ChasNote

Xeni at Boing Boing broke the story in an exclusive interview with Al Gore yesterday. Current TV has partnered with Yahoo around four broadband video channels covering sports, pop culture, automotive and travel. A nice coup for Yahoo, especially given Current’s former relationship with Google:

“The new partnership between Current and Yahoo is particularly interesting because until now, the television network had close ties with another search and online video titan: Google. Brief Google zeitgeist segments about top search topics aired twice hourly on Current TV. Additionally, Mr. Gore served as Senior Advisor to Google.”

Related: Weak auto advertising contributed to worse-than-expected earnings news from Yahoo, Mediapost.

The Digg discussion about Digg’s sales strategy and FM’s business model inspired Battelle to reiterate why he founded FM last spring (from the FM Blog):

“Perhaps the most common criticism of the FM model is that once a site gets to some scale - a figure of one or two million pageviews a month is often cited - that site should leave FM and hire its own salesforce. It sounds smart, but in fact it doesn’t consider any number of factors which go into the reality of running a sales-driven media business. Sure, if you want to run a traditional media business - where 10-15% of the costs are in content creation, and 85-90% of the costs are in stuff that have nothing to do with content - well, go right ahead. But be prepared to be surprised when your margins are consistently in the red. Have you hired a finance person? A traffic person? A business development chief? How about collections? IT? Operations? I’m guessing that many sites prefer to focus on what they do best, and let us focus on the stuff we do best. Not to mention, the advertisers out there have very little time to have 50 meetings with 50 sales folks from 50 different sites, each with 1-2 million pageviews. That model does not scale. (And, by the way, good luck hiring those 50 sales people. They are nearly as scarce as good developers these days, and just as expensive.)

Great news, Mom! FM got Dugg!

Of course it’s the Digg community (and, well, perhaps some Digg members who work for FM’s competition) thrashing FM’s performance for Digg and FM’s business model generally. Digg CEO Jay Adelson jumped into the fray with a different point of view (thanks, Jay!):

“We knew FM was growing and we’re giving them an opportunity to do so. We love their model, and we’re enjoying the fact that we have time to let them scale. Futhermore, Digg doesn’t even use up FM’s resources; They have assigned specific people to us (they have more than four people, I assure you) and it does not take away from their other clients….[And by the way] FM isn’t entirely self-service. They also have a salesforce, essentially the same thing we would be doing if we had our own sales team.”

Yeah! What do you think –- ChasNote writes itself?! Now I better get back to that long call-list of customers who want to advertise on Digg!

Contextual ad exchanges continue to create awkward moments for advertisers, but at least they’re getting funny. Or sort of funny. Here’s an Apple ad — with “PC Man” featured in a wheelchair with broken limbs — that shows up on CNN Money next to an article on the recall of faulty Segway scooters. From Adrants.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 on the latest Veronis Suhler Stevenson industry forecast:

“It’s no longer about just delivering a message — it’s about leveraging the connection that media (be it New York Times, MySpace, Boing Boing, YouTube, Digg, or Google) has with its users, who are increasingly driving the media (and in the case of MySpace ARE the media). It’s about enabling people to discover and connect with brands through meaningful, entertaining, and useful content and experiences, which media companies, who should know their audience/users best, are ideally positioned to facilitate.”

More from Mediapost:

“It also suggests that Madison Avenue’s shift from conventional ad-based media planning toward marketing-based communications planning is also having an effect, and that the definition of media is expanding well beyond traditional formats like TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. Perhaps most significantly, much of the shift toward new forms of marketing spending, especially the kind of experiential marketing aimed at active young adults, is a sign that marketers need to find new ways of reaching some important consumer segments.”

More on the Facebook whoopla at PaidContent: “Instead of the response from founder Mark Zuckerburg earlier this week telling people to calm down and offering vague assurances that complaints were being heard, it sounds like realization may finally have seeped in that top-down doesn’t always work even when the features are cool.” A good lesson for every business (an ad-supported media business or otherwise) with a revenue stream that depends on a loyal audience.

“How Not To Get Kids To Read Magazines” from Techdirt: Require them to download special software so that they can receive a free copy of the magazine via email:

“Of course, this comes as the very generation they’re targeting is becoming less reliant on email, preferring things like ’sitemail,’ instant messaging and text messaging as modes of communication. Going to email seems like a strategy from a decade ago. These days, college students are focused on communities: things like MySpace and Facebook. That is, they want to interact with their content, not just have it delivered…. The reason they have to install special software is so that the magazine looks like a traditional paper magazine, basically taking away just about all of the benefit for the magazine to go online. Readers can’t show others the content, or discuss the content. It basically blocks the magazine off — not just by adding hurdles to actually read it (even though it’s supposed to be free!), but by making it difficult to actually use it.” [My emphasis.]

In his Sept 6 column at iMediaConnection, Brad Berens interviewed William Urschel of AdECN, Michael Walrath of Right Media, and yours truly of Federated Media on the topic of ad exchanges. For Urschel, they solve the biggest problem in online advertising today, liquidity:

“A real-time trading exchange solves that liquidity problem. Imagine a world with lots of stock brokers, but no stock exchange. If you went to your stockbroker and asked to buy 1,000 shares of Microsoft, he would look to see if any of his own clients wanted to sell 1,000 shares of Microsoft. If not, he would call his buddy at another brokerage, who, if he didn’t have a selling client, would pass the deal in turn to his buddy, and so on and on, until someone came up with those 1,000 shares. The problem is that: a) this is slow, and b) every stockbroker in the daisy chain takes a commission, increasing the price for the buyer and decreasing the price for the seller. Would we put up with a 500 percent spread between the purchase and sales prices for a share of stock? Hell no. But we do, billions of times a day, in online advertising.”

I like the idea of an exchange or marketplace for the commodity end of the advertising spectrum — direct response campaigns or low-priced CPM campaigns that care more about price and less about placement. And there’s room for this kind of transaction at every online publication. But allowing this to be the only conversation between a publisher and a marketer limits marketing opportunities to standard, cookie-cutter programs, and leaves money on the table for publishers who might otherwise capture premium pricing for a unique marketing partnership. Here’s my contribution to the piece:

“The bulk of the online ad-buying/ad-selling discussion is still guided by a discussion of effective CPC. Because we can track it, we often forget to talk about any other value that comes with advertising a brand. And when the conversation gets stuck on CPC, advertisers stop paying a premium for innovative, integrated opportunities that entail partnership with a particular publishing brand, voice or conversation. Federated Media (FM) pulls together leading authors, community leaders and sites, and it hopes to bring marketers into those specific conversations.”