The Big Picture speaks about something even I have noted recently. More and more Mainstream Media (MSM) are seeking ways to bolster their ad revenue’s.
If I can summarise the The Big Pic’s conclusion it is that these MSM’s value is so low that they are desparately seeking alternative eyeballs to boost their revenue. When we see this kind of thing, it suggests desperation, and perhaps revenue problems for MSM.
The Big Picture | Soon to be worthless: Nielsen Net Ratings and comScore Media Metrix
Their business model appears to be essentially a “Seeking Alpha” aggregation approach, with the added element of splitting advertising revenue with the analyst/authors. Over the summer, I was asked to participate in this. I wasn’t interested in 30% of the revenue for 100% of my content.
Time to go back to the drawing board at ComScore/ Neilsen methinks. Strategy 101.
- what is your business model?
- understand why would people want your product?
- selling advertising based on the input of others, such as The Bog Picture blog, will not improve your intrinsic value as an organisation
I continue to be out on somewhat of a limb, by believing the online advertising model is overblown, even potentially dead and just doesn’t know it. Why – because of a circular argument, that confounds everyone, including big companies like Microsoft.
- Advertising is generally associated with entertainment
- The assumption carries on, that the web is entertainment, and that interruptive tactics are accepted in entertainment
- arising from the first assumption, that all companies are advertising companies
Relevance to Bankwatch:
Interruptive advertising will have a place, but it will always be a percentage play. x.xx% success, with x being a really low number.
What about 1 minus x%. The 99% of us who did not react to this or that campaign. Is this really the best that we can hope for online. I refuse to believe that.
Bankwatch 
This just in from Adweek: Online ad revenue now tops $5 billion per quarter (or $20 billion annually).
http://www.adweek.com/aw/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003654905
Geez, I don’t mean to sound like I’m shilling for Adweek, but this article is really on-topic:
http://www.adweek.com/aw/magazine/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003654895
Excerpt: “Television spots come in expensive 30-second increments. Print ads come in costly single pages. Getting more time or more space costs dramatically more. Working within these constraints led to the modern art and science of positioning and messaging: Pick the key idea and blast it out over and over until it is ingrained in the minds of consumers. But now these same reductive messages coexist with hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of parallel messages unconstrained by time or space. These are the words and messages on blogs, YouTube videos, Flickr streams, MySpace and Facebook pages and all similar locations where consumers control the content.”
The adweek article makes the distinction between messages and content. Their definitions:
messages = soundbites
content = detailed product descriptions, comparison tools, demonstrations, live chats, category expertise, advice from experts and more.
I fear the advertisers will misunderstand and think that content = long, complicated soundbites.
I go back to my original point, with a qualification. I do not think that internet is entertainment, especially as it applies to getting things done. The qualification there, might be that many do feel internet is entertainment, and there you have the dichotomy between Yahoo and Google.
Either way internet is whatever I, the user, want it to be, and the Adweek definition of content still feels like fake ad interruptive advertising to me.
Final example: search for your favourite hotel – I guarantee you will find it hard to locate their actual home site.