ChasNote

The FT cites a Screen Digest study predicting that user-generated video sites will capture only 15% of online video advertising budgets by 2010, despite attracting 55% of viewers’ attention.

“Peter Chernin, News Corp president said at a recent conference: ‘We do not see big advertisers advertising with YouTube or MySpace. They have concerns about the content … and there is no scarcity value for the content … so there is very little ability to monetise video advertising on user-generated video.’”

Quite a comment from the #2 executive of the company that owns My Space!

In an NY Times article about the “24-hour newspaper people”:

“Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0 magazine, recently asked his writers to come up with blogs, and he writes his own. He decided to encourage them with (small) bonuses based on the number of visitors to their blogs, after one of his star reporters, Om Malik, left the magazine to tend to his own immensely popular blog. (Mr. Malik still contributes a column to the magazine.) ‘I don’t want that to happen here again,’ Mr. Quittner explained.”

Go, Om!

Last week I came across another case of the advertising robots looking dumb relative to their human counterparts.

Not that I don’t love technology and dream about a future where contextual ad-serving algorithms will mature to a point that brand advertisers can trust them as much as direct marketers do today. But we ain’t there. The tech-driven targeting engines of today’s ad networks (I include Google’s AdSense in this list) continue to put their advertising customers in awkward situations when they deliver scale (zillions of impressions across thousands of sites) without solving for advertisers’ need for quality environments and context that goes beyond keyword matching.

Techdirt pointed me to an example of Wal-Mart running ads on anti-copyright site (and illegal entity, per the Swedish government) Pirate Bay. According to Variety, the Wal-Mart ads were placed by Targetpoint, “an Israeli online ad agency that serves ads to match targeted queries on the Web.” My colleague Justin Watt brought to my attention that Microsoft is running on the same site (Justinsomnia).

I’m guessing Microsoft is another client of Targetpoint’s, because there’s absolutely no way that Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) would knowingly spend money supporting Pirate Bay. In fact I’m pretty confident that neither would allow their brands to run on the site, even if the advertising were free.

In a post last August, I disagreed with Eric Schmidt’s quote that a targeted ad is better than a targeted salesperson (see ChasNote 8/24/06). On second thought, I actually agree. But I’m still waiting to meet one!

A new study by the Online Publishers Association “found that when it comes to spending time using ad-supported media, consumers devote 17 percent of their media diet to online content, while advertisers spend only 8 percent of their media budgets in that same area.” (PaidContent.org)

eMarketer estimates $4.8 billion will be spent on ads on mobile devices in 2011, 12% of the advertising pie and up from $421 million in 2006 (Mediapost)

I caught up some reading over the holidays, and especially enjoyed Joe Mandese’s Mediapost piece on CPMs moving above $100 from the $15 CPMs premium sites get today. Reduced ad clutter and integrated sponsorships to drive higher audience engagement, he suggests, will act as multipliers to today’s online ad rates. Also, ads on niche publications may work better:

“A recent study reports that pages with fewer than one million unique viewers have a higher effectiveness in delivering brand messaging. This, the report asserts, is due to an increased perception of intimacy between the viewer and the content. Now extrapolate the potential for millions of sites with less then one thousand unique views. In order for advertisers to leverage this highly influential inventory, certain technologies and systems still need to be developed to place emotionally relevant brand advertising within fragment content.”

Bambi Francisco at Marketwatch says wikis are media too, and I wholeheartedly agree.

“I’m certain the negative tone from media executives will change in time as more professional publishers and producers begin to experiment with using wiki-styled ways of creating content. After all, wikis enable online expression and communication. And media is any form of information that expresses or communicates ideas or stories. It wasn’t long ago that traditional media looked askance at blogs.”

Back in September I made a similar case for advertising on blogs (the good ones that reach your customers, anyway) under the heading, Why Doesn’t Anyone Ask: If Content Is Printed On Paper, Is It Niche?

And another episode of trouble stemming from a lack of transparency (NY Tmes).