Category: Advertising

Marchex Acquires IndustryBrains, a Provider of Highly Targeted Online Traffic and Contextual Advertising Solutions

Marchex Acquires IndustryBrains, a Provider of Highly Targeted Online Traffic and Contextual Advertising Solutions

[disclosure: CXO Media is an IndustryBrains "user"] 

The Death of the Page View Meme is spreading

I’ve discussed the Matt McAlister warning that the decade-old online publishing model of "visit my site, read my content, rack up page views, see the ads" is doomed by RSS in past posts. So I won’t flog that horse again.

A couple items reinforce my belief that this concept is getting positively "memetic."

While listening to the Gillmor Gang on my homeward bound commute yesterday, one of the pundits opined that once a user experiences the convenience of RSS syndication into an aggregator, they never go back to the old behavior of clicking off to a destination site.  This is very true. Once users get over the syllogism that RSS equals blogs, but truly equals the delivery, not the pull of information, then the magic of the syndication model becomes apparent.

 The threat of course is that the old online publishing mission of getting people into a site and keeping them there goes away, and with it goes the ad impressions and the possibility of measuring the time spent, the clickstream, the clickthroughs, etc.

 Then MIN’s B2B newsletter published Steve Smith’s thoughts on the McAlister view of the RSS world and advertising (I’d link but the piece is impossible to find) that ends with this warning:

"With newsreaders getting easier to use, major brands like NYTimes.com are embracing the format. Now, as RSS is incorporated into browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and the next version of Internet Explorer, rolling your own online media will be as automatic as maintaining your own browser bookmarks. Face it. You’re about to get TiVo-ed.[my emphasis]"

This is going to be a fun challenge to figure out. While I don’t think the InfoWorld experiment in pushing big graphics or even text ads through the RSS payload is going to come close to a big revenue lift for publisher — and be a hedge against any future declines in impression advertising or reader response/lead generation, it is a good traffic development lever to pull at the very least. If RSS 2.0 gets "unfrozen" and the concept of microformats within RSS enclosures as embodied by the new Atom standard comes to the mainstream RSS world, then the possibilities of inventing a new revenue stream may become more obvious.

 

AJAX bad for publishers, good for users? – The Jason Calacanis Weblog – calacanis.weblogsinc.com _

AJAX bad for publishers, good for users? – The Jason Calacanis Weblog – calacanis.weblogsinc.com _

 He estimates he’d lose 10 to 20 percent of his pageviews if his blog network went to a full AJAX model.

(AJAX — see post below referring to Frederic Paul’s TechWeb column sounding the alarm — permits web sites to behave more like client software installed locally on the users machine, permitting users to perform functions without calling for a new page or reloading the same, thus cutting down on ad impressions). 

Spoofing the Tivo Ad-Skipper

 

While attempting to digest four hours of Outdoor Life Network’s coverage of the Tour de France on a nearly rainy Cape Cod Sunday, a good friend and cycling partner was handed the Tivo remote to handle the critical task of skipping the ads and "up-close-and-personal" banality of OLN’s coverage.

It was the "Queen Stage" of the Tour, the big mountain stage in the Pyrenee mountains, and the one tour my buddy and I wanted to really focus on. This was the stage when the classic rivalries would either blow up or get crazy — Ullrich, Basso, Armstrong.

As my friend, who is not a Tivo regular drove the remote, she would quickly hit the fast forward button three times to blast over the Cialis ads and then hit it a fourth time to bring the replay back to "real-time" speed. She got pretty good at it after a while, figuring out Tivo’s automatic rewind function that figures out the lag between one’s eye and the ads so that when she saw the program had returned to actual coverage and cancelled the fast-forward, Tivo would wind-back a few frames to the point where the block of commercials ended and the racing recommenced.

But what foiled her, over and over, were commercials with bicycle racing in them. OLN was particularly adept at inserting house ads and promos into the middle of its ad blocks and sure enough, everytime a peloton appeared, my friend would stop the skip and wind up in the middle of an ad for either an OLN promotion or a bike company such as Specialized.

 The other phenomenon used by OLN is voice-over ads they spam into the middle of the actual coverage. The announcer — Phil Liggett — spends a lot of time exhorting viewers to stay tuned for the re-runs of the 2000 series "Survivor", something I mute out by hitting fast forward once.

You’ve got to believe more advertisers are going to craft creative that includes actors or key themes of the shows in which the ads are placed in an effort to spoof us. 

Internet Banner Ads Look to Get More Interesting (and Thus Less Easy to Ignore) – New York Times

Internet Banner Ads Look to Get More Interesting (and Thus Less Easy to Ignore) – New York Times

Worth keeping an eye on. Contextual comparison shopping banners. 

AdTension | Doc Searls’ IT Garage

AdTension | Doc Searls’ IT Garage

"There are some other cases of value-increasing advertising. For trade and fashion magazines, the advertising often serves as a form of editorial."

What I said in the previous post — the prevalent pageview model is further toast if Adblocking takes off. And it will. Look at the conniptions caused by DVR technology so people like me can blast over the commercials. I’ve seen surveys of site readers where as many as 75% claim to be deploying ad blockers — no popup blockers — but ad blockers.

Doc is right — it’s the old Cluetrain Manifesto central tenet of the conversation with the audience, not treating them like anonymous eyeballs.