Week of February 25, 2008

One Small Change, One Big Effect

Friday, February 29, 2008

In November Google made a small but significant change to its ad program: For its ads, users would no longer be able to click through via the whole ad box, but only the specific text link within the ad. The result? Click through rates dropped and so did Google's stock price this past week.

Why would a company sabotage itself like this? Well, it was for one reason: It helped its advertisers. By weeding out inadvertent clicks on the box it saved its advertisers significant money. At least one analyst sees this as a bigger win for Google in the long run--its advertising will be more effective and thus more popular with advertisers now. Leading to more competition and higher ad rates. In the end, this would conceivably restore the money lost via the lost clicks.

Gold In Them There Hills

Thursday, February 28, 2008

One of the absolutely most lucrative untapped markets on the web is contextual health care advertising. Not like the kind you find on WebMD--although that is very lucrative--but in services like HealthVault, which is trying to build a way for consumers to store their medical records on the web, rather than in different health care locations (hospitals, various doctor offices, etc.). This is lucrative because health-related ads are some of the most profitable on the web for publishers.

Google sees the huge potential here and has jumped in with Google Health. As www.techcrunch.com points out, however, there are plenty of issues for both Google and HealthVault, one of the biggest is that most health computer systems at hospitals and offices are either legacy systems and old or customized systems not designed for information sharing. Google is spending a lot of money working on fixing this problem, and there are legitimate reasons for this: HealthVault already has some major institutional medical centers signed up.

In the world of advertising, selling medication advertising to consumers who actually have the specific problem addressed by the medicine smacks of two things: Big Brother and incredible efficiency that can generate a massive ad premium. As we addressed in our New Media Landscape report, the revenue potential will drive this, and the privacy concerns will be pushed to their limits.

Turning dollars into cents

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The news just keeps getting grimmer for the record industry. 2007 saw a record number of units sold, but as we all know, this is driven by an increase in digital downloads at the expense of CD sales. And a new study indicates just how grim the news is with respect to teens. 48% of them didn't buy a single CD in 2007. In 2006, that number was just 36%.

Overall, the number of people buying music was up, thanks to downloads. An estimated 29 million purchased a download in 2007, up from 24 million in 2006. And the average Internet used acquired 6% more music in 2007, but due to the shift to downloads, they spent 10% less.

And the loser is....

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

By now you've heard the news that this year's Oscars telecast was easily the lowest rated show ever. And the Grammy numbers from a few weeks ago were almost equally grim. What happened?

Part of it has to do with the increasing number of choices on TV. No single show, other than perhaps the Super bowl, is as big as it used to be. And, in fact, the ratings for most shows and specials are down from their glory days of 20 or 30 years ago.

But in the case of the Oscars, there were two clear problems with the broadcast: the lack of star level movies among this year's nominees and the lack of star level presenters, especially at the beginning of the show. In the age of time shifting thanks to Digital Video Recorders, you'd better hit hard and fast. Pack the show with compelling content right from the beginning. Good programming is compelling programming.

You Can Build It In Your Bedroom

Monday, February 25, 2008

One of the points that PMG VP/Digital Development often makes at conferences is that you simply don't need to spend a lot of money or development time to create cutting edge Web 2.0 sites or platforms. There are plenty of examples but Techcrunch.com has just highlighted one of them and underscored its relevance in a follow up post. In this post <http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/24/how-much-to-become-a-personalized-desktop-page-provider-bidding-starts-at-90/> , the site outlines how a company is offering a very good software solutions for creating a custom Google Pages/My Yahoo site. In this next post <http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/24/the-personalized-homepage-war-who-matters/> , Techcrunch outlines the impact of these custom home pages, and it points to an upstart Hip Hop site that already has over 100,000 users a few months after launch.

So this is as close to a plug and play sophisticated and cutting edge solution as you can get for your listeners and viewers. How much does it cost? 90 bucks.