Monday, April 17, 2006
TV networks and iTunes
When I heard that iTunes was selling TV shows for $1.99 a pop, it made me wonder whether that was a better deal for them than selling advertising.
Let's assume they charge Steve Jobs half his retail price and net $1 per show.
Ad Age reports today that the American Idol finale will charge $1.3 million for a 30-second spot. The show draws 29.4 million viewers.
That means advertisers are paying about 4.4 cents per viewer. And if Fox is getting the rate card price for each spot, that means Fox is getting about 80 cents per viewer for the show.
Advertising Age: Cost of 'American Idol' Finale Spot Hits $1.3 Million
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/17/2006 02:32:00 PM
The Elephants come to the party
The Wall Street Journal reports today that the big packaged goods companies - beer, toothpaste and paper towels, the stuff you don't typically buy on the Web - are joining everyone else in the shift to online advertising.
These guys were responsible for 11 percent of the $145 billion spent on ads in 2005, but they spent only 1.6 percent of their budgets online. (The Journal reported the overall average online spend by advertisers was 5.8 percent.)
Factors influencing the trend: 15 percent of consumer media time is now spent online, 60 percent of the U.S. has high bandwidth connections, and the big online media companies have developed tools to prove that online advertising influences offline purchases.
The Journal cited Yahoo/A.C. Nielsen's Consumer Direct service, which monitors purchases and Web surfing in 36,000 families. Using the service, Pepsi determined that a promotion last year resulted in double-digit sales growth.
WSJ: Industry Giants Embrace Web Advertising ($)
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/17/2006 01:02:00 PM
The Perfect Market
People have talked about the Internet enabling "the perfect market" - where everyone has access to all the information they need to make economic decisions.
We've all been watching that come to pass. Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner, in Freakonomics, have written about the dangers Realtors face as information becomes more available - information is the marketplace where real estate agents find their margins.
I remember cajoling my real estate agents to loan me their copy of the MLS guide, which listed all properties for sale in the area. Now realtor.com provides that information to anyone.
Third-party services like Google's Froogle create catalogs for consumer goods and enable customers to find the best prices.
New to the scene is Yahoo's Fare Chaser, which enables you to search just about every travel site there is for he best airfares. It's a rich internet application, meaning that it uses AJAX to create a slick user interface that updates itself without refreshing the Web page.
I looked for flights from Portland to Cleveland today and got a tremendous amount of options and information.
When developing Web sites we are constantly faced with decisions about how much to disclose about ourselves, or acknowledge market conditions that are less than ideal. With the way the Web is developing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore what is going on beyond your own Web site. The challenge is figuring out how to best fir into this new reality.
(I picked up Fare Chaser from today's New York Times: For Travelers, a Way to Save More Dollars While Using Fewer Clicks.)
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/17/2006 10:30:00 AM
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Finding your audience online
Not surprisingly, our bricks-and-mortar clients want their advertisements to be seen by the people who they can do business with. With online advertising, that has been a difficult proposition. How do you know where someone looking at your Web page lives?
Most of the big advertisers offer "geo-targeting" as an option, but that solution is iffy at best right now. You can guess where someone might be based on the location of their Internet gateway. (Web sites think our Portland, Maine, office is in New York City.) The big portals know more about you if you've registered with them (and provided accurate profile information).
Google is targeting local advertisers, the revenue side of the "long tail." That's what its plan to provide free Wi-Fi access in San Francisco is all about.
If you are sitting at a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco with your laptop and you do a Google search, Google will know exactlly where you are send you advertisements for the business two doors down.
This is good news for small advertisers, but good news for our large customers, too.
It is bad news for the newspaper industry, which is already getting crushed by online jobs sites like Monster.com and classified-ad systems like Craigslist.
Read more about Google's Wi-Fi plans in InformationWeek: San Fran Wi-Fi To Put Google's Ad Strategy To The Test.
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/12/2006 10:09:00 AM
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Video: Ubiquity creates opportunities
Video on the Web has been a difficult proposition. Competing standards and players made it hard to publish something that you could confidently expect visitors to be able to play on their machines.
A couple of thing have changed that. Top news sites are using video in advertising, resulting in a lot of installations of Macromedia's latest Flash players. Apple's iTunes installation includes the QuickTime player, so more people than ever have that installed on their machines.
With Disney's announcement Monday that it will be making television shows available online, we can expect a large number of people to install their required "helper" application, Flash 8 - which has superior video and audio handling capabilities. From Disney's release:
Combining an all-new sleek, modern design with user-friendly functionality, ABC.com will offer episodes the day after they premiere on the linear channel. Consumers will be able to pause and move back and forth between "chapters" within each episode, but will not have the ability to fast-forward through advertisements. Episodes will be streamed in 16x9 formatting which offers a cinema-like feel to the viewing experience.
Encoded and streamed in Flash 8, which offers the best video quality and allows users on both Mac and PC platforms to watch the video episode, will be offered in two different sizes. The standard viewing size is 500x282 pixels (streamed at 400kbs), and the larger viewing size is 700x394 pixels (streamed 700 kbps).
The Washington Post has a nice second-day story about the emergence of video on the PC: Online TV: This Is a Test
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/11/2006 11:27:00 AM
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
New York Times redesigns
The New York Times has redesigned its Web site, and it takes some getting used to.
When I was in the newspaper business, it was commonly understood that any redesign would be unpopular when it was released. People like the familiarity of their newspaper, and changes are greeted skeptically.
There is a little of that going on with the New York Times redesign, certainly. But there are some other things that I think need to be reconsidered:
- 1024x768 layout. Sure, most people are at least at that screen size. I've got a tiny laptop, though (an IBM ThinkPad x41 Tablet), and I like to use the bookmarks sidebar in Firefox. Even full-screen, that makes left-to-right scrolling a requirement in the new Times design.
- Blue headlines. Blue is the universal langauge for hyperlink, but has been often pointed out, it is not a great screen color Moeover, with the increased density of the information in the page, it makes the page less scannable. In this case, a black headline would create a clearer distinction between stories.
- Bullet lists are crammed. The Times would do well to add a little linespacing after each bullet item in the lists at the bottom of the page. Scannability problems.
10:40 p.m. update: The Times changed the look of the bullet lists today (April 5) by adding some linespacing and reverse indenting bullets.
- Tools. The Times is making it easier to find their "most e-mailed" stories, which, when it was introduced, was a very cool way to find out what was the most interesting thing on the site. I think the Washington Post's version is better, though: They have a list of the "most viewed" stories in the section and on the site.
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/05/2006 11:37:00 AM
Connected in museums
The L.A. Times writes of a new trend, audio museum tours using your cellphone: MUSEUMS - For a tour, press the # key
posted by Tim Beidel at 4/05/2006 11:08:00 AM
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