Category Archives: Media ecology

Google is the new Yellow Pages

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Thoughtful post by Robert Scoble

Like TechCrunch I too noticed that Yahoo dropped like a rock today and wondered what that means for Silicon Valley. Why is Yahoo in peril here? Banner ads.

Ford, for instance, has literally stopped spending anything on non discretionary things. Just one company can have a huge impact.

So, what’s discretionary? Banner ads.

You know, those colorful banners that you’ll see on lots of sites, particularly old-school sites.

So, why isn’t Google seeing a huge drop like Yahoo did? Easy. Google’s income relies on text ads that only pay when people click on them.

Those “cost per click” kinds of ads are NOT discretionary.

This reminds me of the 1980s when I helped do the advertising for LZ Premiums, a now-defunct camera/appliance store in Silicon Valley. Advertising for us back then in the Mercury News was discretionary. We did it only when we had some money from a camera manufacturer that was slated for advertising. Our ad in the Yellow Pages, though, was NOT discretionary. Do that and your business would almost stop.

Google is the new Yellow Pages. If a business stops doing Google advertising it might as well just fire everyone and send them home.

That’s the difference between the advertising world today and the advertising world back in 1999.

Later… James Cridland disagrees:

I agree with ‘Google is the new Yellow Pages’, but don’t agree with the Scoble-ster that “ad banners are discretionary”. And here’s why.

Advertising in Yellow Pages (or Google search) is for people who say “I know I want a Ford Sierra, but I don’t know where to get one”.

Advertising in car magazines (or Google AdSense on car sites) is for people who say “I know I want a new car, but I don’t know which to get”.

Advertising in the newspaper (or untargeted ad banners) is for people who say “I didn’t realise I needed a new car, but now you come to mention it…”

The crucial point is that what Scoble says is ‘discretionary’ advertising – in the newspaper, or radio, posters, or even ad banners (to a point) – are all difficult to measure in terms of effectiveness. I can’t buy anything through a poster; but the effect of outdoor advertising is undeniable.

Interesting fact: one in five people surf the internet with the radio on. I therefore argue that radio advertising has a direct link on Google’s fortunes – after all, how else would people know what to search for?

Myspace or his space?

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This morning’s Observer column…

Opinions vary on Rupert Murdoch. Some see him as the genius who has built the world’s only truly global media empire; others as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of mass culture. Playwright Dennis Potter despised him so much that when he was dying of cancer he christened his tumour ‘Rupert’. In between are a lot of media folk who spend every waking hour wondering what Murdoch is up to – and what he will do next…

MyEmptySpace

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I’ve been writing something about the MySpace phenomenon and decided that I’d better sign up. I was then confronted by this rather depresssing analysis of my condition! Zero friends!

The thing that’s really weird about MySpace is its concept of what constitutes a ‘friend’ — which seems to be anyone whose profile takes your fancy. It’s much closer to the teenager idea of friendship than the adult concept. Certainly, it isn’t anyone you actually know. For me, a friendship denotes a serious relationship that’s been built up over time (otherwise it’s an acquaintanceship). So it’s unsettling to see fiftysomethings on MySpace — who really ought to know better — using ‘friend’ in the shallow, teen sense of the word. There’s some interesting anthropological work to be done here, Holmes.

Update: Upon reading the above, Bill Thompson took pity on me and sent an email offering to be a friend! Which is very sweet of him, but he doesn’t count because I’ve known him for years. According to his profile, he has eight ‘friends’, which shows what a good networker he is. But at least one of them doesn’t count because he’s worked with her on the Cambridge film festival!

NBC launches YouTube for Old Media Companies

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Hilarious story from Technology Review….

NBC Universal launched a venture with its affiliated TV stations on Tuesday aimed at providing a legal and profitable way to distribute video online.

The venture, which was originally announced in April, will also include video clips from third parties such as CSTV Networks Inc., The History Channel and others.

Based loosely on the model of the hugely popular YouTube site, members of the venture will be able to add video to the system and also select which clips to play on their own site.

Advertisers will be able to buy ads by programming category but not by specific video clip, a measure that NBC hopes will eliminate any potential conflict with the ad sales efforts of its own affiliates and other parties that contribute content to the system.

And unlike YouTube, which has won a wide following with homemade video clips that any Internet user may post, NBC officials said their venture will have tight controls over which parties can become participants in the network. Clips will also be reviewed to ensure objectionable material isn’t shown, they said.

The venture between NBC and its affiliated stations, which will own about 30 percent of the company, seems aimed at easing frictions between networks and their affiliates over how to share the spoils from new ways of distributing video online.

Many network-affiliated TV stations were angered after being left out when networks started selling hit prime time shows — the lifeblood of TV ratings — through outlets such as Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes service.

NBC officials say the network will focus on short clips that will retain high quality standards. At the same time, NBC clearly wants tap into the thriving video-sharing activities that have made sites like YouTube so popular. One early partner in the venture is Break.com, which features user-generated video clips.

”We know that video should be shared organically,” Brian Buchwald, the general manager of the venture, said at a news conference at NBC’s headquarters in New York. NBC Universal is 80 percent owned by General Electric Co. and 20 percent by Vivendi, the French media and telecommunications conglomerate.

The new venture will be called the National Broadband Company or ”nbbc” — a play on NBC’s original name, the National Broadcasting Co. But the name is not likely to be widely seen by consumers because the venture will simply supply the video and ads to participating sites, such as NBC’s New York affiliate WNBC.

NBC got a taste of the power of online video distribution several months ago when ”Lazy Sunday,” a satirical rap video that had aired on ”Saturday Night Live,” became a huge hit online, but initially through YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

”In the future, when you have a ‘Lazy Sunday’ kind of clip, it will end up here and we’ll make a lot of money from it,” said Randy Falco, chief operating officer of the NBC Universal Television Group.

I love that last quote. One born every minute.

MySpace: News Corp begins to lose the plot

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Right on schedule. News Corp is starting to behave like,… well, like an old media company. See this from Good Morning Silicon Valley:

MySpace to change name to MineALLMINEspace

MySpace is “a place for friends” — as long as those friends aren’t Web 2.0 outfits living off the site’s traffic. That’s the growing sentiment at MySpace owner News Corp., and Tuesday company COO Peter Chernin told an investors conference that it may be planning to take some of those well known social sharing sites to the mat. “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker (sic), whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace,” Chernin said. “There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business. Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we build adequate, if not superior, competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them, if not exceed them.”

There’s a delicious predictability about this.

How to admit a mistake

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I posted something a few days ago about how FaceBook had stepped over an unacceptable threshold in relation to their users’ privacy. Now here’s the response of faceBook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It begins:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…

On the face of it, this is a really good example of how to handle a mistake. Admit it, apologise, fix it and move on.

The only problem is that Zuckerberg got it wrong first time — just like any other CEO!

9/11 as the catalyst for the blogging phenomenon

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Interesting Wired News piece on the impact of 9/11 on the blogosphere…

When the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it.

While phone networks and big news sites struggled to cope with heavy traffic, many survivors and spectators turned to online journals to share feelings, get information or detail their whereabouts. It was raw, emotional and new — and many commentators now remember it as a key moment in the birth of the blog.

When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world.

Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene.

“I have a scrap of paper that flew onto my roof,” wrote New Yorker Anthony Hecht. “Typewritten and handwritten numbers in the millions. A symbol of our tragedy. It smells like fire.”

Many bloggers strayed from their normal writing beats to produce a rolling news service comprising links to materials and tidbits gathered by friends.

Dave Winer, author of one of the earliest and most popular weblogs, Scripting News, used his site to post one-line news flashes, New York webcam stills and links to witness accounts.

The chaos was “a galvanizing point for the blogging world,” said Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media.

“We had this explosion of personal, public testimony and some of it was quite powerful,” Gillmor said. “I remembered that old cliche that journalists write the first rough draft of history. Well now bloggers were writing the first draft.”

FaceBook takes a step too far?

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Very interesting article in today’s New York Times…

But alas, it turns out that even among the MySpace generation, there is such a thing as too much information.

That threshold was reached, unexpectedly, earlier this week when the social networking site Facebook unveiled what was to be its killer app. In the past, to keep up with the doings of friends, Facebook members had to make some sort of effort — by visiting the friend’s Web page from time to time, or actually sending an e-mail or instant message to ask how things were going.

Facebook’s new feature, a news “feed,” does that heavy lifting for you. The program monitors the activity on its members’ pages — a change in one’s relationship status, the addition of a new person to one’s friends list, the listing of a new favorite song or interest — and sends that information to everyone in your circle in a constantly updating news ticker. Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market and you’ll get the idea.

But within hours of the new feature’s debut, thousands of Facebook members had organized behind a desperate, angry plea: Make it stop.

“You pretty much are being tracked with every movement you make on Facebook,” said Emily Bean, a pharmacy major and Facebook user at Ohio Northern University who signed an anti-Facebook petition on Tuesday, when the new feature made its debut. “It’s like someone peeking in on my conversations. People now know exactly when you became friends with somebody. When you hook up with somebody is now documented. Before it took some extra effort.

”While much of the anger was directed specifically at Facebook and its chief executive and co-founder, the 22-year-old Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg, some of the site’s users saw the episode in a broader context.

“Because our generation has been so obsessed with putting themselves up on the Internet and obsessed with celebrity, we didn’t realize how much of our personal information we were putting out there,” said Tim Mullowney, a 22-year-old aspiring actor in Brooklyn and a Facebook user. “This really shows you how much is out there. You don’t see it until you get it served on a platter to you.”

Mr. Mullowney said the Facebook episode had opened his eyes to a surprising conclusion: “I don’t need to know every little detail of everyone’s life.”

The Valley gets free Wi-Fi

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From today’s New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 5 — A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans Tuesday for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year.

The project is the largest of a new breed of wireless networks being built across the country. They are taking advantage of the falling cost of providing high-speed Internet access over radio waves as opposed to cable or telephone lines. The project will cover 1,500 square miles in 38 cities in San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties, an area of 2.4 million residents. Its builders, going by the name Silicon Valley Metro Connect, said the service would provide free basic wireless access at speeds up to 1 megabit a second — which is roughly comparable to broadband speeds by telephone — in outdoor areas. Special equipment, costing $80 to $120, will be needed to bolster the signal enough to bring it inside homes or offices.

The consortium will also offer a fee-based service, with higher speeds and technical support, and will allow other companies to sell premium services over the network as well.Diana Hage, director of wireless services at I.B.M., said she expected the project to cost $75 million to $270 million. She said the project was meant to be a public service and, by showing the potential for the technology, to develop and promote the companies’ commercial interests.

I.B.M. is providing project management, and Cisco is providing equipment. They are joined in the project by Azulstar Networks, which plans to handle network operations, and SeaKay, a nonprofit group that focuses on providing Internet access to low-income areas.

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search

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According to Techcrunch…

New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.

The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.

Search related advertising last year was a $5 billion market, still small compared to $22 billion in magazines and $74 billion for TV advertising – but the landscape is changing. The Financial Times ran an article on Tuesday about the belief that the shortage of marketers skilled in negotiating sites like MySpace and YouTube is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of advertising online.
Even in the short term, it’s still up in the air between the big players. Google’s advertising, which is generally believed to be more effective than that of competitors, hasn’t kicked in at MySpace yet. If Google can make MySpace search more bearable when it takes over in the fourth quarter of this year, then you can expect MySpace to drive more traffic to retail sites than ever. At the same time, IE 6 doesn’t have a native search box in the chrome of the browser and IE 7 will – to search either MSN or Live.com. We’ll have to compare these numbers with Live.com in the future…