Is online advertising in secular decline?
MediaPost covers a new report by Wall Street investment firm JP Morgan that indicates the recent dip in online display advertising revenues may have less to do with the impact of the economic cycle and more to do with the exponential increase in online display inventory. While TV networks managed to hold the line on CPMs for premium offerings in the face of an influx of ad inventory from cable channels, the scale of growth in new online ad inventory from social networks is raising doubts whether premium online display outlets like Yahoo will be able to sustain current prices.
Note: We’ve been on an impromptu hiatus for the last few months while retooling the richmedium site to reflect our intensified research and practice in the field of social innovation: the process of organizing “global tribes” over digital networks to support innovations that address broadly recognized social needs. For organizations in media, information technology, consumer services, and for-profit and non-profit social enterprise, social innovation holds the power to unlock a new, sustainable blend of social and financial value. We welcome your comments and suggestions about our work.
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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.
more media file links for June 15, 2009:
Newspaper billions become Craigslist millions
In a Chart of the Day, Silicon Alley Insider depicts how dramatically Craigslist has rained down “creative destruction” on the classified advertising business, the key to the newspaper industry’s historic profitability. Newspaper classified advertising peaked at $16 billion in 2005, only to plummet to an estimated $5 billion in 2009. Meanwhile, Craigslist started a climb from under $20 million in 2005 to an estimated $100 million today. The $11 billion or so in lost revenue represents a graphic study in the ruthless way that the Internet drives cost out of markets.
The greatest change in media? It’s not what you think
On ClickZ, publishing guru Vin Crosbie asserts that the greatest change to hit the media market in the last 35 years was not search engines, social networking, or even the Internet itself. Instead, the real game-changer has been the revolution in supply and demand driven by the enormous explosion in availability of media of all types--TV, radio, video, print, and the web. The destruction of scarcity as an economic lever in the media business went unnoticed for too long by old media, and its current response--in efforts, for example, to save the dying newspaper business--illustrate that it still doesn’t understand that the ground rules for competition have fundamentally changed, and there’s no going back.
Public media needs new economic models
On MediaShift Idea Lab, nonprofit media executive Tony Shawcross argues that the time has come for public media organizations to explore new economic models that could inject much-needed incentives to innovate and excel in producing and delivering content that explicitly serves the public interest. The article describes several of the most promising funding models.
Kiva brings microloans to low-income entrepreneurs in US
Kiva, the groundbreaking Internet-based microlender that has revolutionized the category for entrepreneurs in developing countries, is launching a pilot project to serve low-income entrepreneurs in the United States, Techcrunch reports. Kiva sidesteps the regulatory problems that have hampered other Internet-based microfinance institutions such as Prosper, by delivering a 0 percent return to investors, making the entire transaction charitable--similar to a program-related investment, a charitable investment category pioneered by the Ford Foundation. (Note: At its current annual run-rate of more than $50 million in small loans, Kiva is making more than twice the amount in charitable loans than Ford, according to the foundation’s last published annual report.)
GovLoop: A social network to reinvent government
Internet Evolution blogger Rob Salkowitz reports on GovLoop, a Ning-based social network that assists federal, state, and local government employees to informally share information and best practices. The brainchild of a young Homeland Security staffer, GovLoop reaches over 12,000 public employees in the US and has emerged as a model for foreign governments of a learning community that encourages unstructured knowledge sharing, spontaneous conversations, boundary-crossing relationships, and open discussion... a phenomenon that the site founders call “Government 2.0.”
A Hippocratic Oath for managers
The Economist reports on a grass-roots movement among MBA students to establish a code of behavior for the profession. Such a movement dates back to the founding of the Harvard Business School in 1908, when the goal was to establish a set of professional behavioral standards similar to those in medicine and law, where a set of shared social values is one of the earmarks of both professions. But the move was stymied by the widespread view that the manager’s job was solely to maximize shareholder value. In a period in which the Internet is forcing transparency upon institutions of all stripes, a code of ethics for professional managers is now coming to be seen as a crucial requirement and powerful force for business success.
Does the world need the venture capital industry?
Who is that behind the curtain? Not the Wizard of Oz, but your local friendly venture capitalist, according to a new report released in June 2009 by the Kauffman Foundation. While the VC industry has convinced itself that it is indispensable to the success of US entrepreneurship, and VCs compensate themselves accordingly, in reality only about 16 percent of the fastest growing companies in the country are VC funded, the report states. One structural problem: Contemporary Internet plays require significantly less capital to gain scale than in the past, and entrepreneurs are quicker to cash out early. That portends a future where VC money will simply be less relevant to the most innovative entrepreneurs. The New York Times reports.
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