SpectatorBytes

Yesterday, as part as our annual gathering of portfolio companies, I had the opportunity to meet a group of high school and college students from the Los Angeles area. There were about 15 kids between the ages of 16-20. 65% boys and 35% girls. The session was focused on learning about their media consumption habits, [...]

This week, I had an interesting conversation around the value of Marketing for consumer products on the Web. In my chat, I was guiding a company in which I am involved to rethink their marketing spend. The young company believed that spending on Marketing was critical to support their products in the highly competitive categories [...]

Today, the WSJ reported on an initiative by MediaVest’s Vivaki to work with some of the leading online networks to test and develop new standards for online advertising formats. This effort highlights the still nascent nature of the industry but also that online video is coming of age. Even in this economic downturn, advertisers continue [...]

A good friend of mine, who works in digital media, recently expressed its frustration with Web businesses: ” Why can these businesses be more simple; They are just not easy businesses.” Any digital media entrepreneur or executive is likely to agree with this statement. Building or operating businesses on the Web continue to be a [...]

The formal creation of AOL’s MediaGlow and the most recent numbers from the Magazine Publishers Association of Americahave gotten me thinking about the future of Magazines. It is easy to be a pessimist and dismiss Traditional publishers in light of the shift in consumer behavior towards the Web. However, Traditional publishers still have some key [...]

Yesterday, AOL announced the formation of its publishing unit MediaGlow. This event marks an important milestone in the evolution of publishing on the Web. Big congratulations to Bill Wilson. It is a formal recognition that the value of publishing on the Web will primarily be accrued by highly-targeted sites that are able to create deep [...]

The online display advertising business is likely to undergo significant changes over the next few years as key participants try to deploy new tools to enhance overall performance. First, the business is becoming increasingly tiered between premium advertising solutions and run of network solutions (RON). In this post, I will focus on the RON performance [...]

ComScore reported that the average online video viewer watched 273 minutes (4.55 hours) of video per month in 2008.  This compares with 73 minutes of online video streaming per viewer in 2005. This is an increase of more than 3 hours per month. As a reminder, 2005 was the year AOL established a major milestone with [...]