Headwinds for online advertising

From The Globe And Mail - The explosive growth of online advertising may slow somewhat because consumers are beginning to find some of its techniques intrusive, consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu believes.

While many consumers find advertising annoying, Deloitte said there are signs they are taking a particular dislike to ads in the online world. It cited a survey last year of consumers in the United States that found the majority noticed print ads more than those online, but also found them less invasive.

People are also objecting to advertisers following their every move online, according to Deloitte. Perhaps the best demonstration of that came last month when Facebook pulled its Beacon ad program that tracked the purchases its members made online and then alerted their social networks.

A slowdown in online ads would be discouraging news for companies looking to expand beyond traditional advertising, as well as for the media companies and websites that rely on online ads for growth.

Nevertheless, Deloitte expects this segment of advertising will expand further in 2008. “Even if the growth of online advertising does slow in 2008, slower growth should be put in perspective. Online advertising is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars worth of revenues in 2008 from a relatively small, addressable market.” | Read full article

CBC Radio show adds a wiki

From The Globe And Mail - Much of what we call "public" radio often isn’t that public -- if by public you mean interactive -- apart from maybe the call-in shows, where everyone gets to rant about how the prime minister is a moron. Some radio programs are trying to change that, however, including a couple that are featured on our national broadcaster, the CBC.

Spark, a show about technology and culture hosted by founding Definitely Not The Opera host/producer Nora Young, has launched not only a blog (something many shows have), but has taken the idea one step farther and has added a “wiki.” The term wiki -- which comes from a Hawaiian slang term meaning “quickly” -- refers to websites that anyone can edit or contribute to easily. One of the most popular examples is Wikipedia, the “open source” encyclopedia, which allows anyone to add a fact or create an entry.

Ms. Young says that she hopes that listeners will use the Spark wiki, located here, to offer thoughts about show topics, to contribute questions for guests who might be coming up on the program, and generally to interact with her and the rest of the show staff. | Read full article

Last.fm, labels launch free music on-demand

From The Globe And Mail - Last.fm, the social music network owned by CBS Corp., said on Wednesday it is introducing a free service for fans to listen to their favourite songs on-demand.

The new service is being launched in partnership with the four major music companies, as well as over 150,000 labels and artists.

When fans in the United States, Britain and Germany search for an artist on the Last.fm website, they can now stream the artist's song for nothing or pay to download an MP3 version of the song via Amazon.com.

Last.fm said the streaming service is funded by advertising revenue, which is shared with the music companies.

The move comes nearly six years after Last.fm first started reaching out to music companies to license songs to stream on its site.

“They wouldn't even take our calls back then,” said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel.

“But our motto to always do the right thing by respecting artist copyright has helped us in our discussions,” he said. | Read full article

Last.fm, labels launch free music on-demand

From The Globe And Mail - Last.fm, the social music network owned by CBS Corp., said on Wednesday it is introducing a free service for fans to listen to their favourite songs on-demand.

The new service is being launched in partnership with the four major music companies, as well as over 150,000 labels and artists.

When fans in the United States, Britain and Germany search for an artist on the Last.fm website, they can now stream the artist's song for nothing or pay to download an MP3 version of the song via Amazon.com.

Last.fm said the streaming service is funded by advertising revenue, which is shared with the music companies.

The move comes nearly six years after Last.fm first started reaching out to music companies to license songs to stream on its site.

“They wouldn't even take our calls back then,” said Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel.

“But our motto to always do the right thing by respecting artist copyright has helped us in our discussions,” he said. | Read full article

Digital music sales up 40% in year

From The Globe And Mail - Record companies' revenue from digital music sales rose 40 per cent to $2.9-billion (U.S.) over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from collapse of international CD sales, the music industry's global trade body said Thursday.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, said the increase in legitimate music sales did not come close to offsetting the billions of dollars being lost to music piracy, with illegal downloads outnumbering the number of tracks sold by a factor of 20-to-1.

But the trade group said it welcomed efforts by French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who has proposed a clampdown on those who violate copyright laws.

Mr. Sarkozy called in November for Internet service providers in France to automatically disconnect customers involved in piracy. | Read full article

What Do Casual Games And Pharmaceuticals Have In Common?

From Video Insider - I recently flipped through an issue of Time magazine and noticed that pharmaceutical companies not only push their latest sleep aids, cholesterol suppressors and erectile dysfunction meds, but they also compete for market share amongst themselves.

The issue I looked at had ads for Actonel, AdVair, Ambien, Cymbalta, Cypher Stent, Medco, Rozerem and Zetia. My first thought was, There is an awful lot of money used to advertise these well-known drug brands. At the same time, I thought about the value proposition of online video advertising:

* touches millions of consumers each month.
* has sophisticated consumer targeting and tracking with each ad served.

Out of curiosity I looked at Time's online rate card, and with simple math I calculated the combined monthly ad-spend of all the pharmaceutical companies to be in the neighborhood of $3 million — just one issue. I looked deeper into what Time offers advertisers and found that the magazine guarantees 19.5 million impressions per month, charges a hefty $48 CPM for black-and-white full-page ads and a whopping $74 CPM for full-page color ads. I also noticed that each pharmaceutical ad was two full pages:

* Page one — the actual full-color ad.
* Page two — the full-page disclosure that generally appears on the back of the page of the color ad

This suggests each drug company buys two pages per month for an average cost per thousand of $61. WOW. | Read full article

Can Apple Jump-Start Internet Movie Rentals?

From The New York Times - The iTunes movie rental announcement at Macworld Expo underscores that this is among the hot categories right now. It’s part of an earnest and chaotic attempt by consumer electronics companies to both bring Internet content to the living room and to get themselves into the process and profit it from it.

This is the Set-Top Box Generation. Everyone’s got an entry and consumers, while they may ultimately benefit, are left to figure out what to choose — how to hook up, whether and when to jump in. | Read full article

Video Podcasts: The Sleeping Giant on AppleTV

From The New York Times - While Steve Jobs talked for a long time Tuesday at Macworld Expo about the movie rental feature of iTunes and Apple TV, he spent only a short time demonstrating its capabilities for podcasts. In fact, the ability of Apple TV to view podcasts may in the long run be its most important feature.

“Huh,” you say, thinking that podcasts are Wayne’s World run amok. But in Apple’s world, podcasts are any free video and audio programs. They are usually organized as a series to which you can subscribe, but you can also choose one program at a time. | Read full article

No More New Things From Microsoft

From The New York Times - In an era when the vanguard of technology is creating smart devices for entertainment and communications, Bill Gates, the outgoing chairman of Microsoft, had little that was interesting or innovative to show off in his last annual keynote at CES in Las Vegas on Sunday.

The headline from the speech was a series of partnerships to bring some movies and television programming both to Xbox and to MSN. At best, this is more of the same. Xbox and MSN already offer video content. And the studios in the announcement — Disney, NBC Universal and MGM — already distribute their content digitally on other services. At best, this is a footnote completing a deal that was obvious. Apple, by contrast, regularly announces deals with Hollywood that offer new content and new terms for users (think 99-cent songs, and then music without copy protection.) | Read full article

U.S. Album Sales Fell 9.5% in 2007

From The New York Times - Album sales in the United States plunged 9.5 percent last year from 2006, as the recording industry had another weak year despite a 45 percent surge in the sale of digital tracks, according to figures released Thursday.

A total of 500.5 million albums in the form of CDs, cassettes, LPs and other formats were purchased last year, down 15 percent from the unit total for 2006, said Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks point-of-purchase sales.

The decline in album sales drops to 9.5 percent when sales of digital singles are counted as 10-track equivalent albums. | Read full article