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From TechCrunch coverage of Apple’s WWDC:
“Apple has iAd commitments for 2010 totaling over $60 million, which the company says represents almost 50 percent of the total forecasted US mobile ad spending for the second half of 2010. Jobs said in his keynote that Apple has only been selling iAds for 8 weeks.”
Earlier this year creative director Alec Brownstein turned his resume / job pitch into a YouTube video and bought paid search ads promoting the video. His ads targeted only Google users searching for the names of employers from whom he wanted a job offer. So when one of those prospective employers searched his/her own name (and c’mon, who doesn’t), s/he would see the ad from Brownstein. He targeted 5 prospective employers, got interviews with 4 of them and job offers from 2. Total advertising cost to Brownstein, 6 bucks.
Thanks, NOTCOT!
Watch the demo here at the AdMob blog.
I’ve recently come out as supporting Apple in the mobile advertising war. This demo of iPad ad formats offered by Google-owned AdMob isn’t changing my mind just yet.
I’ve borrowed the above image from Battelle’s recent post at Searchblog. It nicely conveys the point that:
“Google, once the ‘pencil’ of the Internet, has become a newer, more open version of Microsoft, and it has to admit as much both to itself as well as to its public, or it will start to lose credibility with all its constituents.”
Pencil, in this case, is short-hand for a company that does one thing — and only one thing — enormously well. Google = Search. Now Google makes cellphones, browsers, mobile OSes and office productivity applications. Kind of like Microsoft.
Or Apple, but I think Battelle is intentional in calling Google the new Microsoft. Because while Apple makes laptops, mobile and desktop OSes, browsers and cellphones (not to mention music players, ecommerce platforms and retail experiences), it has retained an intense, control-freaky focus on what its brand means. Asked why Google isn’t doing any brand advertising right now, like all its competitors are, Battelle answers:
“Google isn’t doing brand advertising because Google doesn’t know what its brand means…. [And] Until Google figures out what its brand means in a post search world, it won’t be doing any brand advertising. And given who its competing with — Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Amazon, among many others — I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
Toward the end of Ben Parr’s post at Mashable on the nascent mobile-advertising battle between Apple (who recently acquired Quattro) and Google (who recently acquired AdMob) he says “Google’s greatest advantage against Apple is that it has more relationships and experience with web-based advertising, and it already has the technology to back it up.” But, then again:
“If tomorrow Apple launched an ad platform for iPhone and Google launched a comparable one for Android, Apple would win simply because it has a larger base of iPhone and iPad users to advertise against, making it more enticing to developers and advertisers alike. That advantage cannot be understated.”
Maybe.
But it’s not just about ad-sales experience or smartphone market share. It’s also going to come down to corporate DNA, and who’s wiring is better suited to capturing the types of ad dollars being spent in mobile. If mobile advertising is driven by targeting for local advertisers and retailers offering coupons — the transactional, direct-response arena that it dominates — Google will win big. If national and global marketers put their wallets behind building brands and stimulating (rather than harvesting) demand on mobile devices, I’m putting my money on Apple.
On Friday we launched a native app for Android users. From TechCrunch:
“Digg has just launched its own native application on Android Market. The app supports Digg’s core functionality, including the ability to Digg and bury stories and user comments. The new application comes only a week after Digg launched its highly successful native application for iPhone.”
Other coverage:
The Pulitzer Prize
It’s nearly impossible to talk about the future of news without someone predicting the extinction of two species at once: investigative journalists and working democracies. You can’t argue that wouldn’t be bleak. But Google’s chief economist Hal Varian points out that the biggest cost center at newspapers isn’t the journalists.
“There are huge cost savings associated with online news. Roughly 50% of the cost of producing a physical newspaper is in printing and distribution, with only about 15% of total costs being editorial. Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”
He also points out that newspaper circulation declines can’t entirely be pinned on the Internet: “Circulation has been falling since 1985 and circulation per household has been falling since 1947!”
Perhaps the Internet isn’t killing news, it’s just making what one New York Times writer calls a new kind of news junkie — one that doesn’t demand we spend enormous amounts of money putting that news on paper and tossing it to her doorstep.
I’m thrilled that the IAB and 4As have rolled out Version 3.0 of the standard terms and conditions for online advertising. The two sections I love the most: One, that v3.0 addresses auction-based ad platforms such as Google’s AdWords and Digg’s Digg Ads. Two, indemnity for publishers and platforms — like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo — where some of the content is links to other publishers’ content.
Make the move, agency friends!
TechCrunch reported its traffic numbers for 2009. Google is still the #1 source of traffic to the site, bigger than direct traffic. Digg, Twitter and Google Reader round out the top 5 sources:
“Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.”
It’s interesting to see that Facebook doesn’t make the top 5. I’m also surprised that Twitter represents such a small percentage of total traffic, given TechCrunch has more than 1.3 million followers in Twitter. But, hey, I’m not complaining: I love to see that Digg remains TechCrunch’s biggest source of traffic after Google.
More stats on where big sites get their traffic.
From PaidContent:
“Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent growth, in part due to the economic recovery. By contrast, Efficient Frontier says search ad spending increased six percent in 2009.”
In Q4 2009 Google added to its enormous market-share lead:
“That was a shift from previous reports, which had indicated that Google was losing ground to Bing. Efficient Frontier says Google’s share of overall search ad spending increased to 74.5 percent from 73.9 percent during the previous quarter. Bing’s share, meanwhile, shrunk to 5.1 percent from 5.3 percent.”