Category Archives: advertising

Digg for sale! Again. This time it’s for real. Maybe.

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TechCrunch is reporting that Digg is likely to get sold soon – probably to Google and probably for about $200,000,000.   Good for Kevin Rose and the VC folks, but I’d like to know from the key Diggers if they’ll feel any loyalty to the new owners or to the project.   Also, do they think they are owed more than … zero… on this deal?  

Social sites do offer their participants something of value = participation and platform – but are there “losers” in these equations? 

How do the high level participants who have put in thousands of hours and made the site what it is feel about these cash outs?

I’m wondering how often distribution of equity during the  *liquidity* event properly reflects the building of equity.    Entrepreneurial capitalism correctly asssumes you need to highly reward risk to get folks to take business risks and innovate.   But as Mike Arrington has noted entrepreneurs have a value system that appears to actually assign a high value the thrills and chills of the experience.   Thus to get optimal production and innovation it appears to me we need to pay “deeper” on these big internet deals.   In the case of a YouTube, DIGG, or Facebook I’d find a way to reward those down the food chain in some proportion to their contribution to the enterprise.   It’s possible that these rewards would be small enough that I’m wrong to think this matters much in the overall equation of optimizing the capitalist experience, but even a modest reward would brand the mega deals as “fairer” than simply a situation where fat cats effectively exploit self-motivated worker bees who have generated the user content and social networking that the market values so highly right now.

Click Fraud Class Action against Miva / Lycos: Good idea, but payoff and motives questionable.

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Update upon closer examination of the terms:   Holy crap, BatClickMan, this action is pretty bogus unless you are on the legal team.   Here’s the deal:  Lawyers get a bunch of cash from MIVA while the defrauded customers get 50% off future purchases of clicks from MIVA.      Given that MIVA clicks are generally of  questionable value and positive ROI is tough even with PPC campaigns at Google where they do much better job making sure clicks are legitimate and relevant, this is almost a worthless payment for the defrauded folks unless they have accounts with MIVA now and are spending huge amounts AND are getting some good  ROI.

I won’t even be bothering with this nonsense which appears more like the legal firm looking to nab a few million for an interesting case rather than much if any justice getting done. 

As a MIVA advertiser I just got the email announcing a class action lawsuit against Miva/Lycos that alleges:

… MIVA and Lycos breached their contracts with class members, unjustly enriched themselves, and engaged in a civil conspiracy by failing to adequately detect and stop “click fraud” or other invalid or improper clicks on online advertisements.  MIVA and Lycos deny Plaintiffs’ allegations and contend that all payments they have received from class members for online advertising were legally and properly charged …

I’m surprised there have been so few of these lawsuits because there has been and still is a staggering amount of click fraud, and despite some crackdowns all the advertising places are essentially misleading people about the extent of the fraud.    Part of the reason the wrath has been lower than one might expect is that you generally can get pay per click refunds from search engines  for many types of complaints and I assume they have done a lot of crediting of major ad accounts if fraud was discovered or even suspected.

Of course this may not be worth the trouble as the payout is in … wait for it … more MIVA clicks!    Ha – I guess this could be called the “one fraudulent click deserves another” class action?

Under the settlement, MIVA will establish a settlement fund of $3,936,812.00 on behalf of MIVA and Lycos, of which a portion will be used to pay class counsel’s fees and costs, and the remainder will be available to class members in the form of advertising credits that may be applied to up to 50% of the cost of future online advertising purchased from MIVA.  To receive credits, you must submit a valid and timely claim form.  Credits will be awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account the amount that you paid to MIVA and/or Lycos for ads that you believe in good faith to have been result of click fraud and the total amount of credits available.  For example, if the amounts that you paid to MIVA for the affected ads were 1% of the combined online advertising revenues of MIVA between January 1, 2000 and September 30, 2007 and Lycos between September 23, 2002 and March 30, 2006, you would be eligible to receive 1% of the total available credits.  You must certify in your claim form the percentage of your ads you believe were the result of “click fraud.” Credits must be used within one year of issuance and may be used only for advertising on the MIVA Media US Network.

Here’s the online claim form and a lot more information:  www.PayPerClickSettlement.com

Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping … a quantum leap … in BS?

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Initially I read the Microsoft engagement mapping announcement thinking this would be a remarkable innovation. They are claiming that EM will track a consumers interaction with advertising all the way to the point of sale which if done accurately would be a watershed in advertising accountability.

We’ve noted in many posts before how poorly advertisers track offline and even online advertising effectiveness, usually resorting to opportunisic reporting and explanations by their advertising agencies or reporting firms that stay in business because they support the agency advertising spends using questionable metrics.

Enter Engagement Mapping. Microsoft says:

“The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.” (bolding mine)

Read the bolded sentence again. Although I’ll have to see the methodology before rejecting it as bogus, that last line does not really suggest objectivity here. Rather it appears this is yet another way for a metric to support a course of action (increase online ad spending) rather than measure the effectiveness of that action.

This is standard fare for ad agencies who feed their kids by exaggerating the effectiveness of their campaigns so I guess it’s no surprise that Microsoft is going to help them do that for the online spends, which benefit…..wait for it ….. GOOGLE! And Microsoft too. But given Google’s approximately 50% share of all online spends I think Eric Schmidt should send Steve Ballmer a really nice gift. Maybe a even a Lazy Boy CHAIR?

Google Adsense for Video, Google Health

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Google is the big news today with two major product initiatives.    The first is Google’s entry into the health records management business with trial recordkeeping at a Cleveland hospital.   AP reports

The second Google development is adsense for video, yet another attempt to monetize video.   I tested the last attempt, using YouTube advertising embeds, here at Funniest Online Videos.    The results were abysmal in terms of monetization although I didn’t push a lot of traffic through the site and used cheap low quality traffic.  However notable about the YouTube problems was Perez Hilton’s huge celebrity site with millions of visitors which only had something like $5000 in revenues despite many millions of clip views.    Perez has switched to different advertising approaches.

However I’m guessing Google’s been learning from the poor YouTube system and that the adsense will involve better targeting and probably better returns.    That said, I remain very skeptical that video can monetize well.   As with social networking or a TV show, a person’s relationship to the medium is very important in these money relationships.   Searching offers the potential for good monetization of a person’s natural behavior and relationship to the media – often it’s a “win win” where your search for camera information and camera deals also presents you with advertising you *want to see* because it’s relevant to your needs.    It is very hard to make that happen with video or social networking, which remain pretty barren environments for advertisers. 

…. and in the “old news” department Blodget suggests that the fat lady is singing in the Yahoo Microsoft deal and it’ll go down this way.    This scenario – minor jousting by MS followed by a small increase in the offer followed by Yahoo aquiescence – sounds very reasonable to me.

Scoblegate? No – Scobleizer ads are NOT a sellout.

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Mike Arrington, hanging in Davos with the global power elite, has a great title today with “Scoble Sells Out“, a fake jab at his pal Robert Scoble who is finally putting ads on his hugely popular blog (and is also lounging in Davos with the power elite!).

No big deal in my view – Scoble has been good about disclosure and perhaps even more importantly is a basically stand up guy, so I hardly worry that he’s going to start misleading readers in favor of sponsor B.S. 

That said, the blogging community would be well advised to develop disclosure standards if people want to maintain credibility and avoid the huge ethical gray areas that come about when socializing, economics, and blogging come together as they have over the past few years.

My view on corruption in politics (and blogging is similar) is that the challenges don’t come from basic dishonesty or payola – there is some of that, but the key problem is  more subtle.     In systems where economic support flows to those who *already* share the set of opinions with the money folks you don’t need any dishonesty to have a major distortion of the process in favor of those groups that can fund the people who share their ideas.    Often people wrongly suggest that votes are “bought”, when this is rare.  Rather support flows to the candidates who share the views of the supporters.     This system would actually work OK if the contributions were small, but loopholes have allowed certain groups to have hugely disproportionate impact on our system.    

This is why the conversational marketing model is bogus.  Bringing businesses into the conversation is a good general idea.  But if it only involves those businesses who can afford to buy a conversation  it’s just a step away from basic advertising, yet disguised as real dialog.   That isn’t corruption, but it is distortion. 

The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring.

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OK, I officially don’t get it.  Don’t get all this talk about how online video is the next big thing.  Perhaps more accurately I do get it, but don’t understand why so many bright and well connected folks don’t seem to understand that there is a very important challenge with video that makes it far less significant of an online force than most of the early adopters seem to understand.     Online video has a role to play in the information landscape, but it’s not nearly as significant as many seem to think.

Here’s a BBC story about the very clever Loic Lemeur and his clever SEESMIC project.   We’ll see more of these stories over the next few years as mainstream press slowly figures out that the early adopter online community is very enthusiastic about videos, video blogging, and pretty much any moving pictures that you can pump online.   Seesmic is a combination of video and community and thus offers the killer combo if you buy into the idea that the online world is going to revolve primarily around two key components: social networking and video.     

I’m very skeptical.   Not about the internet, which continues to rule.   Not about social media, which clearly has become and will remain a key driver of online life.  The internet has always been about people far more than technology, and the best definition of “Web 2.0” is an internet driven primarily by people and their needs rather than technology and its constraints.   But I’m very skeptical about online video, and I think the early commercial challenges of companies like RocketBoom, PodTech, and YouTube are an indication that it is very difficult to build a business or a community around video, let alone create a highly profitable environment that will drive future innovation in this space.

The biggest single challenge to video is obvious but overlooked by most of the sharp folks I see working that angle:  Most video clips are very boring.   Unlike a wordy blog entry you can quickly scan for the quick info buzz, and unlike pictures which you can review at the speed of an eye blink, with a video blog entry of video clip you’ll need to pay a lot of attention, and take up much of your attention span to glean the nugget or two of interesting content you’ll be lucky to find.     

Video online enthusiasts often agree with this, but then suggest the answer will be better video indexing services – applications that chop up the video into dialog chunks or “ideas” that are then indexed and easy to search and easier to surf.    Sure, that is an improvement, but if I want the goods I’d rather have a transcript and/or a few still pictures than a video any day, because unless you are a very slow reader a transcript is going to be easier to deal with efficiently than a video.

So, is there any room for video online?    Of course, it’ll continue as a major force for cheap little entertainment bits and perhaps even could become a minor social force as tech enthusiasts use tools like SEESMIC to communicate in a more robust and intimate fashion than you can do with writing.      However the lack of monetization potential combined with the fact that 99.99% of all video clips will bore to tears means that ultimately video will NOT create the kind of sea change in internet focus many have been waiting for.  

In fact, the video revolution is so boring it’s not even online yet, and it may never be.

The Coming Crash of 2008?

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I hope Greg Linden, who is a sharp and experienced guy, was just in a bad mood when he wrote this ominous prediction about what he sees as a bleak dot com future:

 We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.

I’d have to say I’m not as worried and although I’d agree there is likely to be an overall decline in the sky high valuations of companies like Google, it will be partly offset by the fact that internet advertising is still in an infancy period.   Most internet money comes from ads, and the total internet ad pool is still a tiny fraction of the 500 billion spent per year on all advertising.

What, me worry?

The Donny Deutsch Experiment

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Hey, my Donny Deutsch post, part of our SEO Experiment series here at Joe Duck, is now at #12 worldwide as we move into CES.   What?  a few hours after this post I dropped to 34 – not sure wazzup. OK, now back to 12 minutes later – may just have been a server shuffle thing or my mistake …   My goal is to get into the top three sites for the query “Donny Deutsch” although Google’s quirkiness could make this tricky to do before next week. I think I’ll rise over time thanks to the incoming links and the inordinate amount of Donny Deutsch attention here at the blog, but normally you’d try to rise to the top over many months and not a few weeks. However “Donny Deutsch” is not a highly competitive term so I’ll have a shot here.  Though Donny Deutsch is is a fairly heavily searched name due to Donny’s excellent TV show “The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch”, his bombastic style and his ability to pony up $200,000,000 without going into debt.\

What?  You are looking for the Donny Deutsch Big Idea CES website?   Here it is!

When Targeted Advertising … ATTACKS…

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HEY!  I’m just sitting here minding my New Years’ business when suddenly this Google ad pops up in my face at Gmail.  Sometimes these targeted ads … hurt my feelings!

Are You Ugly? – Are-You-Ugly.com – Just an Average Joe? Find Out, Take the Quiz!

Google, I’m *proud* to be an average Joe.  Proud I say!

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.