SpectatorBytes

Over the past few months, I have noticed a rise in large images are increasingly dominating the user interface of content websites, particularly news sites.  The Huffington Post front page illustrates this trend. Here is a comparison of the current front page (below left) versus the version when the site was launched in 2006 (below [...]

The growing number of social tools that have emerged over the past few years (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, and Twitter among others) are contributing to the emergence of new type of users which I call “social leaders.” After all, in a world where we are increasingly “following” our friends, acquaintances, colleagues and celebrities, the “social [...]

We are entering a new stage on the Web. Significant elements of the digital publishing, video, advertising and social media infrastructure have been laid out. Scale winners in each of these ecosystems have emerged such as YouTube, WordPress, Facebook, MySpace, Advertising.com, Google’s Ad Sense, etc. Now, new players are emerging as a second wave of [...]

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 [...]

The online video revolution has certainly been on its way for quite some time now. YouTube’s skyrocketing audience numbers and overall video streams statistics from the Web indicate that video has become a core element of the Web experience. This trend will expect to continue as increasing number of traditional and new video content producers [...]

I am increasingly surprised by how many more sites seem to be looking to build audiences through SEM efforts. The concept of using a direct marketing ad unit such as paid search to promote content websites has seemed strange to me. The idea of having to continually advertise to be able to aggregate audiences seems [...]