Week of May 1, 2006

Local Online Advertising Explodes

Monday, May 1, 2006

The latest of evidence of this comes from newspaper/TV owner Belo Corporation, which has announced its earnings, including the stunning fact that online ad sales represented 6% of its newspaper revenue. This translates into over $15 million in online revenue from just three newspapers-Dallas, Riverside, and Providence-with Dallas the only one in a major market.

Mobile content continues to grow

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Mobile carriers continue to build content around their cellular service. Sprint has just announced that it is adding three more channels to its video offerings: Classic Saturday morning cartoons; comedy shorts, clips, and animation; and stand up comedy.

Mobile Blogging Growing Fast

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Mobile blogging (moblogging) is growing fast, especially as online sites with blogs have made it easier and easier for users to blog and read entries via mobile. MySpace, Facebook, as well as backend software like Wordpress already have mobile elements to their blogs.

Apple Considering Ads For iTunes

Thursday, May 4, 2006

It's not exactly groundbreaking news, but it does further illustrate the ubiquitous nature of advertising today. Ad Age has reported that Apple is considering putting ads on the iTunes "now playing" window of the iTunes library. Apple is also working with ESPN, which provides some of iTunes most popular ad-supported content, with creating ad-supported podcasts and other content.

MySpace Struggling To Monetize

Friday, May 5, 2006

MySpace, which according to Alexa, has the fifth most number of page views in the world, makes a fraction of the revenue of the other companies in the top five. Owner News Corporation is putting a massive amount of effort in trying to improve that situation, but the results have been disappointing so far. Early experiments in using text ads from companies like Yahoo and Google didn't pan out, and ideas like using the bands and artists that use MySpace as a revenue source never gained much momentum.