Jargon alert!

The unidentified “collection of properties” under BuyerBase gets more than 40 million site visitors and generates more than a billion buying signals monthly.

“Buying signal”? Boy oh boy does that sound dubious.

Goodbye CPMs. Even if Gawker’s new approach falls flat, I admire the boldness of their thinking:

To break out of the current painful loop, Denton has decided to emulate his beloved television and move to “a programming grid which owes more to TV than to magazines.” Gawker Media has a rudimentary calendar for its current sites, but that will become vastly more sophisticated post relaunch: he envisages saving up a few personal-finance posts at Lifehacker, say, putting them all up at 3pm on a Friday with the best one sitting on the front page for an hour, and then selling every ad on the site to Visa for that hour. At that point, if all goes according to plan, Gawker’s no longer competing with lots of other personal-finance sites for Visa’s ad dollars; instead, Visa is competing with other financial advertisers for the right to buy that hour.

This is something it’s hard for old-school web or print publishers to get their head around: the idea of selling time, rather than space. But it’s not entirely new to the web: Fortune, for instance, will quite happily sell against the spike in traffic that it knows will come on the day it puts up the Fortune 500. Advertisers, too, are very comfortable with the idea, since they’ve been buying time on TV and radio stations for decades. If I’m browsing Lifehacker during the personal finance hour, I might see what Denton calls “a storyboard of advertising,” a sequence of ads which work over a relatively short space of time. It’s an intriguing idea, and it’ll be very interesting to see how and whether Batty’s successor can sell it to notoriously-conservative media buyers.

Couple of interesting bits in this piece about how Twitter’s Promoted Tweets ad program works (of particular note: companies can pay based on number of retweets for their ad / tweet). There’s also brief mention of a self-service option, a la Adsense. This was the missing component I mentioned when Twitter first revealed an ad program.

I wrote a short post back in 2008 that praised YouTube’s nascent Content ID service. I found it to be a progressive middle-ground between blatant copyright infringement and heavy-handed takedowns. After all, most of YouTube’s infringement is tied to good intentions: people want to share / discuss / amplify material that resonated with them. Content ID provided (and provides … but I’ll get to that), a way for copyright holders to claim their content and make a little money. Most importantly: that attention-worthy content remained up for all to share / discuss / amplify.

A piece in today’s New York Times shows Content ID has transformed from promising idea to key component. With the help of Content ID, YouTube will reportedly make around $450 million this year and — this is the big news — turn a profit.

Chalk one up for open-minded solutions!

The same article includes two other notable excerpts. This one:

“YouTube is a big component of our display revenue, and display is our next big business,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview.

And this one:

Mr. Schmidt said that YouTube’s role began to change about a year and a half ago, when he asked the unit to start focusing on revenue. The strategy had been to amass “an audience first, then figure out the tools that will create the revenue, then you go to the content partners and say, ‘Hey, look guys,’ ” Mr. Schmidt said. “And I think we’re at that point now.”

I added this as a comment to Megan Garber’s post:

The run-and-gun style of the videos is certainly notable, but let’s not forget that these clips are also entertaining as hell. The guy’s delivery is fantastic (so much so, he landed a talent deal with NBC).

How is that relevant to the news business? It all comes down to value: Was I informed? Was I entertained? Did this content justify its existence in my world? Had these clips employed the same production value without the humor, no one would be talking about them.

“My numbers are different than your numbers, and these numbers don’t look like the ones that guy uses.” The vast discrepancies between analytics firms is borderline criminal. This is why page views and visits are crap measurements, and probably always will be.

The embed feature on YouTube (and countless other sites) is one of the most important innovations in the history of the web. It unlocks content and allows it to gather attention in an organic and powerful way.

This FastCompany Q&A with Iain Tait, creative director for the ad firm behind the Old Spice campaign, is a great read. I found this segment to be particularly telling:

Q: Why did you choose to respond to Twitter tweets using video and why employ YouTube versus a dedicated Old Spice site?

By locking the campaign into any proprietary place would have just severely limited the exposure it would get and diminish it. This whole idea of responding to people and being very smart about who we decided to respond to, and in what manner, that wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t done it in a format like YouTube where we are able to embed it. People are very familiar with the ways of sharing it, liking it, and favoring it, and just the fact that it can go everywhere very quickly was a huge positive. [Emphasis added.]

Two things I appreciate here:

1. Google recognizes that browser extensions are a geek perk, not something with broad-based appeal. I imagine most Firefox users don’t even know extensions exist. And I imagine even fewer people know Google *has* a browser. All this may change in time, but right now it’s not an issue.

2. I will be stunned — jaw-droppingly stunned — if Google clamps down on ad blocker extensions for Chrome. That would be so insanely stupid. Like, Facebook/Beacon stupid.

The claim that we’re making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue. [Emphasis added.]

I doubt Microsoft’s massive Bing campaign will ever show adequate ROI, but I fully support any effort that reduces Finder-Spyder references:

On “The Philanthropist,” in which James Purefoy portrays a globetrotting do-gooder, the Bing Maps feature will establish where in the world the character is; other characters will use bing.com to seek information.

This article may signal a long-needed change in Web advertising: Advertisers are beginning to understand — really understand — the strengths and limitations of data analysis.

Many advertisers have already jumped on the analytics bandwagon in a basic manner. Most know about page views, visits and other metrics, and they use this information to craft campaigns. The logical extension of this is to move headlong into full-on data analysis, where reams of information allow ad firms to make educated decisions and adaptations on the fly.

While I’m happy to see this happening, there’s a second component that still needs to be addressed: advertisers need to understand that Web-based audiences are inherently different than the broad-based groups aggregated by traditional media. Web audiences aren’t locked in to specific channels or mediums. They can go where they want, whenever they want. As such, people naturally form, disconnect, and re-form. A few massive channels remain (Yahoo, AOL, etc.), but that’s not the norm in the distributed Web world.

My hope is that a new wave of formal data analysis opens advertisers’ eyes to this change. Media companies can pound their chests over subscriptions and micro-payments, but advertising will continue to be a vital revenue stream for digital businesses. The sooner advertisers embrace the true nature of Web audiences, the better for all involved.

DVD players and discs are on a natural downward trajectory, but instead of innovating with digital-only delivery and subscription/advertising models, entrenched companies are resorting to lawsuits to “save” their on-the-wane products. Does this ever work?

I hope the Hulu vs. YouTube showdown leads to an on-demand, Web-based video service that works seamlessly through regular televisions. This computer-based/small-screen stuff is merely a prelude to the real innovation: ubiquitous availability of high-quality, high-resolution content across devices … including televisions.

My related analysis (if you’re into that kind of thing) is here.

Mr. Mulligan said the decision could encourage more music listeners to turn to a growing number of services that provide “free” digital music legally, as part of a broadband subscription or with the support of advertising, for example.

“The best way to fight free is with free,” he said. [Emphasis added.]