ChasNote

ChasNote’s Asia bureau chief passed through India over the holidays and was impressed with the indomitable persistence of the advertising sales community there.

Ads were everywhere, from the front page of the Times of India — Yahoo’s ad was the front page; news started on Page Two that day — to private cement fences in rural towns, like this one for Vodafone in Alleppey in the southern state of Kerala. Made me feel that Times Square isn’t taking full advantage of all its opportunities.

From The Business Insider.

From eMarketer.

“Visitors are good, but loyal visitors are even better. Where can you find them?

“According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.

“More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.”

The vast majority of traffic still comes from search engines, but this data suggests that while we use search to find a particular nugget of information, we’re more likely to use social media to discover new sites.

Mashable reports on Chitika’s new study of the media consumption habits of 33 million web users in September 2009. One finding: Traffic that comes to your site from Facebook, Digg or Yahoo is more likely to become loyal traffic than traffic from Google, Bing or Twitter.

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That’s the headline for the Business Insider’s Chart of the Day from yesterday, which maps audience size for the leading social news sites.

(Disclosure: I work for Digg.)

From eWeek:

“We’ve all seen ads on the Web that were designed to deceive us: The popup browser window that looks like an error message from Windows, or the box that looks like an e-mail program and says ‘You have 3 messages waiting.’ To begin with, just in case you’re unclear on the matter, yes, these ads are illegal.

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“Lots of advertising networks run ads like these. Often they sneak through a genuine vetting process in a company that has standards and tries, imperfectly, to enforce them. Then there’s Yahoo’s Right Media. A study by Ben Edelman of Harvard

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shows that deceptive ads such as these are common on Right Media and that the company appears to do nothing to stop them.”

Can the dark days at Yahoo get any darker?

Among the list of 14: Apple and Google have peaked (though Google’s stock will spike later in the year); Yahoo and AOL will merge and will cut a deal with Microsoft to monetize Microsoft’s traffic; and Twitter will continue to gain momentum. And two of particular interest to ChasNote fans:

“The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year’s end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. I think it’s possible that Q1 09 will be lower than Q1 08, marking the first time that has happened since 01, if I recall correctly. This will cause all sorts of consternation and hand wringing, but in the end, it won’t matter. The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money.”

And:

“Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with ’social media.’ They will take budget reserved for media spending (IE buying banners and building out branding campaigns) and start to become publishers in their own right. This is not a new tactic (many marketers, in particular technology companies, have published magazines, for example, and many consumer brands create or co-create television series), but given the plastic and social nature of online media, many marketers will see these efforts fail, in particular when the efforts are executed in partnership with major media companies. The reason has to do with putting the cart before the horse: in order to truly succeed in conversational media, the company must itself be fluent in that conversation. A partner with tons of traffic, but who is not fluent, will not be the ‘translator’ major brands need

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.”

His final prediction is that he’ll finish that next book. I’m betting against that one. His FM colleagues (myself included) have plans to keep him busy with his day job.

A few weeks ago, in partnership with Mashable, Yahoo rolled out the BOSS Mashable Challenge:

“The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer to compete for the grand prize of $2,000 and an article on Mashable about your winning entry. How do you win? Build a kickass mashup — search engine or any other Web app — using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies.”

What I like is the timely applications that can be built overnight, such as this 2008 presidential buzz tracker.

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According to AdWeek, Yahoo’s new head of revenue Joanne Bradford has her work cut out for herself, most of which is staving off FM:

“Her task won’t be easy. Yahoo!’s corporate turmoil has damaged morale, according to agency executives, leading to a high churn of reps and inconsistent attention. Upstarts like Federated Media and others have proven more agile at constructing the kinds of deep integrations brands covet. Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been consumed with trying to stave off Microsoft and assuring Wall Street it can compete against Google.”

I couldn’t agree more, Brian.

Hey, it’s my site and I’m allowed to write snarky headlines.

Officially the news is this, as reported by Bloomberg: eMarketer plans to cut its 2008 and 2009 year-over-year growth forecasts for online advertising by a few more points, which currently stand at 23% and 16%, respectively.

“Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said for the first time last month that the company, the biggest seller of online ads, faces a more challenging economic environment. Google’s ads tied to Internet search results are still faring better than much of the graphical banner ads sold by companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft.”

I have no doubt that the online advertising market, across the board, will feel the pain of the broader recession. I also agree that Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL will feel greater pain than Google. But it’s not because Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — which sell mostly graphical banners instead of text ads — are used by advertisers for online brand-building, and brand advertising suffers more on economic downturns.

While the second part of that sentence is true, the first part isn’t. Most marketers buy low cost graphical banners on Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL for the same reason they buy text ads from Google, to drive clicks and other DR activities. Because they are less efficient DR vehicles than Google, they’ll be cut from plans first. The online publishers that have spent recent years working with advertisers on relevant, high-value, integrated sponsorships (rather than chasing Google) are going to fare better — in relative terms — than those three portals.