Internet Advertising Projections for 2006 — who has the numbers?

IAB Resources and Research would appear to the touchstone for compiling various predictions about year-to-year growth of online advertising.

Unfortunately — for me, since  I need a solid prediction for ’06 now — the Internet Advertising Bureau is only showing estimates cooked up a year ago, and those include estimates for paid search, which by itself is arguably 25% of the category.

 

 

 

My worry working with expectations of growth in the high twenties and low thirty percent range, is two-fold:

1. Paid search shows no sign of slowing (save for some major click fraud discredit) and is, if one extrapolates Overture and Google Revenues, at least 20% of the spend and is not a space I play in).

2. The rapid rebound of spending between late 2003 and the present is widely predicted to flatten through the next four years and 2006, barring the development of a compellingly profitable new ad model accepted by marketers, could be the year that the CAGR starts to stagger.

 

 

 

 

 

Readings – What the Dormouse Said

The intersection of technology and the counterculture has always been a quiet but persistent theme in the sound track of the history of computing. John Markoff attempts a chronicle of the two worlds in his latest book, titled after the line in the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit that exhorts the listener to "feed your head."

The foreward is brilliant, where Markoff — who has been on the scene in Silicon Valley for over three decades — relates a conversation he had with Steve Jobs when the subject of LSD came up, and Jobs discussed the impact the psychedelic had on him and others in scaling the role technology could enhance and extending the capabilities of the mind. Markoff makes a succinct, but eseential delineation of the world into two camps — Information Libertarians and Information Proprietarians. Proprietarians are exemplified by the movie industry, the RIAA, Bill Gates (who early on cast himself against the practice of sharing code with his now famous open letter in  Dr. Dobb’s to those homebrew users who swapped his version of BASIC for the Altair), and those who would predict the demise of intellectual property through file sharing and piracy. The libertarians, Markoff says, are at the essence of the OpenSource movement, whose forefathers extended government funded projects such as ARPANET and opened up the standards of TCP/IP to the world and not a commercial entity.

 It’s a neat dichotomy, one that forces a binary alignment of the world into the Stewart Brand camp where "information wants to be free" and the Gates camp where "information is expensive."

 The book chronicles the efforts of Doug Englebart, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, and the coterie of coders and visionaries that transformed the world of information technology from a centralized time-sharing model of data centers to infinitely scalable, truly personal computers, technology envisioned as tools to extend and share the power of the mind. While many components of the tale are familiar — Englebart’s and McCarthy’s projects at SRI and SAIL are stories often told — and the influence of Xerox PARC is almost mythical at this point in time, Markoff plows some new ground in his discussion of how LSD was regarded in the mid-60s, before it escaped the labs, and the impact it had on otherwise buttoned-up engineers.

There is a little over focus on SRI and SAIL and not enough details about the overall role the counterculture played within the industry that followed the early innovations. The tensions created in the PC industry as freak-met-suit, the countercultural influences on seminal communities such as the WELL versus the traditional glass house mentality as corporate communities such as CompuServe. Markoff needed to take another two years and another 500 pages to truly chart the social threads that have been woven together over the past forty years to create the most astonishing industry the world has ever known.

 I highly recommend the book.

 

Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us

Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us

 Okay, so the Long Tail thing is growing old, but this is the best representation of the thing growing organically I’ve seen yet.

Udell's Del.icio.us Long Tail

Bragging ….

My daughter recently won the US National High School Rowing championships in the Junior Women’s Fours with Coxswain. This being her first year rowing, it’s a huge accomplishment for her individually, but most importantly her team, the Brooks School, which also won the title last year.

To put it all in perspective, I also learned how to row at Brooks and it took me until my senior year before I found a seat in the First (or varsity) boat. I never won a New England championship (which my daughter did this past May), nor did I ever earn a medal at the national level (there were no high school national championships in the mid-70s. For a novice to do this in their first season? Nearly impossible.

 Now Alexandra is rowing at the US National Junior Development camp in New London, an honor open only to the best junior rowers in the country.

 I taped the championships in Cincinnati and have posted clips elsewhere on her page here at Churbuck.com. More later on my forays into the world of digital video.

 

Does IT matter in Web Operations?

Does IT matter in web infrastructure? As I ponder a rebuild in a new era of commodity functions, the question is forced: “What should we build ourselves?”

To steal a meme from the Nicholas Carr article that rocked the IT world two years ago — does IT matter when it comes to organizing and operating an online publishing environment?

Carr’s thesis was that IT doesn’t matter, or at least doesn’t confer sustainable competitive advantage to an organization, and that while vital to business operations, should be managed as a utility on a cost basis. This pushes the question of what, if anything, a web publisher should build inhouse or seek outside from the market.

As I am in the throes of an infrastructure rebuild, I can point to some fundamental assumptions about what technology needs to be directly under the control of the publisher, and what can be sourced elsewhere.

Beginning at the bottom of the "stack" — the server environment — few, if any publishers have ever considered a self-hosted environment where the racks were housed on their premises and managed onsite by their sysadmins. Decisions about operating systems, application servers, backend databases, have depended on cost constraints, the existing skills of the technology management team, and vendor preferences. At Forbes.com we launched into a Microsoft IIS/ASP environment because it appeared to be well supported and offered some environmental conditions — particularly in database publishing — that were compelling. Inevitably we had to suck it up and migrate to an Apache/Java world, which caused our developers and tech team a world o’hurt. Today — the preferred environment for many sites is LAMP, by its opensourced nature a commodity environment that further commoditizes further application development by opening up a wide community of opensource third-party apps ranging from WordPress for blogs to MediaWiki for Wikis.

 Above the OS lies the tricky part: the content management system, ad serving system, and third party apps.

As I look at CMS options I’m restricting my intial scan of the market to five choices. They are:

  1. The incumbent home-grown solution (custom CMS development is a viable option, and indeed, the end state, even for customers of off-the-shelf solutions that require a high-degree of customization to fit their particular environment and variables)
  2. An open source solution — Bricolage, etc.
  3. A commercial solution I have experience with (in this case, Interwoven Teamsite)
  4. A hosted solution. ie, Websidestory’s Atomz
  5. A player to be named later

Continuing with custom development for the CMS forces the question "Should we develop such a system?" All technology sourcing questions — which it can be argued come down to build vs. buy? — need to assess staff capabilities and capacity against those functions which confer strategic competitive advantage and those which are "lights on/table-stakes" for staying in the game. Does a CMS confer strategic advantage? Should it be purchased versus developed? Would purchasing technology free internal application developers to focus on those activities which do confer competitive differentiation?

 A great deal of internally developed web publishing tools were a matter of survival and economics — we need it, we can’t afford it, so we’ll build it.

 The net of this scenario is cheap economics, and indeed, tailored apps, the result can be undocumented software which is a bear to train on, get users to adapt to, etc.

More to say on this topic anon … 

 

 

One month into the new gig

Lack of blogging here due to 65 hour weeks the past month; but coming out of the cave of analysis now and beginning to carve out some time to return to this blog (9:30 pm on a Saturday is an indication of loss-of-life).

Tons of stuff to post and pose:

1. Audience enhancement — not development as an art of "names" embrace. Wish I could find the old Bill Ziff keynote to some b2b publishers association in the 80s. Brilliant manifesto for working with one’s "names" on every thing from qualified circ, direct mail, registration, renewal, and multiple media delivery channels.

2. Podcast production. Easy as pie. Download Audacity, get a digital mike, then find something to say. Last week CMO Magazine launched its first in 36 hours from conception to publication. Production costs were the salaries of those involved. Issue is how to make cash from the thing.  (The story of getting copyright permission for the music in the aforementioned podcast is priceless. Good thing I tracked the owner down, he was the force behind the passage of the 1976 copyright legislation).

3. Lead generation – this is a whole new alien topic. Remember Glengarry Glen Ross? When the desperate condo salesmen are ravenous for leads and contemplate stealing them after bemoaning the old set is full of Polish people, deadbeats and people named Patel?  Now take that scene and apply to tech advertisers. 

4. Metrics – whole new game now that Hitbox and Omniture are in the game.  No more seat of the pants guesswork. Death to Webtrends and garbage numbers. But yet … still they fall short.

That’s it for now. Now to figure out how to migrate my admin password for this blog from an old laptop to my new one, and blogging can recommence or need to go on pause and be reconstituted, most likely under blogharbor at Matt McAlister’s suggestion. 

The Cross-over is on us

Welcome to BtoBOnline.com

"Jim Spanfeller, president-CEO of Forbes.com, responding to an audience question about when Forbes.com will surpass the print edition in terms of revenue, said, "probably in about 18 to 20 months." Forbes.com is run as a separate company within Forbes Inc. "I think blogs are an important environmental change on the Web, but I don’t know if it will be as disruptive as some people think for publishers," Spanfeller said. Forbes.com is "trying to endear ourselves to the blogging community with the creation of a blog on blogs," he added."

My baby has grown up. Damn. Ten years and boom, they’re like a teenager ready to beat up the old man. 

 

Update: 6.24.05

Steve Forbes is quoted in Folio as disputing the Spanfeller cross-over remark. Looks like Steve is jerking the leash a bit. 

I want one

The ultimate cell headset but definitely not hands-free

 

 

The Pokia 

N.J. resort lifts ban on Speedos, barechested men (May 1, 2005)

N.J. resort lifts ban on Speedos, barechested men (May 1, 2005)

Grape-smugglers and Lumpy-wearers of the world rejoice.