ChasNote

Congrats to Gil and the gang at Wikia! Today they announced a relationship with Looksmart for search, backfill ads and the technology to manage the display ads and conversational marketing programs us FM’ers are selling across the many Wikia sites. From the release:

“The LookSmart solution is comprised of a full-service ad serving and yield optimization platform and corresponding services to handle all forms of ad units and payment types (CPM, CPC and CPA). The platform and services will support Wikia’s sales of both CPC and CPM ads directly to their advertisers and will help Wikia optimize revenue and page yield among its various ad sources. Wikia will also become part of LookSmart’s distributed ad network, which provides relevant backfill for its partners to augment their own ad sales efforts.”

From Forbes, the September issue of Business 2.0 will be its last.

“…media outlets focused on startups and new technology haven’t shared in Silicon Valley’s resurgence. Venerable tech title InfoWorld cranked out its final print edition in April. One-time venture capital bible Red Herring–under new management since the tech bust–has struggled to pay its bills. PC Magazine’s editor-in-chief left that magazine after ad pages fell 33.5% through March of this year. Even one-time online powerhouse CNET Networks is reporting growing losses as the companies it covers flourish.

“Part of the explanation: Ad dollars that used to be spent touting new products in tech publications are being spent buying ads via sophisticated, keyword-based ad systems such as Google’s–a phenomenon that has helped power the tech industry’s resurgence. Meanwhile, fast-moving, low-overhead blogs are pushing into the territory once dominated by magazines such as the Industry Standard and Upside, and they’re sucking up many of the ad dollars that remain.”

An earlier Forbes article put even more of the blame on companies like FM:

“Meanwhile, Industry Standard founder John Battelle is keeping the bonfire of the print titles burning. His Federated Media Publishing is selling ads on more than 100 blogs, giving ad buyers the ability to spend big money on a collection of highly specialized sites–many of them focused on tech–that suit their needs. ‘If Cisco has to spend, I don’t know, a couple of million dollars on a trade campaign, they are not spending it with Red Herring or Business 2.0. They are spending it with Federated Media, with bloggers who cover the sector,’ says Rafat Ali, editor and publisher of online media tracker PaidContent.org.”

The WSJ celebrates 10 years of blogging with an article called “Happy Blogiversary.” Video interviews with Boingers Cory Doctorow and David Pescovitz, and Techdirt’s Dennis Yang, among others. Mia Farrow names Boing Boing as one her personal favorites. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster lists Techdirt and Metafilter among his. Congrats!

Tessa Wegert’s ClickZ column from last week looks at two conversational marketing programs — the Ask.com / Ask A Ninja campaign and the Intel / Digg Arc campaign — that succeeded because the brand marketers located media brands that organically reinforced the marketers’ messages.

I like to consider myself an expert on sniffing out advertiser messages among editorial content. But today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal’s MEDIA AND MARKETING EDITION newsletter has me stumped!

The email arrives daily with “WSJ.com Editors” in the From field, and most of the links are to editorial stories — so I’ve always pegged this an editorial product. There are advertising links, which are generally marked as such. Today’s first link is one of those: “Advertising: Dell is rolling out a TV, print and online ad campaign aimed at promoting its new line of colorful notebook computers, the company’s latest step to jump-start lagging sales,” just above the link to the Dell ad.

The second story, though, is marked “WSJ Video” but also says it’s an invitation to watch a Dell commercial: “WSJ Video: Watch an ad for Dell’s new line of notebook computers.” When I followed the link to the WSJ.com site and watched the videos, they appear to be advertorials or what PR firms used to call “video news releases.” Toward the end of the video segment, text in the video window announced the content was provided “courtesy of Dell via Beam TV” — aha! It’s an ad! But before and after the segment, the screen filled up with the WSJ Online logo along with text that said “presented” by WSJ. And the WSJ logo ran as a watermark over the video the whole time (like CNN or MSNBC does over their own news footage, but not commercials on those networks), and nothing on the website or player window (nothing I could find, anyway) disclosed that it was sponsored or advertising content — though WSJ did post a disclosure on the player window while traditional Cisco video ads ran before and after the Dell advertorial.

Wait a second! The WSJ crew convinced Cisco to run commercials around Dell commercials! (Assuming those Dell videos are, in fact, commercials.) The entire ad-sales team here at ChasNote is humbled. Wow.

From WSJ:

“Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, will scrap rankings based on the industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites.

“The move, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.

“Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.”

Good news for publishers in the content business, bad news for Google, which drops to the #6 position.