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Week of June 16, 2008
June 16, 2008
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LinkedIn Valued at $1 Billion
Friday, June 20, 2008
Business social networking site LinkedIn has received $53 million dollars in venture capital in exchange for a 5% stake in the company. Doing the math, that pouts their valuation at just over $1 billion. How does that compare with other social networking sites? Well, it's a bit of an unfair comparison since the value of most of these deals keep going up and some of the other transactions, such as MySpace's acquisition happened years ago (eons in Internet time). Still, here's how the other deals were valued:
- Facebook - $15 billion (Oct 2007)
- Bebo - $850 billion (March 2008)
- MySpace - $580 million (July 2005)
- Ning - $500 million (July 2007)
- Slide - $500 million (Jan 2008)
- Rock You - $250 million (Oct 2007)
LinkedIn claims 23 million members worldwide. But the most important number to its future economic growth is this: those users have a median annual income of $110,000.
Internet Ad Spending Jumps
Thursday, June 19, 2008
A new report from the IAB, Interactive Advertising Bureau, says that online advertising generated $5.8 billion in the first quarter of 2008. That's up 18.2% from the same period in 2007. What's interesting is that the first quarter was actually down slightly from the 4thquater of 2007 ($5.9 billion to $5.8 billion). That decrease is due to several factors, including a post-Christmas drop off and the general slump in advertising, which has hit print, radio and network TV the hardest.
PPM and Cell Phones
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Arbitron CEO Steve Morris this week said that it's inevitable that the PPM will be integrated with cell phones. However, he pointed out a few potential pitfalls before that could happen, not the least of which is accreditation by the Media Ratings Council and various technological hurdles. But what really caught our eye was reading this quote, "The problem is people have very strong habits attached to what they do with cell phones. It's much harder to coax them in terms of carrying it more than they would otherwise in order to satisfy the needs of research."
What does this mean? Certainly the mobile phone has become a vital device and people have developed very strong habits, but why would they need to carry their phone more? The mobile phone is already the most ubiquitous device ever. Is he implying that current respondents currently carry the PPM more than they do their own cell phones? Is that true? If so, do we really want our future determined by people who would do that?
This is an intriguing comment and we hope to hear more soon on their initiatives in this area. There are a lot of reasons for the sampling problem with 18-34, but the fact that they're being asked to carry a pager-like device in addition to their mobile phones is a big one.
ABC Offers Makegoods Online
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
ABC TV has been offering advertisers the option of taking makegood spots online, as well as over the air. Online advertisers have reacted positively to the offer, with a number of them taking a mix of spots over the air and online. ABC executives told MediaPost that the online offer allows some advertisers to get spots in popular programs that they might not be able to get in the over-the-air broadcasts. Also, in some cases, the CPM for the online episodes was greater.
According to industry analysts, the majority of makegoods occur in the traditional way, but they expect to see more of the online/over-the-air mix in the future, which reflects the nature of original advertising buys as we move into the future.
Grand Theft Auto IV Sales Records
Monday, June 16, 2008
Last month, the video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, shattered all sales records, generating over $300 million in sales in just the first week. For the month of May, it sold 871,000 units in the US and drove a 37% increase in the video game market from May of 2007 (games, consoles and accessories combined). Curiously, however, according to AdAge, the success of GTA IV has not translated in a big boost for the Sony's PS3 or Microsoft's Xbox 360 game consoles. The top selling until in May continues to be Nintendo's Wii.
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