MediaVidea

Why Facebook advertising is a waste of money

Labels: advertising. online advertising, facebook

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:49 PM 0 Comments

Study says Facebook Pages Less Effective than Search Ads and Email Newsletters for Most Businesses

Labels: advertising. online advertising, facebook

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:52 PM 0 Comments

How Mark Zuckerberg went from Cool to Uncool in a Day

When Mark Zuckerberg got up to announce Facebook's 'User spams User' aka the Beacon Social Ads System, he did two things he wouldn't normally have done, but I guess the flush of easy Microsoft money was too rich to blow off quickly.

He starts with saying an idiotic pronouncement:

"Once every hundred years, media changes".

Yeah right, next thing, the bright one will say is that he invented the "pamphlet".

But more importantly, Mark forgot to wear his talismanic sandals.
If success is a show then Mark's Sandal ethic was the thing that may have attracted all those things into that giant ad system.

As technology started playing an increasingly important role in our lifestyle, Charisma has become a popular term during the two decades of 90s and 2001-till date.

This also corresponded with an unprecedented rise in business and technology journalism, blogging being the latest extension, coupled with growing hype of business schools, business book writers, motivational spekaers and so-called gurus and pundits.

More than any other industry, it comes to pass that it is in the technology industry, that the 'Charisma/Founder/Visonary' drama is played out most often.

Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs, Microsoft vs. Google (and everything else that came before), Google vs. everyone else...the technology industry is full of drama, and why not?

Nothing beats the promise of quick riches and the resultant Hero Worship.

Maybe, the newly-minted paper billionaire Mark Zuckerberg should have stuck with the Sandals that brought him all the luck in the first place.

For long Mark Zuckerberg has aped Steve Jobs.
So, it may be the case that, like Jobs, Zuckerberg will bounce back again.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, facebook, social networking

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:01 PM 0 Comments

How Facebook's Social Ads system is evil and what you can do about it

The Social Ads-Social Graph-Facebook nonsense rolls on and on. At the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City, Steve Jobs-wannabe Mark Zuckerberg again tried to justify absurdity with some rather suave statements.

We heard some real gems from the new Pied Piper of Social Media:

"Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend,"

"Once every hundred years media changes."

Even the New York Times, which has become a Facebook Fan of late, has given objectivity a boot, and now parrots the “Any social innovation that only Facebook is fit to bring” party line.

The Times says this about the new Social Ads system:

"Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product.

But, the User as Brand Fan is not new.
Google introduced a similar (and patented) user-led Ad Recommending system/user-to-user advertising system some time back.

In Mark Zuckerbeg’s world, and Nick Carr has noted this brilliantly, 'Media and advertising are synonymous.'

Nick explains,
‘Editorial is advertorial. The medium is the message from our sponsor.’

In Mark Zuckerbeg’s world, ‘Marketing is conversational... and advertising is social.’

But alas, Mark is not new to jump to this sort of idiotic phraseology.
Some months back, if you remember the Spokesbloggers scandal, John Battelle tried to pass the ‘Marketing is Conversation’ shtick when Microsoft paid many top bloggers to carry puff pieces about Microsoft product.


So, it comes to pass that Facebook the Pied Piper and the social rats have decided that today’s generation of 18 year old, who don’t know who Bob Dole was and who use the mobile like Engineers use drawing pencils are the stupidest ones around.

They know for sure that the kids are totally okay with trusting Facebbok with all their data, which Facebook will duly sell to advertisers, who in turn will bombard them with ads.

It sure is a swell deal, and instantly joins the ranks of 500 channels, customization, personalization, portals and assorted other fantasies of these 15-odd years of the web.

Some note on the Social Ads nonsense:

1. Stop adding the ‘social’ prefix to every other word (and while we are that, I hope we also stopped adding “Open” before every other word, Google, take note)

2. Social Ads System is just another name for a Behavioral Targeting System and Tacoda.com is doing it for a while now.

3. Segmentation of audiences based on profile data can bring a too narrow data for advertisers and may not be worth all that trouble. Google Adsense does a better job with the long tail and will have a wider reach.

4. Is there such a beast called Brand Enthusiast?
When I could afford, I started wearing Levi’s because I wanted to be cool among my friends, none of whom wore Levi’s.

It may sound cussed but I did not want to be the same as everyone else and I am sure you would be thinking the same.

Maybe, a brand enthusiast is another name for ‘paid blogger/paid focus group member/give- me- money- to- watch- type -unemployed guy/PR intern’ and other variants.


5. Social Ads system will be the new spam:
it will clutter users’ profile pages and inboxes with ads - banners, buttons, advertiser communities, homepage takeovers, brand wraps, TV shows in form of advertorials and assorted other hoohahs.

6. Facebook’s Hotmail problem:
Also known as Ad Blindness Problem. Seth Godin writes, “When someone goes to FaceBook, they're not looking for stuff. They're looking for people. But people don't buy ads, stuff does.”

If you didn't know Seth wrote the book on Permission Marketing, and Facebook's Social Ads system blows the whole idea to bits.

7. There is no more Privacy on Facebook:
And by association on all sites that Facebook partners for its Social ads system.
For example, Facebook will monitor what you buy on Amazon and then spam you to death.

By the way, take it for granted that Facebook employees, right from the janitor up to Mark Zuckerberg is looking at your profile and your activity.

Unlike Google, Facebook is not heavy with faceless bots so far.

8. You can’t opt out of all the ensuing spam:
A least, Hotmail and all other free service providers had this facility. Is this a coding problem with an outfit that has its own developer platform?

So, What can the user do?
Early signs are that the new Social Ads system will make the same mistakes Google’s Adsense does, and mistargeted advertising will be a common excuse from advertisers caught spamming.

However the social networking addicts can use the Adblock plugin to block all ads coming from whatever domain Facebook uses.

If ads still filter through, the ‘new college generation’ of today can do what generations have done before with intrusive advertising: Ignore them.

Update: Umair has written a brilliant strategy note on Facebook's Social ads and has this ti say about Facebook's partner brands:

on the whole, not exactly brands consumers luv

Labels: advertising. online advertising, ethics, facebook, social networking

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:07 PM 2 Comments

Bighow beeps in

On October 21, I quietly launched my new startup Bighow.com. Bighow.com is based on a simple premise: what if there was one web service where you could share links, like digg.com or del.icio.us and could also publish original items, like a blog post? And wouldn't it be sweet if you could do that in not only news, but 21 others topics as well?

I like to call Bighow.com an all-in-one Community Publishing System (COPS, anyone? :-))

With Bighow, I have tried to do something of a structured database. As a result, there are some preset categories and sub categories when you submit your items. However, we have also incorporated tagging, thus ensuring a two-level categorization - the best of structured data and folksonomy.

Last year, when I left a comfortable job to pursue my dreams, like most startups before me, I faced challenges and I even wrote about it back then in a post titled Startup is hard in New Delhi.


Much of what I wrote is still valid. But developing Bighow has been the most exciting educational journey in my professional life so far.

We have tried to do something FUN with the 'Craigslist+Google Base+Digg/Del.icio.us' approach. Bighow is nothing great to look at and I think we have only archived 10% of what I hope to achieve with Bighow.com. Interesting things are in the works - Microformats, APIs, XML/Republishing, Edgeio type deportalization...

I started with $8000 in my bank and in fact, Joydeep who developed Bighow learnt php while we started coding.

Here are the topics that Bighow covers:
News - news, reviews, events, announcements, forums, community, polls
Classifieds - jobs, wanted, services, for sale, products, travel, vehicles, housing, vacation rentals, matrimonials, business for sale, coupons and

Listings - resume, personals and business profiles

I am particularly excited about Bighow Polls (http://bighow.com/poll) and about we have tried to display information submitted information across Countries, cities, localities and groups. Bighow has RSS feeds for everything, including advanced search. Even the Classifieds section has detailed flagging and comments.

I am taking it slow with Bighow and partly the reason is that Bighow is hosted on a shared server, my busted bank account partly the reason.

Bighow is about a new news foundation and I hope we don't get caught up in the Web 2.0 is dying rant cycle. In fact, I agree with PR Guru Steve Rubel's suggestion to question conventional web wisdom and I am looking forward to building a small news team to bolster, moderate and seed Bighow and and do interesting things with Bighow on a local basis.

I hope Bighow plays an important role in the news business of tomorrow and while I work at raising some funds to promote Bighow, build a team, I would like to hear what you think about Bighow, what I should do with it and so on...

Labels: advertising. online advertising, bighow, startup

posted by Pramit Singh @ 10:22 PM 0 Comments

How bad a word is 'Content'?

Unlike its more distinguished brethren including blog, blogosphere, and wiki, which hold the promise of something new, the word "content" may be responsible for reducing the once respected art of writing and reporting to a debased and generic form.

I don't know what it is with you but the word, here in India conjures up images of factories and sweatshops.

Rewriting outfits masquerading as blog networks, made for adsense sites, online marketing outfits and publishing outsourcing services, among other avatars, who routinely advertise looking for content writers and freelance writers with a bachelor's degree and make shift English.

You see few classifieds looking for reporters and journalists.
What do you need degrees for when all you need is an ox-like strength to rewrite 15 articles in 8 hours?

Content Developer means someone with 2 + years of rewriting existing articles - making active to passive and vice versa.

Content Manager means someone who can manage a team of rewriters who fill hundreds of pages in the latest travel portal.

I should know. I first cut my teeth into online publishing by landing the job as a editor at an outfit that shall remain unnamed for obvious reasons.

David Callaway of MarketWatch, writes about the "C" word on the 10th anniversary of Marketwatch.com

"Content" is a horrible word, snagged from the bowels of the dictionary by the same Internet marketing folks who gave you "B2B," "hard stop" and "digital solutions." Its primary definition is something that is contained, such as the contents of a bag of dog food, or the contents of a bottle of valium. Or the contents of your retirement account. News is the last thing that can be contained -- especially online news.

Ultimately, it is the nature of all words to be reduced to content.
Long live Google adsense.

Thnx to Romenesko for the link

Labels: advertising. online advertising, news 2.0, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:16 PM 0 Comments

There are worse things online than adsense

I have gone through Nick Carr’s recent takes on the new browser plug in Adblockplus and how it may go nuclear for Google and I can see Microsoft smirking around the corner.

I can detect the dilemma in Nick’s mind, him being a far-seeing thinker and all, who thinks ad– blocking may be immoral, using the free stuff on web publishers’ sites without any personal overhead, when most online publishers are not in Wikipedia’s position – Paypal donations are far and few and Micropayments never took off.

But, eventually, the so-called hypocritical purist in Nick takes over and he concludes that even Jesus would abandon the ‘Vegas style’ ad-splattered Net and use Ad block plus.

I bet some ad block plus copycat would be using this tagline in his adwords campaign soon.

If Jesus were to use Ad Block plus, he would be batting for the big online publishers and websites and the old way of 'big site+ display ad deals+ payment only mode' will be back in vogue and that would mean that the old adage of ‘ God works for the rich’ would indeed be still be true.

Besides, the net would be taking a few steps back.

I haven’t tried it, but if Adblockplus is for blocking adsense type ads only, then it is a positive case of ‘wrong product, wrong category’.

Granted that there are made for adsense sites and blogs, spam/rewriting blog networks, and many advertisers are conned by spurious publishers but this is taking it too far and commentators ought to get off their high horses.

Try all you can, but the old and pure early 90s type ad-free,WELL-era net is not going to come back.

Jesus would be loving it that information and communication has become more widely and cheaply available to ‘commoners’ instead of some elite user base operating in the United States.

As it is, people who don’t click on adsense can be seen using and evangelizing Adblock plus, to cosmetic effects in this case.

There are worse things online and offline than adsense.

How about Spamblock plus? How about Spamblockplus on social networking sites?
How about Popupblockplus, Keywordpopupadplusplus, telemarketerblockplus…?

Labels: adsense, advertising. online advertising, controversey, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:13 PM 0 Comments

Google: search Company or Ad Company? The debate ensues

The debate over Google’s responsibilities as a search company and as a n advertising company, took a legal turn yesterday when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has decided to take legal action against Google over the way Google sells and displays sponsored links.

Although, the case points out that lay users (aka noobies, a big source of adsense clickers) are confused by sponsored links over search results, more importantly, the case also throws light upon the practice of duplicity in Adwords, when a company brings out adwords in name of its competitor – think Coke buying Pepsi adwords – user clicks Pepsi ad link and is taken to Coke’s site.

Now Google might reply that it is hard for it to ascertain an adword buyer’s authencity as most of the Adwords service is self-service, Google may increasingly find itself responding complaints.

With bigger status, come great responsibilities.

Bottomline: sooner or later, Google ought to change the way it operates if it is to become the world’s biggest advertising company too.

This may be a landmark case.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, adwords, controversey, google

posted by Pramit Singh @ 12:49 PM 0 Comments

What will challenge adwords?

Decision makers in most companies still don’t get the ins and outs of the Paid per Click (PPC) online marketing, which is the famous cash cow for Google.

London-based ISM (Internet Search Management) says that most companies overspend while buying paid search results.

So, is ignorance on part of business executives making Google richer?
This is not a simple as this and is only as true as the fact that the web newbie constitute a big part of adsense clickers.

Banner ad campaigns, which were kings of the hill before adsense, are coming back to form. Ebay which recently stopped PPC ads on Google, has opted for banner ads on other networks.

However, this must also be seen in light of eBay’s nervousness vis-à-vis Google checkout and Google Base.

Can Paid Search build brands?
The jury is still out on this.

CPA (cost per action) is new but promising.

Openads, which sells open source ad servers already used by thousands of web sites is fast entering the ‘in thing’ brandspace. Consider Openads as the free version of Doubleclick, which was recently bought by Google.

Then there are those who say that instead of spending huge amounts on PPC, site owners must make their sites as SEO-friendly as possible, going only for now-and-then small-sized adwords campaigns.

Paraphrasing what others have already said:

To defeat Google, you need to defeat it in the ad business.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, adwords

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:21 PM 0 Comments

Matt Haughey suggests doing away with ads for regular users

Some may call this counter-intuitive wisdom. Matt Haughey, who founded Metafilter, suggests websites to have a two-pronged ad strategy – show ads to new users and shut off the ads for regulars and site members, aka ‘the superfans’.

Matt bolsters his argument by pointing that a major portion of any site’s visitors are new users, often directed by search engines and thus you won’t be hurt much financially.

Advertisers who are paying to put ads on your site (unlike Adsense) may miss out in reaching your ‘core group’ of users and you CPM deals may take a hit.

Last year, Seth Godin said something similar, albeit more cynically, about big sites being okay with not caring much with the one-time visitors.

I guess there will always be a struggle in publishers’ minds about the amount of advertising to shown on their properties. Then there are aesthetic considerations to boot.

Whether these suggestions are applicable to social networking sites including the ‘in-thing’ Facebook, I am not so sure – people are so busy looking for new ‘friends’ and 'spam targets' that I am sure they don’t mind the ads much.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, facebook, Metafilter, social networking, trends

posted by Pramit Singh @ 1:56 PM 0 Comments

The dark side of adsense

The New York Times has done a story on companies that own vacant web sites with generic names, and which are earning obscene amounts of money from advertising including adsense.

Called the direct navigation market, this maze of vacant shopfronts with generic names as photography.com (and as many variants possible), did a business of more than $800 million in advertising in 2006 and is slated to earn $1.1 billion through advertising support from Google and Yahoo.

The NYT story says about these domain squatters plan to add content in alliance with relevant sites and I wonder what Google has to say about duplicate content.

Last year, Google’s revenue was $10.604 billion.

One company, NameMedia owns more than 725,000 Web sites.
Moreover, some of these companies may go for IPOs as well - yes indeed, things are that good.

But, this is as serious as spam blogs.

In case of spam blogs, genuine content owners suffer, and with direct navigation advertising, advertisers have to deal with yet another gatekeeper.

Consider these facts about Adsense:
1. Adsense is not effective on quality columns, opinion pieces, and long investigative pieces.
To make adsense work, you will have to have a single focus blog, meaning one blog per topic, making lives of good writers really difficult.

The hugely popular Guy Kawasaki (How to Save the world) blog did not make Guy a rich guy and Guy is a savvy self-promoter.

2. Adsense enriches spammers and rewriters more than anybody else – watch the spread of gadget and gossip blogs.

3. Clickability is a curse, seducing site owners to create sites tailored for the old, kids and newbies – designing pages in a way that makes it hard for unoriented people to distinguish between content and advertising.

It leads you believe that Google’s ‘Don’t evil’ is a smart PR slogan, and nothing more.

Labels: adsense, advertising. online advertising, google

posted by Pramit Singh @ 6:15 PM 3 Comments

10 Viral Marketing tools

1. Useful, entertaining Microsites: Centered on a concept, new product or service or a special service for your customers.

2. Online games/quizzes/polls: Flash games are very popular at the moment. Many sites often carry these games and polls on a Microsite (which you clearly advertise) versus a Pop up (which surprises and annoys people, especially if you don’t inform them about the pop up status)

3. Video clips: The in-thing in this age of video sites such as Youtube. Produced for anything between free and $50000 and upwards on a cellphone or on full-fledge sound stage.

Viral videos are the third most effective tool for Viral marketing, according to a study by MarketingSherpa.com, behind Microsites and Online games, quizzes and polls.

However, you must keep in mind that most videos don’t go viral. In fact, many of the successful viral videos have been that individuals create instead of corporations. Besides, the effectiveness of specially produced Viral Video may also suffer from over use, having to compete with others; often you will find yourself spending money to spread the message about your $50,000 viral video.

Marketing Sherpa says that 10% of people who see a video will ell others about that clip,

Check out this Wikipedia entry cum list of Viral marketing campaigns.

4. Audio clips: In form of podcasts, song clip., etc

5. Tell a friend feature on web sites: Heavily used by Web 2.0 startups.

6. Encouraging e-mail forwarding: News sites thrive on it.

7. Offering e-cards and special ‘cool-looking’ single page, easy-to-download (that is, not heavy) documents.

8. Refer-a-Friend: A staple of social networking sites, including Digg.

9. Free tools and Widgets: Seomoz.org’s SEO tools are very popular.

10. Community marketing: Actually, it is an alternative to Viral marketing methods. Jeremiah Owyang says that Viral campaign is like getting ‘digged’ – a initial spike and then back to normal. Rather, as Jeremiah suggests is to nurture a community which will eventually deliver your business compounded growth year after year.

There are no short cuts to business success.

If you succeed in satisfy at least a small group of customers, they will speak about you to many others. Isn’t this Viral marketing or what?

Your core group of users/customers: those are the ones who pay attention. Of course, people selling alcoholic beverages, movies and all that involves huge back-end expenditure usually forget this and go for short cuts.

According to Jeremiah,

Viral Marketing effort that will be like the ‘pet rock’ of the 80s.

Update:
Jeremiah has this great list of Online marketing tools, worth checking out.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, research report, viral marketing

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:13 PM 2 Comments

Advertising on UGC sites 50% more cost effective

In a new study by BlueLithium labs, while ads shown on non-UGC (User Generated Content) sites had a 32 percent higher conversion rate, because of lower cost of advertising on UGC sites, the ‘cost per conversion’ for non-UGC sites was 58 percent higher.

Moreover, non-UGC comScore 250 sites have 7 percent higher cost per conversion as compared to UGC sites.

Via

Labels: advertising. online advertising

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:52 PM 0 Comments

Google-Doubleclick deal: Things we learnt

What Google really bought
With this deal, Google has bought wholesale relationships. Phil Wainewright says it right,

‘the most important asset DoubleClick possesses is its relationships with publishers and advertisers’.

What is Google’s aim?
Be the biggest ad broker in the world.

Size of online advertising market: $17 billion a year
Google’s 2006 revenue: $11 billion (mostly text ads)

Recently, Google announced that that it was extending its Adwords marketplace on TV.

Google’s competition: Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN

Google’s Current Market Cap. and Cash position
As of Dec. 31, 2006, Google’s market capitalization stood at $145 billion and had $11.2 billion in cash and marketable securities.

About Doubleclick
New York-based company in the business of placing banner ads on websites. Founded in 1996, it was taken private in 2005 by Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity for $1.1 billion.

Doubleclick’s revenues
According to New York Times, revenues are about $300 million a year.

By paying $3.1 billion in cash, Google paid 10 times revenue for Doubleclick, which some say is a healthy buy of a mature company.

DoubleClick’s clients

AOL
Friendster
Sports Illustrated
MTV
Meredith Corp.
Military.com
Autobytel.com
Slate.com

DoubleClick earlier announced that it is going to set up “a NASDAQ-like exchange for the buying and selling of digital advertisements”

Why did Google pay in Cash this time?
A. Lured in by Microsoft this time around?
A comment on Slashdot says that ‘Microsoft wasn't that interested in DoubleClick…they wanted to make damn sure that Google overpaid for it.’

B. Too many Google shares in the market, which was not helping Google’s stock price.

Kevin Kelleher writes that while Google’s share price has risen by just 1.5%, as of April 12, this year, the S&P 500 index, which Google joined a year ago, has given returns of 16.5% in 2006 and is up 2.1% in 2007. Google’s stock rose by only 11.0% to $460.48.

Reasons for glut of Google shares
1. Google’s secondary stock offering in September 2005 added 14.2 million shares to the 19.6 million already in the market

2. Google paid for its earlier $1.65 billion Youtube acquisition in stocks, by issuing another 3.2 million shares and paying only $15 million in cash.

3. A larger number of Google employees are exercising stock options.

What do detractors of the Deal say?
1. Google may have paid a bit too much.
2. This is a bubble.
3. Banner ads is ‘so last century’. (Phil Wainewrigt)
4. PPA (Pay per Action) will be real thing.
5. Clash with existing partnership deals with web sites.
6. Since Adserving is a commodity business, with charges as low as $.02 cpms, some say Google could easily have developed a better Adserver product inhouse which would not put any dent to its cash position. Moreover, Google could offered it for free if a website publisher accepted the Google adsense program to run on any remaining inventory. It would have been ‘disruptive’.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, google

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:42 PM 1 Comments

The future of Advertising is incomplete without the Search specialists

In its latest issue, Businessweek did a survey of the 121 judges at the annual Effie awards on the future of advertising.

As expected, the confused agencies and clients were not so sure about search.

Only 18.2% of respondents believed that Appearing at the top of Google Search results is a more effective form of brand building than a national TV campaign.

Maybe such perception will change if Google’s new CPA (Cost per action) model works.

63.9% of agencies and 41% of clients did not believe that generating press and buzz is the most important part of building a brand.

What’s more, two keywords that respondents were sick of this year were ‘Buzz’ followed by ‘User Generated content’.
Next year, they said they would get sick of Second Life.

I did not find any SEO or SMM firm mentioned in the survey. I am sure that search advertising is a big part of the industry by now. The Ad agencies know this, for sure.

Tip for ad agencies: buy a SEO firm
SEO is no more a cottage industry.
I am waiting for a big ad agency to buy Seomoz and get heavy on linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing.

Labels: advertising. online advertising, SEO

posted by Pramit Singh @ 2:29 PM 0 Comments