Week of August 4, 2008

T-Mobile Breaks the Carrier Mold

Friday, August 8, 2008

The iPhone has revolutionized a lot of things, and one of them is the concept of the "carrier deck," the standard display of applications added to your phone by the carrier. You can then add to this via the carrier's subscription store. In simple terms, this is similar to the iPhone app store, but the way it is presented to consumers is heavily structured and controlled by the carrier. T-Mobile has announced that they are going to break the deck mold and release an "application store" type of interface. This will give consumers a much broader and easier to integrate suite of additions for their phones.

Of course this was inspired by the success of the iPhone app store, but T-Mobile is taking it to the logical carrier-level-offering software app downloads for all phones that support the T-Mobile network. In essence, when the consumer logs in he or she is presented with the applications which work on his or her phone. There is no word yet on how open this T-Mobile store will be, but with the tight control Apple has over the iPhone app store, the bar isn't too high.

Imeem Making Waves

Thursday, August 7, 2008

With very little fanfare, social music site Imeem has become the third social networking site in the US behind MySpace and Facebook, and is now the number one streaming music site in the United States. Why has Imeem succeeded? Well, first of all it has deals in place with all the major labels, so the choice of listening to music on Imeem is exhaustive. Additionally, Imeem allows users to take their music with them (at least online) via a robust widget. In a lot of ways Imeem is the first ad-supported streaming music model that has generated enough traffic to make things work. Of course, there are questions: This is an online-only service. You can't "subscribe" to music via Imeem for your iPod or MP3 player. And, of course, you can't download it. So Imeem is limited to the web. But in today's mobile web and with a dedicated base of users who listen while surfing-that's not a bad place to be.

Online Ads Still Growing, But Slowly

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

An LA Times article goes into more detail about the online ad slowdown. Online is still the only growth area for advertising, but it's not accelerating like it was in the last few years. Many experts are attributing this equally to the economic downturn as to the natural maturation process of a new medium. According to multiple sources, display ads are the first area to see the slowdown. Displays are image builders, while search ads are lead generators. Therefore, the image campaigns are the first to go.

Important Court Ruling on DVRs

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Viewers won and advertisers lost on August 4th when the US Second Court of Appeals ruled that Cablevision did not violate copyright laws by introducing a new network DVR service that will allow users to store recorded programming on external servers. Unlike a standard DVR, which has its own hard drive for storage, the network DVR service will record onto Cablevision's own hard drives, allowing viewers to access their recorded programming - and skip the commercials - from any cable box in their home.

Content owners including Turner Broadcasting, 20th Century Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC charged that this was a copyright violation, that Cablevision service was effectively making illegal copies of programming. A lower court agreed with the media companies, but the higher court sided with Cablevision, saying that the viewers themselves were making copies, effectively agreeing that this falls under the "fair use" doctrine.

In reality, this might not be a bad ruling for advertisers. The growth of DVRs has been fast and predictable. The network DVR allows the cable providers to insert advertising into programming dynamically, changing the spots depending on who is watching and, most importantly, when. So even though many people may skip commercials with their DVR, others will see even more precisely targeted ads.

Gaming The System

Monday, August 4, 2008

While radio may consider the PPM a flawed yet important step in the way of measured listening, it still is a long way from the exact numbers you can get from the internet. Or is it? Well, when you consider that online sites and companies are constantly looking for ways to distort the data-"game the system"-things are quite so cut and dried. Influential tech blog techcrunch.com referenced this today, when they pointed out a finding from Next Web that showed RSS feed subscription data could easily be distorted by just making a Netvibes account. By creating an account and inserting 2,500 RSS widgets of the same feed, the item showed up in Feedburner as 2,500 different subscribers.

Now, when you consider that Feedburner has an advertising arm and sells their subscription numbers to companies for advertisements, such a distortion is a serious problem. While gross abuses could be easily caught (an unknown site overnight pulling in more subscribers than Techcrunch, for example, would raise red flags), subtle distortions could get through the system quite easily.

We see gaming the system across the Internet constantly, from Digg.com voting to RSS feed subscriptions to Google click throughs. So when you are out there selling radio and someone comments on the ratings "not being accurate," pull out this item and show them that accuracy is relative... everywhere.