I know this but I can’t. stop. using. it.
Millions of people use the tool Ghostery to block online tracking technology—some may not realize that it feeds data to the ad industry.
via A Popular Ad Blocker Also Helps the Ad Industry | MIT Technology Review.
Facebook just hit 1 million advertisers, a milestone signaling that it has become a mainstream advertising channel for small and medium-sized businesses.
via You Know What’s Cool? 1 Million Advertisers On Facebook – Forbes.
A couple more telling stats: Facebook claims more than 2 billion connections between members and local businesses, with 70% of users in North America connected to a local business. On average, local business Facebook Pages produce 645 million views and 13 million comments (not always positive, it must be said).
Urtak, a polling platform for media outlets, has managed to get its technology implemented on 12,000 sites including Sports Illustrated, the Daily Dish, InStyle and Mashable.
Some more details:
Using a metric called “impression lift,” Urtak shows that adding one of its polls can lead to a 50 percent rise in impressions of an article. It’s not clear if slapping a brand logo on a poll helps, but it is a new place for sponsored content to live in the middle of the page. Sponsored polls cost a monthly minimum of $1000 for advertisers and Urtak splits the revenue with the publisher. But they’re performing well. This post alone on TheBlaze generated $600 for the publisher.
There’s two ingredients to doing something this big in a successful way– first, you got to have big budgets and second, you have to be trending just enough where something like this can really grease the wheel. I think this is a nice job by Samsung:
The connection: Samsung has purchased 1 million copies of Jay-Z’s coming album, entitled “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” slated for release July 4, and plans to give them to Samsung Galaxy smartphone users for free – 72 hours ahead of the release. The users are to receive the music through an app they’ll receive later this month. (Recipients won’t be able to share it until the official release date.)
Samsung paid $5 apiece for the albums, according to a person familiar with the matter. It wasn’t immediately clear if Nielsen SoundScan will count Samsung’s purchases in its sales tallies.
#contentmarketing
Chartbeat’s data shows that most readers scroll to about the 50 percent mark, or the 1,000th pixel, in Slate stories. That’s not very far at all. I looked at a number of recent pieces to see how much you’d get out of a story if you only made it to the 1,000th pixel.
via How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. – Slate Magazine.
Like a responsively designed Web site, the “adaptive” ads automatically rearrange their content based on the size of the screen they’re being viewed on. The same ad that stretches the width of a 27-inch desktop monitor will contract and adapt to be viewed on an iPhone screen, for example. The idea is that one piece of creative can deliver the same ad experience on mobile and tablet devices as it does on desktop ones. Further, Say can charge the same amount for them as a result.
via More Publishers Tap Responsive Ads | Digiday.
It shows that for a number of years—from 2009 until late 2012—Apple’s users were valued (implicitly by the stock market) as likely to create a net present value of about $1200 in earnings. The current value is about a third of that, or $440 in earnings.
via What’s an Apple user worth? | asymco.
Continues:
Although the rate of spending of each customer is decreasing, the number of new customers is increasing more rapidly. As this is happening the company’s equity is being priced such that an Apple user is considered less than half as valuable as she used to be—from 3.2x revenues to 1.5x revenues.
What’s surprising is that this is the product lifecycle trend you see when a product goes from the enthusiast to mainstream market. Well, one can ask, aren’t iPhones already mainstream? It may seem like that in the US today but in the broader global market, the definition of mainstream is very different.
I very much believe that this market will follow the traditional pattern of product lifecycles and the durations will be a lot more compressed that for other tech products. In other words, iOS’ reign will be shorter (measured in years) than Windows reign on desktop.
#productlifecycle
I like strong POVs:
So the next time you hear a startup founder talking about achieving “scale,” or delighting users, or making a really cool product — and who then dodges the question about how they’re going to make money with some blather about being backed by “patient capital” — note that this is a founder who is a rung or two below where he or she needs to be.
via The Tech World’s Immature Hostility To Advertising – Business Insider.
The fundamental issue here is that ad monetization vs user experience is zero sum. If you can make it not be zero sum, then this issue becomes moot and you’re probably onto something innovative but you’re not done yet– you still need to figure out how to make it scale.
Some pricing info from Line:
Line charges companies a one-time fee of over $6,000 just to create an account on the service.
It then charges the companies for messaging their followers directly. Prices start at around $5,000 to send 15 messages a month to 100,000 fans and range all the way up to almost $17,000 each month for 30 messages to 500,000 fans.
The company also offers one-off plans for companies that want to do short bursts of messaging rather than for months at a time.
As a way to help companies gather fans on its service, Line charges over $33,000 to let companies offer cute branded “stickers” that users can place on their profiles.
via Asian Startup Making Money Off Of Chat – Business Insider.
Come on guy, you can’t try to turn this into a positive thing:
So why is a cookie-less consumer a good thing? My favorite answer is that it enables us to think hard about marketing in the greater context of a multi-device consumer.
via Why Cookie-less Consumers Are A Good Thing – Business Insider.
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about 2013 being the year that multi-screen starts trending in our industry. This article above is evidence of that.
The other options listed in the article are known solutions. The most interesting yet non innovative in terms of tech are the cookie co-ops. I wonder if someone can herd enough cats to create an entity with compelling size.
#multiscreen
