Google Sells Radio Assets, Buys Video Firm

Google has reportedly found a buyer for its radio assets. The Radio Ads program, built around the dMarc acqusition, was formally shuttered in February. According to the article:

WideOrbit Inc., a privately held company that makes software for the broadcast TV and radio industries, said Wednesday it has agreed to buy Google’s technology for automating radio ad placement. The San Francisco-based company did not disclose financial details. It will inherit 3,600 customers and an undisclosed number of employees.

One imagines WideOrbit is getting something of a deal.

Earlier this week TargetSpot,”the nation’s largest Internet radio advertising network,” announced that Eyal Goldwerger was taking over as CEO. The company says:

TargetSpot has grown to . . . more than 15.3 million unique listeners per month through distribution partners such as CBS RADIO, FOX News, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast and AOL Radio.

Also earlier in the week Pandora announced a sales deal with Clear Channel. So perhaps Google exited the Radio Ads business a bit too early. What do you think?

Separately Google announced acquisition of On2 Technologies, a company that does video compression. Essentially this will help support video on YouTube and the Internet more broadly (potentially also in mobile).

Geotargeted NY Times Ad Made Me Click

I was on the NY Times site reading a bunch of articles and I clicked back to the home page at one point. On the right in the middle of the page is a tile ad. The ad registered almost subliminally.

I wasn’t paying attention and then I saw the question: “Looking for the finest Journalism in San Francisco?” (I’m surely being IP Targeted because I’m not in SF right now but in the larger DMA.) Almost without thinking I clicked on the ad:

The use of Alice Waters’ image, but more importantly, the local copy on the ad motivated me to learn more. I who am so jaded and otherwise impervious to such things clicked on the ad because of the local content/mention.

See, it really works.

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Another one from United on the CNN site:

Brace Yourself for the Coming eReader War

Maybe I’m crazy but I’m fascinated by the emerging eReader phenomenon featuring a growing roster of devices:

• Kindle
• Kindle DX
• iPhone/iPod Touch
• Sony eReader
• Plastic Logic reader
• Hearst mystery device
• Fujitsu FLEPia
• Samsung SNE-50K
• Apple Tablet
• TechCrunch Crunchpad

The last two aren’t strictly “eReaders” (nor is the iPhone) and the Apple Tablet is just an often repeated rumor at this point. However today a bunch of media outlets reported on two new, forthcoming  readers from Sony — one undercutting Kindle on price.

The two new devices will reportedly go on sale in the US at the end of this month and are called the Sony Reader “Pocket Edition” and Reader “Touch Edition.” The latter has a touch screen, as the name suggests; and the two devices will sell for $199 and $299 respectively.

While they will be smaller than the Kindle 2 (and certainly the larger DX) their lower pricing is sure to gain consumer notice. The Kindle and DX retail are more expensive:

My belief is that to really sell to the mainstream these devices need to be priced at sub-$200. However, with all these new devices and a growing list of available book and periodical titles the market is finally here.

Now they just need to develop color screens, run video and apps (think Netflix streaming), offer full-time Internet connectivity and so on.

RHD Posts Q2 Earnings

YP publisher RH Donnelley this afternoon announced Q2 earnings:

R.H. Donnelley Corporation . . . reported second quarter 2009 net revenue of $566 million, representing a 15 percent decline from second quarter 2008. Adjusted EBITDA(1) in the quarter was $293 million, down 20 percent from second quarter 2008. Adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was $164 million – based on cash flow from operations of $121 million, capital expenditures of $6 million and $49 million related to reorganizational, restructuring and restricted stock unit payments – up from $159 million in second quarter 2008, primarily due to the termination of bond interest payments while in bankruptcy. Second quarter advertising sales were $523 million, down 23 percent from advertising sales in the second quarter 2008. Net loss was $75 million in the quarter compared to a net loss of $339 million in second quarter 2008.

“Second quarter advertising sales were $523 million, down 23 percent from advertising sales in the second quarter 2008.”

Here are the filings for those who want to dig deeper.

WSJ: Brands Successful Use of FB, Twitter

The WSJ has a nice article on successful use of Twitter (and Facebook) by major brands to get customer feedback and/or diffuse tension and potentially negative PR episodes. It offers several cases in which rapid response, based on information or feedback gleaned from Twitter reshaped customer perceptions for the better.

One morning last December, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, saw Twitter messages alerting him to online comments criticizing Ford for allegedly trying to shut a fan Web site, TheRangerStation.com. The dispute prompted about 1,000 email complaints to Ford overnight.

Mr. Monty, who joined Ford the previous July from an advisory firm specializing in social media, didn’t wait to learn the facts. He posted messages on his Twitter page, and Ford’s, saying he was looking into the matter, adding frequent updates.

Within hours, he reported that Ford’s lawyers believed the site was selling counterfeit goods with Ford’s logo. He persuaded Ford’s lawyers to withdraw the shut-down request if the site would halt the sales. By the end of the day, he Tweeted that the dispute had been resolved.

For a long time consultants and experts in the social media space used lots of obfuscating jargon and dressed up common sense to justify large fees to companies that thought they needed to be educated about this new “social web” or “Web 2.0″ world. Barely a step ahead of basic insight, they kept talking about managing brand reputation or “buzz” or “influencing influencers” — blah, blah, blah.

This WSJ article and other similar cases illustrate very directly and clearly how Twitter in particular can be used to gain customer feedback and tap into potential PR issues. And if the company acts quickly and is sincere about resolution, potential damage can be turned to advantage.

Google’s Dedicated Street View Site

Google has launched a dedicated Street View site that seeks to explain and demystify the visual mapping program:

Accordingly, privacy is one of the prominent links on the page. Among other things there’s an interesting discussion of business use cases and how to “promote your business” using Street View:

Telmetrics: PPCall Growing ‘Explosively’

Call measurement firm Telmetrics has put out a press release this morning reflecting that the company is seeing “explosive growth in customers’ local search pay per call advertising programs in the last six months.” Accordingly the company said it’s “monitoring three times the number of pay per call programs from January 2009 to June 2009.”

Telmetrics identifies three key trends behind the growth of PPCall programs:

1. Traditional Media Proving Value: Traditional media has been forced . . .to compete with online, click-driven models . . .
2. Trackable Conversions Key for Monetizing Leads: Tracking conversions on phone leads linked to demographic and contact information is easily done and advertisers are willing to pay more for these leads . . .
3. Online Advertisers Demand Holistic View of Results: Small and medium-sized businesses that have made the foray into local search engine marketing are looking for online advertising programs that offer results-driven and easily quantifiable solutions.

It added that “Attorneys, Credit & Debt Counseling and Dentists categories demonstrated the highest growth of pay per call adoption.”

We’ve long known that calls are much more valuable than clicks to small businesses in particular, but also to many larger entities with call-center sales operations. However because of the failure of the major search engines to adopt PPCall as an option, it’s taken PPCall much longer to get going than I originally anticipated.

Now PPCall growth may be driven by two somewhat unexpected sources: traditional media and mobile. A couple of years ago I asked “Is Mobile the ‘Sweet Spot’ for PPCall?” PPCall is “organically” suited to mobile advertising on smartphones, where phone numbers turn into links that can immediately initiate a call.

But the first bullet above, about traditional media usage of PPCall, is most interesting to me. PPCall in print is a fascinating story. As the release says:

Traditional media has been forced to adopt pay for performance models, such as pay per call, to compete with online, click-driven models. With the challenging economy, advertisers are more comfortable and willing to spend their limited budgets on advertising programs where they pay only for results generated.

My anecdotal understanding is that PPCall programs are now increasingly being used in print YP directories. But the larger idea is that most traditional media, including print, TV, out of home, will eventually need to track performance with URLs, SMS codes and/or phone numbers.

PaperG Challenges AdReady, Expands Reach

In short, PaperG is a company that’s trying to:

1. Make display advertising more accessible to SMBs (and in so doing challenges AdReady)
2. Make self-service for SMBs a reality
3. Help newspapers attract more online ad dollars
4. Build a local ad network

The company was started in 2007 and already has an impressive roster of customers. I actually met with one of the founders roughly 6 months ago or so and forgot about that until this morning.

Here’s the concept in a nutshell:

Flyerboard takes offline behavior online by adapting the concept of the cork bulletin board for use with a market’s local or hyperlocal websites. It gives local businesses an intuitive, inexpensive and shareable vehicle to attract customers, and provides for many their first foray into online advertising.

Today the company announced an expanded relationship with Hearst Corp.:

Ad tech start-up PaperG Inc. today announced that it has signed an agreement with Hearst Newspapers to deploy PaperG’s dynamic new ad unit Flyerboard across Hearst Newspapers’ network of 15 web properties, including SFGate.com, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle, and TimesUnion.com, the Albany Times Union’s website. The agreement comes after Hearst piloted Flyerboard at Chron.com, the website of the Houston Chronicle.

The “flyerboard” ads appear in banners, skyscrapers or can have dedicated pages. Here’s an example on Boston.com:

Detail: The ads all expand and are interactive.

There’s a self-service ad wizard that offers two simple ways to create ads. One is to use existing images and ad content (i.e., an offline “flyer”); the other enables SMBs to create ads directly in the tool:

Users choose markets and publications. Publishers set prices but the same ad can run on multiple sites (hence the ad network reference). I can’t asses how simple the ad creation process is compared with AdReady because I haven’t gone through both experiences and compared side-by-side. PaperG faces the same “push” vs. “pull” challenges everyone asking SMBs to create ads faces. That’s why the company is expanding into automated ad creation with a new, related site PlaceLocal.

Display ads for SMBs are all the rage now, with the NY Times and Yahoo launching self-service tools based on the AdReady platform. ReachLocal is selling display and others are looking at display advertising as another traffic source beyond “local search.”

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Note, however, that “Internet banner ads” (display) are cited in a recent Harris Poll (n=2,521 adults 18+) as the ad units/types that people most ignore:

By contrast, a recent OPA study found that online display was highly effective but that its effects were “latent.”

Going Google: More Consumer Marketing

Google is “growing up.” It has now more fully embraced conventional marketing and advertising — as it must.

After lots of “peek-a-boo” ads here and there over the years and a fairly visible campaign for Transit, it released bona fide TV advertising in support of its browser Chrome.

Now it’s going after Microsoft (or attempting to boost enterprise usage of Apps) with a new outdoor campaign, “Going Google“:

We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we’re telling the story in a new way. We’re kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks.

Would You Shop at ‘The Shack’?

Apparently to reflect its broadening inventory and mission, electronics retailer RadioShack is going to rebrand as “The Shack” (cue the Issac Hayes music).

The question is: would you shop there?

What the stores need more than a name change is a makeover. They need to be nicer environments with more helpful sales people. I dislike the name “RadioShack” but “The Shack” feels equally cheap, suggestive of something flimsy or insubstantial.

And now the theme from Shaft: “He’s a complicated man and no one understands him but his woman.” (Hey this is what you get when I’ve had three hours sleep.)

In Brief: Google, YouTube, Marchex, FTC Regs

Here are some things going on this morning/today that I don’t have time to give more attention to:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigns from the Apple board because he has too many conflicts of interest given that the companies compete across a number of areas now. Here’s Apple’s official statement; it’s clean:

“Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest.”

YouTube to feature local news. From the NY Times:

YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more.

YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.

YouTube and the Internet more generally are a substitute for cable TV long term.  TVs or TV boxes in a growing number of homes will access the Internet. And with YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, why would I want to subscribe to pay TV — with some notable exceptions of course. Pain is coming to cable TV and more pain is coming to broadcast. Quality (not lowest-common-denominator-cheap-to-produce-schlock) is the answer. But when cost is an issue quality typically loses. TV is generally a wasteland anyway. So be it.

Marchex asks: Can Locally-Focused Display Ads Make The Phone Ring? The argument in the piece is that display should be part of the local marketing mix but that local advertisers will want to be billed on a performance basis (clicks or calls, preferably). What do you think about display and local:

• Will it work for local advertisers? (most have not used, according to survey data I have)
• Can it only be sold on a clicks or calls basis?
• Must it be outsourced and created by the partner/sales agent or will self-service (e.g., AdReady) be viable at all?

As the FTC looks more closely at online advertising and data mining, stronger regulation (disclosure and opt-in/out requirements) are coming. Mark my words. Or to use the Internet cliche, “watch this space.”

Magazines and the ‘End of an Era’

The NY Times yesterday featured an article on an event that in retrospect perhaps marked the beginning of the end of a lavish (advertising) era for print magazines:

This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney, decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown, fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, that would lead the national conversation . . .

Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff.

Talk Magazine failed in 2002, a leading indicator of the dive that the industry would take years later — a combination of “secular” and “cyclical” factors.

These days magazines are suffering almost as much as newspapers. But they’re a form, downsized and bruised, that is likely to remain — although there will be fewer titles and, as the article suggests, this sort of flamboyant and costly type of launch party may/will likely never be seen again.

The advent of eBook Readers may herald a new era for magazines. Beyond the new mobile “form factor,” magazine (and media) publisher Meredith’s recent investment in mobile creative shop Hyperfactory, as well as Lucky Magazine’s deal with NearbyNow, suggests magazines are potentially going to evolve into “marketing platforms” or ad networks — of a sort.

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Related: Forrester eReader consumer survey data. Awareness is growing: 40% have now heard of but not used and 36% have seen but down own. Only 1.5% of respondents said they own one of these devices.

AP Debuts Online Payments: Cash for Quotes

Thanks to Tim Cohn for pointing out AP’s (apparently new) online form that makes it easy for you to pay them for even very short excerpts and quotations. I had not seen this before (see update below):

Here’s what it would cost me to cite a relatively small amount of text from the article “NRA opposition fails to sway senators on Sotomayor” — $17.50.

Given how many AP articles I’ve cited and quoted, I would probably have been liable for perhaps thousands of dollars in fees over the past three and a half years that I’ve been blogging. Linking to a headline (such as I did above) is presumably covered by this: 5-25 words costs $12.50. Educational and non-profit fees are somewhat less.

While this form may facilitate payment for commercial uses of AP’s content, the question of fair use immediately arises. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago when AP was doing all its saber rattling:

Here’s the legal test as laid out in Wikipedia through which a court determines whether some content use is fair or a copyright violation:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This aggressive policy flies in the face of the Internet’s culture of reciprocal linking. It may also run afoul of existing copyright law.

What this will do is start shutting down use of AP content on third party non-licensee sites (unless they’re looking to be provocative). We’re likely to see some litigation around this pretty soon, either a preemptive action for “declaratory relief” or in the context of AP suing someone refusing to pay. That will be good because the Internet needs clear rules about fair use: what’s permitted and what can be charged for.

While this “cash for quotes” effort may deter references to AP articles in many cases (if it stands) it will clearly not solve the problems of the newspaper industry or make newspaper sites more lucrative or popular than they are today.

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Update: PaidContent’s Rafat Ali clarifies that the system has been in use since April of this year:

This has been in place since April, and many sites including Reuters.com, The Independent (UK), Investors Business Daily, Toronto Star and others use the iCopyright system. AP, IBD and others decided to turn on the excerpting part, Reuters and others haven’t. All of them are using a standard excerpted pricing template that the third party system allows. Firstly, I doubt they’re earning any significant money through this. Secondly, I very much doubt AP will go after individual sites/bloggers on this; in fact I know they won’t, speaking to sources inside . . .

Good News, Bad News in WashPo Q2

Here’s the earnings release from Friday. Revenues were down but the quarter saw a profit for the company overall; newspapers were down:

The Washington Post Company today reported net income of $11.4 million ($1.30 earnings per share) for its second quarter ended June 28, 2009, compared to a net loss of $2.7 million ($0.31 loss per share) for the second quarter of last year . . .

Revenue for the first half of 2009 was $2,182.6 million, up 1% from $2,169.4 million in the first half of 2008, due to increased revenues at the Company’s education and cable television divisions, offset by revenue declines at the Company’s newspaper publishing, magazine publishing and television broadcasting divisions. The Company reported an operating loss of $13.4 million for the first half of 2009, compared to operating income of $71.7 million for the first half of 2008 . . .

Newspaper publishing division revenue totaled $168.8 million for the second quarter of 2009, a decrease of 14% from $197.3 million in the second quarter of 2008; division revenue decreased 18% to $329.7 million for the first six months of 2009, from $403.4 million for the first six months of 2008. Print advertising revenue at The Post in the second quarter of 2009 declined 20% to $80.0 million, from $99.8 million in the second quarter of 2008, and decreased 27% to $154.3 million for the first six months of 2009, from $211.4 million in the same period of 2008. The print revenue decline in the second quarter of 2009 is due to large decreases in classified, zones and general advertising; the decline in the first half of 2009 includes similar declines. Revenue generated by the Company’s newspaper online publishing activities, primarily washingtonpost.com, declined 9% to $23.5 million for the second quarter of 2009, versus $25.9 million for the second quarter of 2008; newspaper online revenues declined 9% to $45.6 million in the first six months of 2009, versus $49.8 million for the first six months of 2008. Display online advertising revenue grew 2% for the second quarter and first six months of 2009. Online classified advertising revenue on washingtonpost.com declined 29% and 26% for the second quarter and first six months of 2009, respectively.

For the first six months of 2009, Post daily and Sunday circulation declined 1.5% and 2.6%, respectively, compared to the same periods of the prior year. For the six months ended June 28, 2009, average daily circulation at The Post totaled 622,700 and average Sunday circulation totaled 858,100.

Newsweek also saw significant revenue declines:

Revenue for the magazine publishing division totaled $45.5 million in the second quarter of 2009, a 27% decrease from $62.7 million in the second quarter of 2008; division revenue totaled $91.6 million for the first six months of 2009, a 21% decrease from $116.1 million in the first six months of 2008. The decline is due to a 40% and 32% reduction in advertising revenue at Newsweek for the second quarter and first six months of 2009, respectively, resulting from fewer ad pages at both the domestic and international editions. In February 2009, Newsweek announced a circulation rate base reduction at its domestic edition, from 2.6 million to 1.5 million, by January 2010.

Demographic Segmentation and Social Media

A recent study of social networks (n=5,000) from Anderson Analytics probes usage and loyalty to the top social networking sites. (Data are US only.) The company estimates roughly 110 million social networks users out of an online population of roughly 190 million, or about 57% penetration of the online population.

Which network is the most valuable:

• Facebook — 75%
• MySpace — 65%
• LinkedIn — 30%
• Twitter — 12%

Which network could you “probably do without”:

• Twitter — 43%
• MySpace — 35%
• Facebook — 29%
• LinkedIn — 29%

Usage overlap:

These data are ominous news for MySpace in my view. Accordingly, users could abandon MySpace for FB with minimal “switching costs” because lots of people are using both. This is what largely happened to Friendster. As that site stumbled, people switched to MySpace. However MySpace is used by younger audiences than Facebook overall.

Average age of users:

• MySpace — 29
• Twitter — 33
• Facebook — 34
• LinkedIn — 36

Gender differences: “By a margin of 55% to 45%, there are more women than men using social networking sites regularly.” LinkedIn apparently skews male, while FB skews female:

• Facebook: Males (44%) vs. Females (56%)
• LinkedIn: Males (57%) vs. Females (43%)

Here is eMarketer’s compiliation of the Anderson data:

And here are the asserted reasons why people are using these sites:

As the chart immediately above suggests, there’s limited commercial intent among users. It’s not surprising then that social networks have a mixed track record as ad vehicles (as other data show). Still Anderson found that half of users have “followed a commercial service, product, or brand”:

• 50% of participants said they have followed a commercial service, product, or brand on a social networking site
• 46% report saying something positive about a brand on a social networking site
• 23% have said something negative about a brand

MySpace Starting to Push Local?

I haven’t seen much from MySpace local since it launched earlier this year. However I just got the following email this morning:

It clicks through to this page, which (in a very un-MySpace way) doesn’t require registration to view:

I think MySpace does have an opportunity here both on the consumer side and with advertisers (large and small). A relatively bland or perfunctory treatment of local, which is what they launched with, won’t cut it.

After poking around a little bit this morning, I’d say the site merits a “B” but there’s a great deal more work to be done if MySpace wants to develop local as a strategic asset.

Wiki Directory BizWiki Launches in US

BizWiki formally launched on last week. It’s an international wiki-based directory site, like Brownbook. According to the release:

Bizwiki was built by industry-veterans with years of business directory and meta-search experience behind them, including Keith Hinde, Matt Aird, Craig Sefton and Arthur Jenkins, who between them have helped develop directory and search products for Infospace, local directory publisher Thomson Directories, TradePage and Webcrawler.

The fact that it involves people experienced in local and the directories business is the only thing that suggests there’s any chance to gain visibility and usage. Regardless success with a directory wiki (unless acquired) is a relatively long-term play.

Yellowikis was the original effort to use a wiki to develop a directory site in 2004. Since that time the major search engines have allowed users to add or edit listings on their local sites.