ChasNote

Avenue A’s senior VP for global media isn’t worried about Microsoft buying Yahoo. Or, as the Silicon Alley Insider headline puts it, “Microsoft + Yahoo = Irrelevant.”

“”There’s a perspective that going from three portals to two is bad for buyers. But spend is actually moving away from portals and much more broadly across the web, so I’m actually not concerned about moving from three to two, because we are really moving from 3 to 800.”

More at Ad Age:

“For the first time in the past four years, portals lost share of ad dollars year over year — at least from Avenue A/Razorfish, which releases its latest Digital Outlook report today. The shift comes after years of ad-dollar consolidation with the largest players online. In 2007, 19% of Avenue A’s media spending went to portals, down from 24% in 2006.”

Coinciding with the launch of a new sponsorship program on Boing Boing (Microsoft’s sponsorship of mobile posts), Boing Boing founder and editor Mark Frauenfelder explains how his site can accept ads without corrupting the site’s editorial integrity. Turns out, the approach at Boing Boing is a lot like the approach at NY Times, the BBC and CNN.

Silicon Alley Insider, another site featuring Microsoft-sponsored mobile posts, uses the “map it” feature to help their readers crash a formerly hush-hush advertiser party.

Another site puts Microsoft-sponsored mobile post widget to good use, RealTravel.

Looking to bask in the glow of audiences whose experiences are improved by sponsors, Microsoft has rolled out “mobile post” technology across 20 FM sites, such as Duct Tape Marketing, Stowe Boyd and Open Road TV. It’s great to see marketers making the effort to add value to the media experience.

The project team on the above includes Matt Nessier and Patrick O’Neil at Universal McCann; Jared Katzman, Josh Mattison, Marcia Simmons, Stephanie Loleng, Andy Yang, Nate Vogel, Ivan Kanevski, Frank Leahy and Matt Jessell at FM; and many content-creating members of the extended FM family such as Stowe Boyd, John Jantsch and Doug McConnell.

Jon Fine, Fine on Media columist and blogger at BusinessWeek, on Yahoo and Microsoft:

“Ah, Microsoft-Yahoo. It’s truly touching to me how companies are forever believing that if you mate two dogs, you can make a pony.”

Ouch.

Another powerful data point from JPMorgan’s Nothing But Net report:

“While portals were once dominant, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of minutes spent online in August 2007, down from 42% in August 2002. Meanwhile, blogs, online gaming, and social networking websites have experienced double to triple digit Y/Y growth rates in page views. This fragmented audience not only makes it more difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience through only a few publishers, but also makes it difficult for publishers to attract advertisers given their limited scale. We believe that companies that can aggregate traffic through the development of ad networks or partnerships will be more successful in driving growth in 2008.”

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile group is sponsoring FM’s 2007 Holiday Gadget Guide, a wish-list of geek gear from a dozen leading tech authors and bloggers. Right now the site comes up in the #1 position on Google among the natural, unpaid results for the phrase “holiday gadgets,” ahead of sites from CNET and CNN Money. Nice!