Category Archives: blogs

Online Sheep get the revenue shaft. Hey Google, when you gonna show *Average Joe’s* the money rather than Rupert Murdoch?

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Business week is fretting over how Google will monetize the YouTube content and whether they’ll share with Myspace owners News Corp. Myspace users have embedded tons of YouTube video content in their personal pages so this is potentially a big stream of cash for somebody. Poor Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have enough money as it is, so heaven forbid that the content producers or the users would be put first in line for a piece of the action that *they generate*.

Business Week:
Google could soon have the ability to stream ads to MySpace users who are viewing YouTube videos embedded onto their MySpace pages. The question is whether News Corp. will get a slice of that revenue, and if so, how much …

I think a more relevant question is how much of that revenue should go to those generating the content and the billion daily page views.

Sites (like Google) are doing a fine job of making it possible for Average Joe’s to find the web pages of other Average Joe’s over at Myspace who in turn does a fine job helping people build silly pages filled with videos and images from other infrastructure sites like Flickr and Youtube. They should be well compensated for this and I think 25% is a good number, with 75% of the total revenue generated going to the “users” who are generating all that content and all those page views.

“Professional” users like me already get a piece of the action from Google – about 60-70% of the ad revenue I generate at my websites comes back to me via Google Adsense payments, and I think that’s probably a fine relationship. At least until Yahoo or MSN wake up to the fact they can jump start their contextual advertising services with a temporary 100% revenue share with publishers. Then I, and a large chunk of the 43% of Google’s Adsense Revenue, will be jumping ship. Booking services only give me about 50% of the commissions I generate but that’ll trend upwards over time (ha – it used to be only 20% revenue sharing).

However it’s very intriguing how the big players in the mega money deals leave out the key people in the equation – the Average Joe user. Part of that is simply scale. An average myspace user is only generating nickels and dimes (literally) per month in ad revenue. Collectively it’s a truckload of money but individually not much and Myspace does provide a good service to the user. Win Win? Maybe, but I think the trend will be towards people valuing their own content and their eyeball time more selfishly than they do right now.

The problem with all this great people-generated content — clearly the heart and soul of the new internet — is that the people generating it are getting left in the revenue dust. There are exceptions who manage to turn a few bucks here and there from the crumbs dropped by the mega monetizers like Google, but the average Joe who blogs and posts pictures and has a Myspace page with his Youtube videos gets nothing but the use of the online tools. That searchability and infrastructure is worth something. Arguably it’s worth a lot and clearly Average Joe is happy so far getting sh** for all his content effort.

However, I think over time Average Joe will become more demanding, perhaps even having the audacity to suggest that the collective fruits of all that online labor should be shared not just among Google and friends, but shared with those who watch it all and who make it all worth watching.

Blogs are killing journalism? So what’s the bad news?

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Wow, talk about missing the point and the future.

Kent has a post about the running “blogs vs mainstream journalism” debates which seem to be heating up again lately, but he suggests that bloggers have their place and it isn’t an honored place as citizen journalists.
>>> It will be the same journalists who get paid for doing it now <<<

I think he’s really missing the key blogging advantages. Most importantly, this is not about ONE journalist vs ONE blogger, it’s about ONE journalist vs TEN THOUSAND bloggers.

Even the most virtuous journalist:

1) Needs to sleep. Expert bloggers are collectively around 24/7/365

2) Makes far more than is needed to get quality informed commentary from bloggers, who work for … hmmm, let me go check … oh, that would be ZERO dollars per hour.

3) Does not live in the affected areas and can’t get there the instant news happens. . This personalization and localization is a key reason blogs are already replacing mainstream, and rapidly.

4) Is not even remotely as good as people like Kent suggest. My god, try spending 15 minutes watching the jingoist FOX babes or even the very competent CNN world reporters. They cannot possibly match thousands of citizens who speak the language and are smack in the middle of the line of news fire (and gunfire).

Sure, I’d take an Ed Murrow in New York City over Joe Sixpack in New York City, but not when reporting on Hawaii earthquakes, or Peoria, or Berlin, or Kabul, or Tashkent, or Baghdad, or …

Carnival of Marketing … October 15, 2006

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This week is the last where I shall host the Carnival of Marketing. For future hosting and posting go over to the blog of Noah

Sadly, I only had one submission but happily it’s the best of the 12 articles that were sent in over the past two weeks.

Nedra Kline Weinreich presents:
Norms in Dorms (Social Marketing)

Following are the articles sent in last week that did not get posted along with a link to a page with all articles sent to me over the two week hosting period:

Barry Welford presents Late Is Rude And Customers Notice
posted at BPWrap – Internet Marketing From A Different Point Of View.

Phil B. presents Phil for Humanity: Top Ten Reasons Why No One Clicks on Your Ads posted at Phil for Humanity.7 Golden Guidelines For Having Meetings
http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/10/03/7-golden-guidelines-for-having-meetings/
Brief blurb: “Article that gives 7 practical guidelines on arranging better meetings.”

Lickhau Loo presents Know your Market in Internet MLM
posted at Internet MLM Development.

All Carnival of Marketing articles of the past two weeks.

CNET – the tech canary in the internet coal mine?

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Mike Arrington points out over at TechCrunch that CNET’s traffic is going down, and fast.
For many years CNET was the top spot for tech news and it still is a superb source for technology news, reviews, and more.

Yet as the web moves to what you could call “power niches”, e.g. Technology news, where a certain group of sites dominate and thousands of other sites participate, the traffic is logically getting spread among a rapidly growing number of “good” blogs and websites.

I haven’t looked to see how the growth in viewership compares to growth in number of blogs, but I’m guessing the later is happening at a much greater rate, especially in the tech sector where you’d have pretty much every tech person now online and spending a lot of time online.

Thus the potential total tech page views are levelling off as the number of tech blogs skyrockets. The result? Less traffic to *former* key tech resource and more to the new kids on the block, though this may indicate they can never attain the status, or traffic, CNET once enjoyed.

This is really speculative but if it’s true then we might expect similar things to happen in other sectors as the number of participants levels off while the number of resources and blogs increases.

You call mainstream “news” Journalism? I call it an intellectual wasteland.

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Over at Jeff Jarvis‘, as well as all over the world, there’s a debate about how online news will affect offline news.
An anonymous comment notes:
>>news organizations AREN’T the ones keeping democracy alive. And maybe they haven’t done so for awhile<<

Exactly correct. “News organizations”, even at their best, reflect a highly commercialized, narrow focus on events of usually superficial and passing interest. More time’s been given to the Yankee pitcher plane crash than, say, the recent study suggesting an enormous death toll in Iraq or developments in Darfur.

Even politics is covered by almost all major outlets as scandal and personalities more than issues and substance. The stories of the century, often in the developing world and rooted in the life and death struggles facing *hundreds of millions* are eclipsed by Michael Jackson and Madonna. A notable exception has been Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN with an outstanding effort by that team to cover the African nightmares of war, famine, and AIDS.
The journalistic high road, for the most part, was left far in the distance decades ago when Ed Murrows were replaced by Geraldos and Bill O’Reillys.

Modern “journalism” … isn’t journalism. It’s a wasteland of superficiality and celebrity ruled by ratings, circulation, and money.

The internet may not make things better, but it can’t get much worse.

More on this story from:
Dave Winer
Dan Blank
BuzzMachine

Time Warner to Google: We spell your merger “SueTube”. Battelle to TW: Lookout!

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John Battelle thinks Time Warner is mistaken to attack Google on copyright, writing over at Searchblog:

a shot across the bow may bring a broadside from the other side

I usually agree with John Battelle but I don’t really follow his logic here. I agree with him and Bob Dylan that “The Times They are a Changin”“, and that we need a new song to show how the old media empires don’t get the internet. I’d call that song “The Time Warner’s .. They Aren’t a Changin’ “.

However, I don’t see how bringing out the big legal beasts will hurt Time Warner. Frankly, I think they just want Google to throw money at them. As the Napster buyout proved all this has little to do with “rights”, it’s a money grab, sung as usual to the tune of that great O’Jay’s tune of years and years ago “The Love of Money” :
Money money money money ….. money!
The HUGE winners in this are the clever YouTube founders who really just created a very clever distribution system at an opportune time. The user community, and then the GoogleBucks, followed. One thing that irks me about all these mega deals – including Google itself – is that they are built on the backs of the swelling supply of (mostly) user generated content and in the case of YouTube a lot of illegally obtained copyrighted stuff. There will be little or no compensation to the *key components* of the YouTube environment other than a distribution vehicle. Now, one might argue that that exposure is enough compensation for an average YouTube uploader but it still seems…”wrong” to me.

I’d agree that those who create and then monetize these efforts should make a lot, but it’s unfortunate that people, like sheep, choose not to aggressively explore all our online alternatives. I think if we did do more exploring and innovative thinking we’d have a stronger ecosystem of companies rather than a few big players and a plethora of “also rans” standing around drooling at the prospect of a Google or Yahoo buyout.

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.

Zenrob: Can Youtube win 11 Superbowls?

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I’m mangling his point a bit in that title, but Zenrob  has a great new post that does some math to ponder Robert Scoble’s question to me today:

“Tell me, is the $3 million for a minute of Superbowl ad time worth it? If so, why wouldn’t it be worth doing video advertising on YouTube?”

I said over there that I think it’s all about the math and the prospective math of these deals.  Robert’s great but I think he’s seeing this through his channel9/podtech video-enhanced glasses that make video seem more viable as a commercial medium than it really is.

To answer Zenrob’s excellent math question:
Else > 2*Youtubes > 10*11Superbowls

Facebook worth more than YouTube? Don says “yes”

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Don Dodge over at Microsoft has a great little thumbnail analysis of the business prospects of YouTube and Facebook, and concludes both are way overpriced at current valuations and Facebook is more valuable at 700 million. He cites Scoble’s latest thinking on the topic as well though it seems to me Robert seems too supportive of buying anything that even smells like Web 2.0 and is still feeling a bit hostile toward his ex employer.   I don’t blame him for that since he was way ahead on the new web and blogging and Microsoft’s failure to “get it” must have been really frustrating.

He’s not doing an extensive analysis but this is the best actual math I’ve seen regarding these deals, which as Don indicates with his little summary, appear to be valued more like Granny’s china than businesses. Given the uncertainties I think he’s generous to go 20x expected earnings. The landscape is changing daily and it’s not clear people will stick to favorite sites the way they stick to favorite brands (I predict we the people will not show much in the way of online brand loyalty, and this will shake it all up a lot in the coming years).

Google may not be evil, but their advertisers often are. Facilitators of illegal ads should be held accountable

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Although I think Google really tries to follow the “don’t be evil” mantra I think it now rings fairly hollow (ha – especially if it’s ringing up a ringtone ad scam at Google Adwords).

The problems are click fraud and downright illegal advertising which is running rampant all over the internet. This is a great set of PPC fraud advertising examples displayed at Google from a Harvard Law researcher, a proverbial drop in the online bucket of fraud.

Google, as the 800 pound gorilla, is the major beneficiary but this is an area that is simply ripe for legislation to prevent the plethora of PPC fraud schemes, ringtone scams, false advertising, and many, many more from polluting the online advertising space.

Why is this such fertile ground? It’s the new and fascinating combination of young users, young advertisers, young and old scammers, anonymity, global reach, and more that make this a complex and growing problem. Google et al are taking a “let the buyer beware” approach which is both evil and ignores the fact that many of the buyers are kids who wouldn’t know a scam from a treasure trove.

Ironically the solution to the scam ads is very simple. One new Law: If you run an advertisement you are responsible for any refunds in the event of a dispute with the advertiser. Make the publisher deal with their friend the advertiser who they are implicitly endorsing by showing the ad. This would clean it up very fast.

PPC fraud solution is not as easy, though I’d consider this:

1) Have teams of objective ombudsman researchers evaluate the fraud component at the different search engines.

2) Engines must refund to each account this average fraud component.

This incentifies the SE’s finding out and killing off the fraudulent clicks quickly, rather than the current lackluster efforts to root out the problems.