea - which is seen as a pioneer in broadband and mobile phone services - another technology, terrestrial DMB or TDMB, is supported by big manufacturers such as Samsung and LG.

Qualcomm, the US telecoms equipment company which developed CDMA mobile phone standards, says its proprietary FLO technology is superior.

Chief executive Paul Jacobs told the FT that he believed there were good opportunities for FLO around the world.

“Certainly people in the DVB-H camp are trying to make it seem that DVB goes with GSM or CDMA, and Flo is more CMDA2000 [which is little used in Europe], but I don’t buy that.”

However he said Qualcomm’s media service operation, MediaFLO, which manages content distribution for network operators such as Verizon, was unlikely to be replicated in Europe.

“We’d be willing to be partners in it, but I don’t necessarily see us as having the same position we have in the US where we actually own the whole thing.”

One outsider with a fighting chance is IPWireless, which has raised more than $200m including $14m from US mobile operator Sprint. Founded six years ago as a mobile broadband developer, IPWireless’ technology, tdTV, is more aligned to telecoms standards than DVB-H, which hails from the broadcast industry.

IPWireless’ broadband products are already used by some big mobile operators, such as T-mobile in the Czech Republic and Orange on Wednesday announced a trial of the technology on its 3G network.

Jon Beizer, chief financial officer, said IPWireless received a sudden flurry of interest in tdTV six months ago which has led to talks with several operators. Echoing the comments many companies made at 3GSM, he said the operators wanted to move incredibly quickly to deploy mobile TV, speeding up the trial and review process. It’s moving so fast that Mr Beizer said he expects to know within six months how widely tdTV will be used.