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media file 6.15.09 | Is online advertising in secular decline?

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.

media file 9.9.08: Platforms are markets

What Apple Knows That Facebook Doesn’t

What does Apple know that Facebook doesn’t? That platforms are markets. In his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, strategist Umair Haque offers this insight: Whereas Facebook is treating its platform in the traditional way, as a mechanism to be manipulated and controlled, Apple is treating the iPhone platform in a next-gen way, as a market to be made. The result: Facebook is turning something good (the open web) into something evil (a closed system), along the way destroying the value of its platform. Meanwhile, Apple is turning something evil (the notoriously closed mobile industry) into something good (a radically open market), along the way altering the very nature of competition in the mobile space and driving up the value of its platform.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for September 9, 2008:

Designing the Future of Business

On BusinessWeek, design guru Marty Neumeier ponders the notion that design is fast replacing strategy as the key driver of business innovation and growth. In a social and economic environment characterized by relentless and disruptive change, design--with its inherent emphasis on creativity, improvisation, and innovation--confers the ability to explore and invent the widest possible range of solutions to the problems facing organizations, markets, and the world.

How to Win by Studying Culture

On the Harvard Business blog Real-World Innovation, Scott Berkun interviews anthropologist Grant McCracken about why marketers should add cultural studies to their professional toolkits. Culture supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in a group, including how consumers relate to a company and its products and services, and how companies relate to their market and stakeholders. Organizations that understand culture gain an extraordinary advantage, McCracken says.

Google Launches Cloud Operating System “Chrome” And Calls It A “Browser”

Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodgett writes that Google’s strategy for its new Chrome web browser eerily resembles the game plan Microsoft used to gain dominance in the web browser and desktop application software markets: Tie its new “cloud”-based software lineup (such as Google Docs and Google Gears) to its search engine and browser, and leverage that tight linkage into top market share.

Google’s Strategy In Japan: Avoid Yahoo And Take Over The Mobile Web First

How is Google coping with Yahoo’s overwhelmingly dominant position in the Japanese search engine and portal market, one of the world’s most lucrative? According to TechCrunch, the company is effectively backburnering its desktop efforts in favor of pursuing a number one position in mobile search, via (1) strategic partnerships with Japan’s top mobile carriers, (2) promoting mobile Gmail to subvert Yahoo Mail’s grip on the email space, (3) amping up its Android open mobile software business development activity, and (4) pouring development dollars into turning Japan’s relatively closed mobile environment into a testbed for breakthrough mobile applications that could eventually go global.

Why Yahoo Japan Is Worth Nearly As Much As Yahoo

TechCrunch analyzes why Yahoo Japan’s market valuation is nearly as great as that of the parent US company, and asks if its strategy is an anomaly or a model for going global on the web. Key strategy elements: (1) partner with a local powerhouse; (2) get super-localized; and (3) extend your reach through your entire value chain, via mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships.

A Muckraker’s Slaying Leaves Russian Province Fearing Crackdown

The Wall Street Journal reports on the death of Magomed Yevloyev, the publisher of an independent online news site in the Russian province of Ingushetia. The site accused provincial authorities with using hit squads to silence political opposition. Yevloyev was arrested at the Ingushetia aiport and shot in the head shortly thereafter. Authorities say the death was an accident.

media file 6.9.08: Platform wars--the fight to own the social web

Who Will Rule The New Internet?

Time's Josh Quittner tags Apple, Google, and Facebook as the three most innovative companies in Silicon Valley, and forecasts that one of them will emerge as the dominant platform provider for the social web.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 9, 2008:

YouTube puts demographic feedback to work

The Los Angeles Times reports on new initiatives by Facebook and Google-owned YouTube to provide demographic data to users who post content to their sites, giving marketers greater insight into what causes social media to go viral.

Facebook lets you vote against lame ads

VentureBeat reports on a Facebook test of a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system for advertising on the site.

MTV: how internet killed the video star

Britain's The Independent reports that MTV Europe faces trouble on two fronts: regulators unhappy with off-color programming on one side, and social networks that face no restrictions on content on the other.

Prince Issues One Takedown Too Many

Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on a tussle between rock acts Prince and Radiohead. Prince wants a YouTube video of him performing a Radiohead tune live taken down; but Radiohead, which owns the copyright, wants it to stay up.

Aspen Institute releases report of its 2007 Forum on Communications and Society

"Media and Values: Issues of Content, Community and Intellectual Property" explores concepts of community social values and intellectual property on the social web, and proposes a set of principles to govern so-called "fair use."

Should Social Networks Be Regulated?

ReadWriteWeb reports that a UK press regulatory commission released results of a study showing that 90 percent of British citizens favored rules protecting use of personal data posted on social networks.

Police Raid One of Russia's Largest Radio Groups

WARC reports that the Russian Media Group, one of that nation's largest broadcast holding companies, was raided in connection with an investigation into tax evasion--a favorite tactic in that country for stifling political opponents.

Leading Chinese video sharing web sites are having trouble staying online

VentureBeat reports that "technical problems" plaguing Chinese video sharing sites may more accurately reflect the government's evolving position on free speech and foreign ownership of media.

Can Microsoft Win the Search Wars with Charity?

ReadWriteWeb reports on Microsoft's so-far mediocre success with Search and Give, a program that pays charities when people search the web using a special Live Search page.

Text to Save Lives: Mobile Giving Takes Off

ReadWriteWeb reports on new "text to give" mobile services from Verizon, PayPal, and a new "social giving" site called mGive.

Mobile Social Web: 975 Million Users By 2012

ReadWriteWeb reports on recent predictions by InStat and IDG's Computerworld of an explosion in the mobile social network space. By 2012, InStat forecasts 30 million US mobile social network users, and Computerworld predicts 975 million users worldwide.

Free WiFi harder than expected

AlwaysOn Network blogger Chris Maresca looks at the demise of MetroFi and wonders if free, advertising-supported wifi service is a non-starter.

media file 6.2.08: Wen Jiabao has a Facebook page

VentureBeat reports on Facebook's challenges in entering the Chinese market. Among them: Whether to launch a Chinese-specific version of the site that authorities can censor, or pursue its one-site-fits-all globalization strategy there, too.

Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has a Facebook page

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

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media file for June 2, 2008:

Longtail, meet Fashion social networking

VentureBeat reports on Fashionspace, a UK-based social network targeting fashion professionals and fashion lovers in 120 countries.

GooTube

Forbes writes that Google's YouTube is now "the biggest television station on the planet." The article quotes JupiterResearch analyst Tulsiani: "A studio declining to do business with YouTube would be like a cereal maker not dealing with Wal-Mart."

Newspaper Online Local Ad Revenue Hits $2 Billion, More Than All Other Media Combined

Editor & Publisher recaps results from a Borrell Associates survey of online local advertising. Newspapers lead all other local media in grabbing market share, but are still losing ground overall to search engines and product sites.

Glam offers new video ad network, gets acquisition offer for $1.3B

VentureBeat reports on the Glam network's launch of GlamTV, an online video distribution and advertising network targeted to its global audience of 64 million women.

media file 5.29.08: Facebook’s Causes shows route to success in social network marketing

TechCrunch reported today on Causes, the Facebook/MySpace application that allows you and your friends to promote your favorite charitable causes on your profile page and to donate money to them. Causes released some information about its financial performance during its first year in operation. The good news: Over 12 million users registered and installed the Causes app on their profile pages. The bad news: All those people coughed up only about $2.5 million in total for around 20,000 charities, or $0.20 per registered user and $125 per charity, on average.

Nevertheless, $2.5 million is nothing to sneeze at, considering how little it cost to reach those 12 million users, and the potential they represent for a significantly greater volume of donations over time.

What Causes has done is to expose the underlying dynamics that will lead to ultimate success in social network marketing—a dynamic that drives all marketing in fact, but is hidden from view in all the hand-wringing about how poorly social networks produce results compared to search engines.

With their left brains, marketers will readily offer that search-engine click-through represents the tail end of a process that begins with diffuse awareness of a need or desire and continues through cycles of discussion, exploration, and consideration. Search engine marketing offers little or no insight into what leads up to the click-through, and so we’re basically left in the dark about the fully burdened cost of generating response, and how to most effectively facilitate it.

Causes users install the application because they see it in their friends’ profiles or feeds. Clearly, based on the numbers, they are not installing it to make a donation, but instead because having the application itself fulfills a diffuse need...to feel like good person. That is the starting point for social, values-based marketing.

Over time, Causes will be able to develop a fully articulated model of the giving process, exposing to itself and its partners a rich and nuanced understanding of what transforms the charitable impulse into action. They will be able to implement and refine that model with their large and growing user base, driving efficiencies that are beyond the reach of more traditional marketers, whether for-profit or non-profit, on the web or off. And the understanding they gain will assist them to attain scale and momentum more effectively than any search-driven enterprise.

Even in this very early stage, Causes represents the potential for a huge breakthrough in marketing methodology, which will leave us all wondering (in a few years) how we ever could have thought that social networks wouldn’t work.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them, and once per week in digest format.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

media file links for may 29, 2008:

Causes Reports On Its First Year - $2.5 Million For 20,000 Charities And NonProfits

TechCrunch reports on the success of Facebook application Causes. In its first year, it attracted 12 million registered users and $2.5 million in donations--roughly $0.20 per user, indicating how scale and revenue relate to each other in social networks.

VC's Advice to Agencies: Get Tech Cred

Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme tells advertising agency executives that, as marketers move from blasting messages to eliciting customer engagement, the winning agencies will be the ones with the deepest technology benches, Adweek reports.

The Power of Interactive Printed Magazines... A Magazine called, “Your Old House"

"Mr. Magazine" Samir Husni reports that Time Inc. is tiptoeing into user-generated content with a 100% user-generated issue of "Old House" magazine, renamed "Your Old House" for the occasion.

No API? You Suck!

On AlwaysOn Network, Silicon Valley VC Brad Feld cuts to the chase, reminding us that the most successful companies build programmable platforms, and that rule applies to social web companies, too.

The Fork in the Road for Social Media

ReadWriteWeb reports on the fateful choice social networks are facing, between pursuing a "walled garden" approach to scaling and monetization versus an open API strategy. Uncertainty in the revenue model for social networks makes this tricky.

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism

ReadWriteWeb reports on Freebase, an early example of a "Web 3.0" (aka "semantic web"), open media application, built by Metaweb, a company chaired by technology thought-leader Danny Hillis.

media file: may 27, 2008

media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them, and once per week in digest format.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

media file links for may 27, 2008:

It's Time To Rethink Copyright Law

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch reflects on the complicated issues behind the YouTube-Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit. YouTube--owned by Google--is clearly applying the Google success model to video, a strategy that could damage the market, but...

Internet Businesses Adopt Social Sigma

Analyst Mary E. Shacklett blogs on Internet Evolution about "Social Sigma"--an online quality assurance strategy pioneered by Forrester and others that methodically employs user feedback to shape product development and customer service.

Mass Mag Exodus Continues as Brands Follow Men Online

Advertising Age Digital reports that, as young men continue to abandon special-interest magazines in favor of online entertainment sites like Heavy, marketers are shifting their budgets forcefully into digital media.

Everywhere, JPG - magazines for the future

SF Gate reports on 8020 Publishing, a startup funded by CNET's Halsey Minor that marries traditional print publishing with user-generated content and online community--presenting a new business model for special-interest media.

New York Times API Coming

ReadWriteWeb reports that the NY Times is planning to open up its archive to third-party developers via an API that it plans to release this fall.

CNN, Newsweek editor starting international show

The AP reports that Fareed Zakaria is launching a weekly international news program on CNN that is geared toward a US audience, and designed to fill a "huge gaping hole in American television, which is 95 percent of the rest of the world," Zakaria says.

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to turn its developer platform into an open-source project, a "nearly inevitable response" to OpenSocial, an open-source platform backed by Google, MySpace, and Yahoo.

Chinese local review site Dianping: A lot more than a "Yelp for China"

VentureBeat reports on Dianping, a review site in China that offers features not found on Yelp or other US-based review sites. Dianping also takes advantage of the ability to buy top rank in organic search results from search engine Baidu.

Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated

The Washington Post reports on new research in medical sociology showing that traditional social networks--families, friends, co-workers--can have a profound impact on individuals' behavior, extending as far out as three degrees of separation.

Seeking to preserve global interests, social networks risk everything

Last week, TechCrunch reported on the latest in a series of occasions where global media outlets caved into a government request for personal information that led to an individual being prosecuted for what amounts to a thought crime. In this case, Google handed over to Indian authorities the email address of a poster on its Orkut social network who allegedly disparaged politician Sonia Gandhi using what the police claimed was vulgar language—a crime punishable by up to five years in prison in that country.

The episode seems to have merged back into the cloud, so to speak, but it shouldn’t—for reasons that should concern executives at any online media enterprise with global ambitions. Nobody may care about the tiff between Sonia Gandhi and 22-year-old Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid, but someone, somewhere will care when the wrong social activist, journalist, or ordinary citizen is turned over to the wrong country for a manifestly wrong punishment—and at that point, the CEO of the company that collaborated in that miscarriage of justice will wish they had thought through this problem ahead of time.

Stanford professor BJ Fogg has done some thinking about this. Social networks—Facebook first among them, in his opinion—are pioneering a new mode of group dynamics that he calls “mass interpersonal persuasion.” It’s word-of-mouth on steroids, and it can happen with startling speed and impact thanks to the way online social networks can spread ideas across multiple degrees of separation, among people who share nothing in common except the network—and a set of social values that are activated or challenged in the face of current events. Fogg first noticed this dynamic a few months ago when the Myanmar government cracked down on its Buddhist monks. Word of this violation of human rights and common decency was all over Facebook well before it started grabbing mass media attention.

Even medical sociologists are noticing how social networks can facilitate the spread of an idea or behavior among people who don’t know each other but are loosely connected via the network. When a member at the center of the network adopts a behavior—quits smoking, or goes on a diet—the effect of that behavior ripples through the entire network.

So what would happen if someone central to the network decided that Google—or Facebook—was evil after all? For example, last November Congressman Tom Lantos publicly derided Yahoo as “spineless and irresponsible” and its executives—in particular, CEO Jerry Yang—as moral “pygmies” for their role in the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese dissident journalist Shi Tao. Who is Shi Tao? I don’t know, and probably you don’t either. But it’s not a stretch to believe there is someone out there whose unjust treatment at the hands of a global social network will ignite the ire—not just of a few congressmen—but of its entire customer base.

This point is critical because the most progressive business strategies in social networking involve a form of globalization that media companies previously haven’t practiced. Most media globalization involves some form of localization—Google and Orkut, for example. But Facebook, ahead of all others, is ambitiously globalizing by providing translation tools that will make it possible for every Facebook member, in every supported language, to enjoy every feature of the global site and theoretically connect with every other member, globally. Somewhere in that vast global network, someone at its center is going to get mad about something. And what will happen then?

Neither Facebook, nor any other social network, wants that person at the center of the network to be mad at them for a social injustice they committed in the name of preserving their business interests in an authoritarian state. We might get a taste of this in the coming months. The Tibet issue would be a perfect one to demonstrate to global media enterprises the urgent need they have to develop workable strategies for exercising corporate social responsibility on a global scale.