SpectatorBytes

Social networks have established a new “social paradigm” on how users can consume information on the Web. Content consumption in social networks has been mainly organized around friends or people you know. The primary tools provided by “social” experiences have proven to be highly addictive and engaging: -  People  or entity-specific data feeds provide an [...]

In recent weeks, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the attractiveness of the “application reader” experiences on the iPad / iPhone. Flipboard, FLUD and Pulse are good examples. After several weeks of using them, I believe these news readers are ushering in a new era in content aggregation. These application readers are designed to allow users [...]

There are two major forces poised to significantly simplify the way we interact with the Web over the next few years. In the process, the drastic simplification will anoint the Web as King of All Media (sorry, Howard).  The first one is mobile applications and the second one is the social graph.  A“simpler, easier-to-use” Web [...]

Upon learning of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, very few industry people (myself included) were surprised that Facebook needed to acquire a company to bring in talent to compete with Twitter. However, if one takes a step back, this news should have at least raised an eyebrow. Currently, Facebook is one of the hottest digital media [...]

YouTube’s recent programming and advertising initiatives are pretty exciting. In them, I can see that YouTube is taking steps to unlock the value of online video. First, YouTube recently allowed one of its content partners, CBS, to use their own video player to broadcast “March Madness” on YouTube.com. The second was YouTube’s experiment with a [...]

Over the past couple of years, I have advised the digital companies with which I am and have been involved to minimize their marketing spending. Instead, I have advocated that management teams focus on product development and maximizing distribution, which I strongly believe is a superior recipe for success. The list of digital products that [...]

I recently attended an interesting “unconference” organized by WPP’s Mark Read and Yossi Vardi in Athens, Greece (Thanks to both of them for hosting this event). After reflecting about the many conversations I had in Athens about online advertising, I thought I would start outlining my thoughts on what is going in online advertising today [...]

Venture Beat picked an interesting story from Ad Age which outlines the challenges facing the online advertising industry (See Here) which outlines the challenges facing the onlineadvertising industry. Below is one of the most interesting statement’s in the Ad Age piece. “The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is “old” [...]

This was a tough week for online advertising given Valueclick’s lower guidance for Q208 (see below), Google’s less than stellar performance and even eBay’s cautious outlook for Q3. Valueclick’s Guidance – Fiscal Year 2008 Revenue by Segment Year-Over-Year Growth Affiliate Marketing2(excludes Search123) +8% Comparison Shopping and Search (includes Search123) +19% pro-forma Technology +18% Media, Total [...]

I have written several posts about the need for offering innovative ad solutions to brand advertisers. I wanted to share a couple of solutions for brand advertisers that two companies in our portfolio have developed (obviously I have a vested interest in the success of these two companies). Nevertheless, I think that they are offering [...]

Today, there was an interesting article on USA Today about the impact of DVRs on TV viewership (See Here). It seems that we have certainly been talking about DVRs and specifically Tivo for quite some time. Yet, as the article indicates, DVRs have yet to reach mainstream; penetration levels are hovering at 23%. This will [...]

Recent report by Pubmatic (see here) over the past week indicate that online advertising prices are declining. This trend had already become evident as leading Web players announced their Q1 results. The forces that have enabled the growth in advertising on the Web now seem to be working against it. Direct Response advertisers have driven [...]

In an effort to increase TV audiences, the CW network has decided to stop streaming new episodes of Gossip Girl on the Web. To some extent, this decision seems to ignore evolving consumer media habits and appears to be founded on the hope that the traditional television model still works. While I understand the economic [...]

For content producers and providers, the Web is bound to create significant value in the middle. Much has been said about the Web’s long-tail over the past few years, and certainly many companies are focused on the “head” since most offline models have been built around the “head”. However, the middle – which some call [...]

Today’s major news headline is NewsCorp’s FIM sales reorganization (see here). While internal politics have been blamed for the changes in the blogosphere, in an strategic sense, I would expect the move to further help FIM built its brand advertising revenues. Here are some of the reasons why: – Increases focus on creating “scalable” custom [...]