April 2005

Highlights from the Economist article, The online ad attack:

Advertising Age says the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC, and the internet has become the fastest growing advertising medium. ZenithOptimedia says ad revenue on the internet grew by 21% in 2004 and that we can expect that type of growth to continue.

As we mentioned in a prior post, they describe how Google advertisers will now be able to select the specific sites where they want their ads to appear, and advertisers can now pay for ads by impression. Google will now also offer animated ads.

Yahoo’s Terry Semel says the opportunity for growth is significant. Many firms allocate only 2-4% of their marketing budgets to the internet while it represents about 15% of consumers’ media consumption.

We’ll be covering Blog advertising in depth at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

The NY times reported on Weyerhaeuser’s disturbing precedent to not allow any spontaneous interaction with executives during their recent shareholders meeting. One Gadfly attempted to ask a question and was quickly removed by security. I’d expect Gadfly blogging is not far off for Weyerhaeuser stockholders and others, where issues are presented in the blogosphere to shame the board into responding.

The every-blogger, manifesto-writing pundits can proclaim the rules of blogging all they want, but they’re not running your business and some may not even have a business. Boeing’s redesigned blog launched a few weeks ago and what’s impressive is that they took the psuedo-blog criticism head on and said, ” … . we appreciate all the comments. We’ll be sharing some of them here - positive and negative. ”

The proper blog, the blog police, and the experts come up a lot when I talk about blogging to businesses. I insist that it’s a balance between giving the blogosphere the proper respect and your business goals. For example, I publish some without comments, some without categories or anything else, and some just for fun.

Congrats to Boeing for doing their own thing.

We could have predicted that eventually this type of story would have made the cover of Business Week. Check it out: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”.

We just didn’t figure it would have happened so soon! Much of what the article describes as why business should view blogs as a mandate are covered in our conference sessions.

I just emailed the authors of the piece to invite them to the next conference.

More from today’s WSJ article “Google to Target Brands In Revenue Push”

May answer the question many bloggers have been asking regarding what their “cut” of the action is. From the article: “…Google on average returns about 80% of the ad revenue from these sites as well as search sites for which it sells ads to their owners…”

Also, Mark Mahaney an analyst at American Technology Research estimates in the article that content-targeted ads on non-Google sites (like blogs) account for roughly 5% of Google’s revenue.

We’ll be covering this topic in depth at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

According to reporter Kevin J. Delaney in today’s WSJ article “Google to Target Brands In Revenue Push” Google is expected to announce that they are giving advertisers more control over pricing, graphic/animation options and where their ads appear.

The goal is to to bring in more big-name advertisers, as they are less likely to be interested in the search-centric system google offers today. The assumption is is that Web surfers are not likely to “shop” for product information that many big advertisers would benefit from. How many people type in “laundry detergent” as a search term? Even if they did, could Proctor and Gamble leverage that into sales? Unlikely.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, U.S. advertisers spent over $140 billion last year. Jupiter Research says online ads were just six percent of that, and less than one third were search-related ads. Apparently many expect search ads to explode as a medium for corporations over the coming years. The chief innovation officer at Publicis Groupe called the market a “$50 billion-plus opportunity” and predicted it will prompt companies to shift their ad budgets from television and magazines to the Web. A Jupiter analyst disagrees that a sizable shift will occur.

Google will now let advertisers run animated display ads on non-Google content sites, and will allow advertisers to go beyond keyword specific placements. Through an auction process, advertisers will be able to specify the sites where they want their ads to appear.

We’ll be covering this topic in depth at the next Blog Business Summit. Let us know where we should host it.

I’m always looking for better, simpler ways to explain blogging and recently found this defnition on Rhizome

To blog is, after all, to stage—through selective inclusion, exclusion, and recontextualization—a performance of individual identity, to imaginatively order an inchoate universe through the re-centering lens of subjectivity.

Wow. That’s the all-time most complicated blog description ever. A simpler metaphor is the Snowball from Doc Searls. I referred to Snowblogging earlier this week when I talked to a group of communicators. Speaking to diverse groups is a good way to remind yourself how nascent blogging is. This group had zero idea of what blogs could do for their business, but they do now after I suggested that they think of blogs as “topics, ideas, conversations, that grow like snowballs with each link.”

However, as Jason Fried just posted, “It’s not enough to have a blog. You have to write it too.”

Writing for a blog is a whole different matter. We covered it in the first BBS 05 and learned we need to cover it more.

Zeldman launched an alter-ego blog and quickly proves that one negative comment will turn a comment thread all negative. The ugly controversy in the comment thread is a live case study of why some business will never allow commenting on their blogs and what still makes PR, marketing, and advertising professionals very uncomfortable.

Besides commenting, business may not want to have a Taco Sanchez show up on their site either. Taco is an Amateur Butt Doctor, Chef Extraordinaire, and apparently an Amazon.com prankster. Taco’s guide to the Greatest Things Ever started showing up on Amazon.com yesterday right next to Clip-n-Seals. I’m not sure how he got on Amazon, if it’s performance art, or if Taco and his friends are just doing it for laughs. Taco may be gone now from Amazon or not show up when you visit the site, but take note that pranksters like Taco are out there, and may even post an crazed opinion about Circus elephants or show up on your business blog.