There are two principal ways advertisers are trying to create value for consumers on the web — and they must create value because, you know, consumers are in control. On the web, advertisers can provide entertainment or information.

How effective is advertising as information on the web? See Google’s $15B in ad revenue — an $5.19 […]

For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where all the comments appear on FriendFeed, […]

Why isn’t Facebook a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google, Yahoo, and MySpace? Because Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.

Facebook is worried that this will enable groups of friends to easily pick up […]

We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere.

Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information […]

Tech bloggers and analysts had a collective cow yesterday over the news that January 2008 comScore data suggest clicks on Google’s paid search ads have stopped growing, which implies that Google may be vulnerable to a US recession already underway. Fred Wilson had a sober reflection on why he stands behind his (albeit ill-timed) […]

A post by Steve Yelvington contemplating the secret of Apple’s success got me thinking again about principles that will drive the next wave off successful digital media companies, in addition to the five principles I wrote about to kick off the year:

So Clinton and McCain won in New Hampshire. All the polls got it wrong. Great upset story. This morning, I wanted to read about how it happened, but I only had time to read one article before getting to work.

This presented an interesting question. How should I figure out who’s got the best coverage of […]

After I asserted several times that data is the key to the future of the web, Umair Haque gave my head a good spin by asserting that data is in fact a commodity. Umair is half right — we are increasingly overrun by data, and SOME of it is a commodity. The commodity data is […]

Raise your hand if you’ve seen the dreaded “Still Working” error as Gmail takes half an hour to complete even the simplest functions.

That’s what I thought.

Google has been quietly rolling out social features across all of its services based on Gmail contacts. While Google still has to overcome some of its social tone-deafness (e.g. automatically adding contacts without asking), this move makes perfect sense. For people over 30 (and probably even over 25) email IS the social graph.

When each local newspaper was a self-contained, non-overlapping, monopoly distribution channel, the news wires made all of the sense in the world — why have each newspaper spend its own resources to cover the same national and international stories? Just pool all of the newspapers’ resources and do it once.

But on the web, where anyone […]

The new YouTube InVideo ad format is big news not because the format is new — Google has been testing the format for a while, and other sites like VideoEgg have used it. It’s big news because the ad format is being rolled out on YouTube’s massively scaled video site — kind of reminiscent of […]

To understand why the inclusion of videos on Google News pages — which can be played via YouTube embeds right on the page, without leaving Google News — can be a valuable distribution channel for video content producers, first take a look at this video embedded right here on Publishing 2.0:

It used to be the product of journalism was static — printed column inches in a newspaper or magazine, a TV segment, etc. — when it was in the can, that was it. Done. The only additional mode of activity was printing a correction the next day, or perhaps a follow-up story. But the original […]

Kudos to Publicis Groupe and Digitas for imagining an all-digital advertising future, for planning to solve the deep structural problems of advertising 2.0, and for not sitting still while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft take over the advertising industry.

The most provocative idea to emerge from the New York Times profile of Publicis/Digitas’ digital advertising strategy is […]

This weekend we drove from our home in Leesburg, VA to visit my wife’s family in Staten Island, NY. Along the way, we passed through rural areas of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. I had my laptop with me, which we used while we were driving. I used my Blackberry 8830 as a tethered modem, […]

Why should Google buy Yahoo? With the exception of search, Yahoo’s strengths map to Google’s weaknesses, almost precisely. Consider the following:

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing Google for deceptive advertising practices. I don’t know if the suit has legal merit, but it puts the spotlight on Google’s advertising formats (which are used by most search engines) and, given that this is a government suit, raises significant questions about commonly accepted search advertising practices:

Banner ads on Facebook is a dumb way to monetize. Same on MySpace. People don’t pay attention to banner ads on social networks because they are too busy paying attention to EACH OTHER. It’s no surprise that people are complaining about low click through rates on Facebook display ads.

But that doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t […]

Nielsen took a big step towards accelerating the death of the page view by announcing it would rank websites by time spend on the site instead. But time spent is an equally problematic metric that assumes that more is better, which isn’t the case with web applications designed for efficiency, like Google search.

There’s been a lot of debate about what killed Backfence, the hyperlocal news site. Was it poor design? Lack of incentives for users to generate content? Bad business model? Maybe all of these contributed.

But what really killed Backfence was Google and Web 1.0.

As speculation and chatter increases, the question of whether Google ends up buying Facebook is turning out to be one of the big questions of 2007. My bet is that there is already an offer on the table, and that Facebook is seriously considering it. I’m also willing to bet that Facebook will […]

I made the argument that Google’s weakness is community and social dynamics, which have become as fundamental to the Web as hyperlinks and which represent an opportunity for Yahoo or anyone else to change the game on Google. A perfect example is Google’s new “user-generated content” feature — adding reviews to Google Maps. The problem […]

In all the coverage of Terry Semel’s stepping down as Yahoo CEO to be replaced by founder Jerry Yang, there’s a standard reference to Yahoo’s failure to beat Google — and the implication that perhaps Yahoo can never beat Google. The main reason way Yahoo has lagged Google is that Yahoo has been trying to […]

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating interview with Rupert Murdoch. Here are some choice quotes:

What does an ad agency do? It brokers ad sales, right? So is Google an ad agency? I mean in the traditional sense of being the middle man between advertisers and media companies, not as a media company selling ads directly, as Google does with AdWords. You tell me:

FeedBurner just quietly posted to their site the official announcement that Google has indeed acquired Feedburner. Here’s what CEO Dick Costolo has to say about why it’s such a great fit (which it really is):

Google has finally taken a major step to bring online applications into the mainstream — by making them available offline. Despite less-than-credible denials, Google will now be competing overtly head-to-head with Microsoft Office. But Google isn’t content to just compete with Microsoft for control of the office application market — after all, Google has already […]

Neil Henry, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley, has a lament about the decline of newspaper journalism in the soon to be editorially downsized San Francisco Chronicle. He puts forth some good examples of the types of investigative journalism that are at risk of being defunded. He also displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what […]

Google’s control over identity really is astonishing. I received an email with this opening line, which I just assumed was some weird type of spam:

Eagerly waiting for Insomnia Media Group\’s web site to launch as Variety story caught my attention.

Facebook Platform, which allows companies to build applications — and entire ad or fee-driven businesses — inside Facebook is a brilliant move, which could given Facebook the opportunity to become the next Google. The secret to Google’s success with AdSense was sharing revenue with publishers and letting them figure out how to optimize the revenue. […]

Google’s PR guys must have been asleep at the switch when they let CEO Eric Schmidt make this comment:

“We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.”

Despite the challenges with consumer adoption of RSS, XML feeds have become the building blocks of online publishing. So Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, the show-stealing feed management platform, for $100 million comes as no surprise. The immediate applications are obvious — enhanced feed-based search, integration of feed stats into Google Analytics, integration of feed ad […]

Google has disintermediated media companies, not just through Google News, which has been the focus of newspaper lawsuits and handwringing, but also through Google’s main search results — and even more so with the introduction of Google Universal Search. But of all the features in Universal Search, the most disruptive may be the Video PlusBox, […]

Every media company is positioning itself to benefit from the increasing shift of ad dollars from offline media to online and digital media, but in many cases ad dollars aren’t moving online in a 1-to-1 ratio. That’s why newspapers, for example, still get 80-90% of ad revenue from print, an artifact of monopoly pricing that […]

Has Facebook missed the boat by not being acquired by Yahoo, or is it just getting warmed up? A MediaPost piece by Gavin O’Malley showcases some opinions supporting the former:

What do offline media journalists have in common with Made For AdSense publishers, i.e. online publishers who create sites with junk content for the sole purpose of making money off of Google’s pay-per-click ads? Quite a lot it seems — Google is destroying their business models from either end of the content quality spectrum. Compare […]

The issue of whether Google’s indexing of news sites constitutes copyright infringement is likely to receive more attention following a report that Google has entered into licensing agreements with several large UK news groups, similar to the licensing deals that Google has made with the Associated Press in the U.S. and Agence France-Presse in France. […]

Google has so many conflicts of interest, e.g. delivering the highest quality “organic” search results vs. tolerating high ranking sites that clearly have no purpose other than to make money from Google AdSense (i.e. “made for AdSense” sites). There’s also pay-per-click arbitrage, where someone buys keywords in Google AdWords in order to send users to […]

Now that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and WPP have spent collectively $10.4 billion to acquire the largest online display ad platform companies (DoubleClick, Right Media, aQuantive, and 24/7 Real Media) on the bet that display ads will be a key driver of growth for online ad spending, it’s fair to ask exactly what the value of […]

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company — the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company — Google’s search results and its […]

Google has more engineers and infrastructure than God, but that hasn’t prevented me from being frozen out of my Gmail account for the last hour with this error message:

I saw one of Google’s “agency relationship managers” give a pitch to a top agency, where she gave the standard line that Google doesn’t want to be an ad agency. I didn’t believe it for a second. And neither does WPP, one of the top agency holding companies, which just announced the acquisition of 24/7 […]

Google announced a major change to its standard web search results — the inclusion of results from its vertical search engines, e.g. Google News, Google Video, Google Maps, inside its standard search results, which they are calling Google Universal Search. That means links from Google News and YouTube videos (playable right in the search results!) […]

Social media marketing, i.e. promoting content through social media sites like Digg has become a cottage industry. Digg and other “audience as editor” sites have fought tooth and nail against gaming, trying to keep marketing content from receiving the same homepage attention as “editorial content,” i.e. content voted up by the community without marketer influence. […]

Can you name an online media company that has billions in ad revenue but has never had to bother with measuring unique visitors or pages views — those antiquated measures that keep the dynamic web locked into antiquated ad sales processes and ruin the online advertising economics of most media companies?

Ok, so that was a […]

Blogging and search have been good to each other overall. Bloggers have cranked out millions of links, which drive search algorithms, and in turn search has rewarded bloggers by ranking their content high in search results, which is to a large degree a function of bloggers giving each other so many links. (Blogging platforms like […]

“Googling a person” has been part of the vernacular for some time now, but Google’s control over identity has become so powerful that it’s now influencing baby naming choices — at least that’s the hook in this WSJ piece on Google and identity:

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she […]

Perhaps there are good reasons why Microsoft should acquire Yahoo, but beating Google probably isn’t one of them. The reason is simple:

Microsoft and Yahoo have businesses that leverage the online network.

Google increasingly IS the network.

The following piece was co-authored with Robert Young.

One by one, the big media companies and the Internet giants have started to ante up for the big poker game over the future of the video content business. Google started it all with its acquisition of YouTube. Then GE’s NBC-Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp responded by […]

I’ve spent a lot of time on Publishing 2.0 talking about the impact of digital media on periodical publishing, i.e. newspapers and magazines, and about online publishing broadly defined, e.g. search results as a form of publishing, that I’ve only rarely looked at the publishing form that gave birth to modern publishing — the book. […]

Just when you thought you understood Web 2.0, along comes a theory so disruptive it razes everything in its path. The theory of cumulative advantage suggests that every successful Web 2.0 site — and the output of every Web 2.0 platform — is completely arbitrary and random. The head-exploding NYT piece by Columbia professor Duncan […]

I sat in on a presentation by a Google rep to a New York agency — it was a big, wet sloppy kiss. Here was Google, king of impersonal, self-serve online ad efficiency up to its eyeballs in gooey “relationship building.” It’s no accident that Google’s New York office has more humans than servers.

This is […]

Everybody in the video content business is focused — to the point of obsession — with distribution. Viacom is going to distribute through Joost. NBC Universal and News Corp are creating their own distribution channel. CBS is going to distribute through everybody and their dog.

All these content owners are right to be focused on distribution. […]

Let’s play connect the dots with a number of recent announcements that together reveal the real battleground for the future of media:

Doubleclick announces that it is setting up a “a Nasdaq-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements”

Google announces that it is extending its AdWords marketplace to TV

AOL announces that Advertising.com will provide […]

What is Google’s core competency? I would argue that it’s harvesting the value from massively scaled, complex human activity, i.e. millions of websites linking to each other and hundreds of thousands of advertisers bidding on key word and experimenting with ad creative, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates. The other critical element of this core competency […]

Did the NBC Universal/News Corp deal make Google a tad nervous? Via WSJ:
Mr. Chernin said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called yesterday and said Google will consider signing on as a distribution partner. A Google spokesman confirmed a call took place, but declined to comment on what was discussed.
After spending $1.65 billion on YouTube, that […]

Is it possible that the future of the content business is worse than being less profitable and worse even than not scaling anymore — is it possible that content creation will cease to be a business?

I was struck by this quote from a music business manager in the WSJ article about the complete collapse of […]

As anticipated, Google has launched a “cost-per-action” advertising program that allows advertisers to pay only for specific results, such as a sale, lead, sign-up, etc. Andy Beal thinks this is a threat to online affiliate marketing, and surely it is. But Aaron Wall’s comment jumped out at me:

If they push this as hard as they […]

Microsoft released a research report about the scourge of search engine spam (via NYT).

Nick Wilson has an excellent podcast on the topic, in which he observes that Google is perversely incented NOT to clear up spam in its search results because it actually makes money off of those spam sites by supplying the ads.

Nick also […]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, […]

Here’s a koan for everyone in media: YouTube had revenue of $15 million is 2006; what is the value of YouTube in 2007?

If you’re not familiar with koans, this is from Wikipedia:
A kō·an is a story, dialogue, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are […]

Google is learning that the value propositions of content hosting, content distribution, and content discovery are not created equal, and that YouTube’s monopoly on all three may be slipping away. A story in the Washington Post states what has been evident for some time:
In the few months since Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, […]

I was working on a spreadsheet in Google Docs & Spreadsheets last night when I got this error message:

This is like the infamous Micorosft blue screen of death — the end of trust.

Until Google Apps has seamless, ultra-user-friendly offline support, it’s simply not ready for prime time — and not to be trusted.

There is a very real body of knowledge about how to manage search that is not fairly characterized as gaming of the system.
There are some very smart people who are masters of this knowledge base.
There are many SEOs who, in addition to possessing this knowledge, appear to be very honest brokers. (See this post for […]

Web 2.0 is all about openness, right? At least that’s the ideology. But as to the BUSINESS of Web 2.0, the most successful money-making machine of the Web 2.0 era, Google AdWords, derives huge strategic advantage from opacity.

Today, Google lost some of that advantage when upstart Quigo forced Google to open the kimono on its […]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.

The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused […]

I was struck by this statement from a NYT report about the ongoing dialogue among Viacom, NBC, and News Corp about the future of online video, GoogTube, etc.:
It has become evident that the question of who will rule video on the Web is incredibly tangled. For now, most of the sticky strands lead to Google, […]

I’ve been using Google Docs to work on some documents with other collaborators. This was my first real test of Google Docs, and I have to say, while most of the application works quite well and online collaboration really is a new paradigm, some fundamental elements of the application really SUCK. Here’s my top ten […]

Discussions of Google’s offline media ambitions — to extend their wildly successful platform for online advertising to offline advertising — typically assume that Google’s success in the offline arena is just a matter of time. But the reality is that Google has nothing but a string of failures to show for itself, most notably in […]

Wikipedia is starting to feel awfully Google-like in the amount of power it wields online. If you publish any original information or insight, and it gets incorporated into Wikipedia, even if you are properly cited in Wikipedia, based on the new “no follow” policy for such external links, Wikipedia will likely rank much higher than […]

Instances of REAL innovation are so painfully rare, so few and far between. There’s so much HYPE, so much hollow, empty promise, it just weights you down — but there’s nothing like the head rush of experiencing real innovation — and that’s exactly what Apple delivered to today with the wildly anticipated and obsessively hyped […]

Google is experimenting with ads in some Google Video clips (via Inside Google via Boing Boing) — a stunning failure of innovation, here is was an example of an Allstate ad embedded into a Charlie Rose clip, which is was as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted […]

If you spend too much time in Silicon Valley you’d think that the technology industry — with Google leading the charge — already owns the future of advertising. But don’t count out Madison Avenue just yet — they may be responsible for perpetuating the imbalance between media time spent online and ad dollars spent online […]

There’s been a flurry of news about new video downloading services — BitTorrent, Wal-Mart, Time Warner — as copyright holders get busy taking back control from consumers. YouTube just cut a deal with Verizon that gives users so little control that the blogosphere couldn’t find enough pejorative adjectives to describe it.

The glory days of consumers […]

Unbowed by its failed magazine print ad program, Google has cut a deal with 50 major newspapers to sell remnant print ad space to its enormous roster of AdWords advertisers. Here’s the upside and downside for Google and the newspaper industry:

Upside

Google — Even if newspaper print advertising continues to decline, Google’s share will be greater […]

Mark Cuban posted an interesting theory about the YouTube/Google deal from an “anonymous author.” The self-described “experienced veteran in the digital media business” characterizes the theory like this:

Some of this is based on talks with people involved and some is speculation based on my experience working in the industry, negotiating settlements and battling in […]

In the continuing (and, I predict, growing) audience measurement saga, Fred Wilson chastises Mike Arrington for calling comScore’s audience metrics “flaky” vis-a-vis Digg’s audience:

My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors.

Perhaps a better question […]

I was struck by this comment from a session on audience measurement at the Business Blog Summit (via conversationrater):

I don’t care about how many page views or visitors I really get. I care about getting the right visitors, the influential visitors, or the potential customer visitors. How can I tell who’s who?

Duh! But this truism […]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance […]

Despite increasingly frequent reassurances to content creators, Google clearly wants nothing less than to own the content industry — but Google is completely earnest about not wanting to actually own or create any content. Google wants to own the BUSINESS of content.

The big news today is of course Google’s launch of customized search, which allows […]

Google has clearly transformed the software industry’s approach to business models, as evident in the hundreds of online software companes (i.e Web 2.0) planning to “monetize” through advertising. But Google may also be influencing the software industry in less obvious but equally significant ways, through its ethos of simplicity and its obsessive (and often hyped) […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a […]

It’s inevitable that a PR firm like Edelman would create a phony blog for one of its clients (in this case Wal-Mart — see Shel Holtz for a great analysis). For all of the hype over “conversation” as the new media paradigm, no one has yet figured out how to use conversation to reliably achieve […]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):

In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking […]

Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube solidifies Google’s position at the center of media. Google already has Google Video, so they didn’t buy YouTube for the technology. No, they bought YouTube for the traffic, the same reason they cut the $900 million deal with Fox Interactive Media.

So don’t believe Eric Schmidt for a second — […]

Buried in the Time interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt is an astonishing admission:

Another example of a question that we are debating right now is: we have this amazing product called AdSense for content, where we’re monetizing the Web. If you’re a publisher we run our ads against your content. It’s phenomenal. How do we […]

Last week I attended the Consumer Engagement Conference, put on by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), where I discovered that the word “engagement” — which is being proffered as a new “output” metric for advertising to replace outdated “input” metrics like Gross Rating Points and Impressions — […]

There is a fundamental tension in Web/Media 2.0 between openness and control — openness is required to leverage the network effect of the Web and harness the power of socially-connected users, but control is required to get a share of any money that changes hands.

Google has been most successful in walking this line — […]