Firetop

Last week I attended the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London and was a little surprised to find that one or two speakers were still presenting Web 2.0 solutions such as article commenting, ‘twittering’ and peer to peer networking as the must-have for all web publishers. I use the word ‘surprised’ because it is my firm belief that this is not the case; we shouldn’t all stop focusing on a yet to be exhausted Web 1.0 by getting overly excited about some modern web applications which really DO NOT fit all publishing scenarios – especially those in many B2B sectors. (more…)

I’m just starting to recover having logged out of the ’social networking’ site Yuwie. I thought I’d take a look at how viable the site’s business model is - stickiness of content etc. so I created a new profile. In the process of doing so I had to click ’skip’ to fifteen concurrent pages offering me debt advice, mortgage advice and all manor of other rather suspicious looking offers before I could even edit my profile… many were repeated over and over again. Once on my profile page I managed to load up a photo of myself before the strobbing ‘PC error’ style leaderboard adverts made me feel positively sick (I kid you not). So stickiness this site definitely doesn’t have, it’s main attractor is the ‘revenue share’ deal offered to all members. (more…)

This time last year I was advocating that Flash 7.0 be the most up-to-date version that should be quoted for online advertising creatives in 2007, with Flash 8.0 penetration only at 70/80%. This year, having looked at the latest statistics from Millward Brown’s research (available on Adobe) and read the blog of the Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player (Emmy Huang), Flash 9.0 is already at 93.3% in mature markets. Clearly this is a marked improvement on the situation one year ago, and I think it means we can say Flash 9.0 exports will be quite acceptable for ad servers in 2008 without impacting too much on campaign delivery / forecasts. (more…)

For me the biggest problem with selling online advertising at a decent profit is time because, as we all know, time is money. Sales people, ad traffickers and senior management time is an overhead that publishers could do without when selling online campaigns. Unfortunately all three groups of people usually need to be involved from liaising with media buyers, trafficking ad creatives, providing reports and analysing yields. With the long tail of niche micro campaigns to monetise, publishers are struggling to get their heads around the most profitable way forward, especially given their inherited print workflows – free of the metrics headache. (more…)

This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission? (more…)

Some of you may have noticed that earlier this month I changed the colour scheme of this website from pastel blues to ‘vibrant’ oranges (in keeping with the lovely Dorking sunset photograph I added to the header). One of the major upsides of this theme change has been the doubling of Google Advert click-throughs - which means increased ad revenue. I’m now seeing average banner click-throughs in excess of 1% each day, and it won’t be long before I receive my second payout, much speedier than the first $100 which took about six months. So why has the new colour scheme caused this increase in clicks? (more…)

2007 seems to have been the year of web stats comparison questions for me. I don’t remember a previous year where so many people asked me which of their web statistics data tools was telling the truth. The main issue is that whether you’re looking at a logfile analysis report from WebTrends, or a client-side tracker like Google Analytics, both are correct in their own way – you just have to understand their methodologies. The main difference is that logfiles track all server activity – from browser based surfing to Googlebot visits and non HTML file downloads (PDFs), client-side scripts only run for browsers used by real people viewing HTML pages. (more…)

Well it’s only taken six months… but finally my Google Adsense adverts have reached their $100 payout minimum, and in July I can expect to receive the first cheque for advert clicks from this blog. I have worked with many clients who have assumed that the payout from contextual advertising like Adsense must be very significant; taking the prevalence of units on websites as a sign of their profitability. However, despite the average click through rate being more than triple that of standard graphic banners, publisher earnings per CPM are quite low in comparison - it’s commission on clicks that we Adsense affiliates get (I estimate 10%), and not the entire advertiser click fee. (more…)

Having just read an article in Advertising Age entitled ‘How Google Has Helped Build Brand Advertising Online‘ I think it’s worth pointing out that Google has also helped to do the exact opposite. I’m not disputing Tim Armstrong’s description of how ‘Saturn’ used Google Earth and Google Video to let people find dealerships and view product videos… but lets be realistic - how many cutting edge campaigns have we really seen like that recently? Instead what we have is a mass market of long tail niche advertisers, who have often been introduced to web advertising for the first time via Google Adwords… and now obsess over click rates and measurable RoI. It’s hitting everything from the Yellow Pages to standard banner advertising. (more…)

It first got my attention a few weeks ago, there on an advert at King’s Cross tube station were Mark and Jeremy from Channel Four’s ’Peep Show’ - Mark claiming to be a PC and Jeremy an Apple Mac. Then I opened the Metro newspaper and there they were again on a double page spread. Actors David Mitchell & Robert Webb have sold their souls to Apple to help kill the PC with a UK equivalent of a campaign already run in the US and Japan. At first I wasn’t sure if Apple aligning their brand with a good for nothing, lazy, pot smoking lay-about ‘Jeremy’ was a positive thing, but now, having seen the Mac vs. PC adverts online I think it’s a move of genius (whether they were deliberately aligning with character Jeremy rather than actor Robert Webb I’m not 100% certain). (more…)