Frank Barnako writes about the new prices for advertising on Rocketboom:
Baron said he’s just done a deal worth $80,000 for a week of commercials in his videoblog. Claiming a daily audience of some 300,000 people, Baron could be getting more than a $55 CPM for his ads. You could get a discount, though. He’ll sell you a week of spots for $60,000 – if he likes the commercial content. „
Baron is in the comfortable position to have a videocast with a very high frequency of viewers, yet being under no pressure whatsoever due to lack of relevant competition…
„I’m only going to work with advertisers I want to work with,“ Baron said, „and I’m only going to run ads I like.“
I don’t think he can sustain that position. He has a first mover advantage, but soon enough that will be effectively challenged by all those ambitious video-geeks reading about the money Baron is making. And there will always be some that are successful.
But then again, I do think he can make money by selling exclusive content for a subscription. That is the story of the DVD business. Package your show with exclusive background material and people will pay for it. At least until the first people will start offering this exclusive material for free, all paid for by a sponsor, for example.
Hey, he’s making $4.000 a month on T-Shirts that are advertised badly. There must be something about his target audience, paying for these things…
Techcrunch has an interesting video online: Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary. (Ok, its almost 2 months old, but nevertheless very interesting.)
The topics discussed include:
1. What is Web 2.0?
2. Are we in a bubble?
3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?
4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?
Businessweek Online has a „Tech Special Report“ online with lots of interesting articles. And also a slideshow about „Your Favorite Bloggers“ – the guys behind boingboing, engadget. People like Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, etc. Nice flick through those slides. Unfortunately, the corresponding list for Germany would be different. We still don’t have that kind of blog-celebrity culture over here…
Other than that there are a few other things worth reading:
According to the Pew Internet Life Survey, on any given day, 40 million Americans go to the Web for no particular reason, just to pass the time.
An article about the (on the web) neglected target audience of the 50 year old baby boomers:
Today, baby boomers make up the Web’s largest constituency, accounting for fully one-third of the 195.3 million Web users in the U.S., according to JupiterResearch. They also spend more money on online shopping than your average Web user.
And an article about Six Apart, and how it evolved from the very first journal entries of Mena Trott to the company it is today.
Not bad going for Microsoft. With this kind of advertising they might actually invade the iPod space. I guess they had already practised. At least that’s what it looks like in this video, that was supposed to be „internal“ but then hit YouTube nevertheless. (That must have been a well-orchastrated publicity stunt.)
Now they sent the Zune Player (couldn’t they have chosen a better name?) to so called influentiers and opinion leaders, such as Ellen, who presented the player in her TV show.
What I particularly like about the Zune Player, though (without actually having seen one myself – is the landscape display for movies, which probably makes it more fun to watch movies on this thing than on the iPod Video!
But back to my point: it seems like Microsoft might actually get their marketing right this time AND apply it for a good product. These two things were rarely seen before on their own, if at all – and almost never in combination.
ZDNet writes about Swicki tapping communities for search and really describes a new way of making search more relevant. This is the question most search engines are currently trying to solve and the model of Swicki seems to be similar to Rollyo:
„Rollyo offers the ability to search the content of a list of specified websites, allowing you to narrow down the results to pages from websites that you already know and trust.“
… but then again, not quite. Since they don’t only allow for predefined filters, but also measure user behaviour to identify which results will be relevant in the future. This also what might differentiate them from Google: it’s not just about what people „voted for“ by placing a link but also about what they actually visited.
Swickis combine Web crawling with filters defined by site owners and algorithms that analyze user behavior (keywords and pages accessed) anonymously and automatically, re-ranking results based on the community’s search actions.
(Just as I typed this I thought: who knows, if Google isn’t already measuring our behaviour anyway? – I mean, how would we be able to tell? In theory, they can measure our clicks on the pages of the search results – but in addition they can track us on any page that has Google Adsense Advertising – which would mean a lot of pages across the hit- and niche-websites of the web.)
Seems to be an interesting tool – if I have some time over the weekend, I might start my own Swicki search in this blog…
So, there is a machinima video by the PR company Text 100 filmed completely in Second Life:
Two things I find amazing:
the fact that we will probably see more of these kinds of videos, since it is so much easier to have all the actors and the buildings put together.
the thought that there might actually be a need for virtual PR, the way it is described in the video
Is this already web3.0, as some say? Not sure, but there is certainly still a lot more potential to leverage these virtual worlds. The only thing worrying me is that amongst the 700k residents there are only 330k that have logged in during the last 60 days. And that is not a lot, especially on a worldwide scale…
Wo ich sonst so bin...