Quigo prepares for IPO after signing deal with Time Inc.

Posted on June 29, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Contextual, Future, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | 1 Comment

Batya Feldman reports in Globes Online that Quigo has raised $30 million from Institutional Venture Partners.

One to watch - they have c. 10% of the contextual ad market already.  I spoke with Quigo last year but it was slightly too early as they were not geared up to working in the UK.

If they get the service right I reckon this is where the majority of the large publishers will end up. The killer is that it allows publishers to retain and develop relationships with their existing advertisers - rather than pass them onto a third-party who may turn out to be a competitor (guess who?).

The key selling points from their site:

Own Advertiser Relationships

The advertisers you attract are yours. Build relationships and up-sell/cross-sell your advertisers new products. Earn revenue when they spend on other sites in the AdSonar Network.

Capture Your Brand's Value

Leverage your premier brand to command a higher cost-per-click from advertisers willing to pay for your site’s targeted, quality traffic. Set your own minimum bid – don’t dilute your site’s value on a network that doesn’t promote direct placements.

Don't Empower Your Competitors

The AdSonar solution is focused on one goal – helping you. Don’t surrender your advertiser base to networks that also compete with you for audience or advertisers. Take back control!

Tagging and The Scotsman Digital Archive

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Archive, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Tools and Services, User Generated, del.icio.us | Leave a Comment

Following on from some of the issues raised in “When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing“.  

The team behind the Scotsman Digital Archive - a searchable archive of The Scotsman newspaper from 1817-1950 developed during 2005 - http://archive.scotsman.com/ - developed functionality that allows users to “clip” and “tag” articles of interest that they might want to get back to later.

Scotdman ArchiveThis is important in the context of a relatively large repository - and especially important when searching across text extracted via OCR from historical material. 

The tagging functionality allows users to organise, group and locate articles easily and was quickly adopted by the user community as the benefits were substantial and obvious.

Clearly this tagging adds a great deal of value to the archive, providing some structure and pathways to difficult to find or significant material that could ultimately benefit the wider community of users.

The next obvious stage of development would have been to develop the social/community side of this by allowing users to share their tags with other users, make them public and connect with each other.  This reinforces the principle that the best way to get users to add value to data is to do it in such a way that they don’t realise they are doing so - I guess this is the same as saying provide a clear incentive (see Amazon, Google Maps, Listal.com etc).  It also goes without saying that it should be as pain-free as possible.

The other point to note here is that in certain circumstances you can get users to tag for the greater good - and not just as a by-product of some personal benefit.  You can see this in del.icio.us where individuals can develop into experts through their consistent and regular tagging of material on specific subject areas.  These experts can eventually develop a “network” of like minded indivuduals and attract “fans” who track what they are tagging via RSS.  This network effect is one of the most powerful aspects of del.icio.us.  The profile that the experts receive from their peers within the community is a great incentive to continue tagging. 

[Disclosure:  Please note author is former General Manager of scotsman.com.]

Quigo challenges Google and Yahoo in contextual search market

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Traffic | Leave a Comment

Quigo LogoThe International Herald Tribune reports on how Quigo Technologies is challenging Google and Yahoo in the contextual advertising space as they claim to give publishers more control and provide greater transparency. 

This and the ability to target specific sites is good but the big benefit as far as I can see is that Quigo allows publishers to manage the relationship with the advertiser - it means that they are not handing existing relationships from their own sales teams to Google or Yahoo.  

“Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo, which was founded in Israel in 2001. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them, publishers get a check but little else. They don’t really build any longer-lasting strategic assets.”

I spoke to Quigo last year after they had signed up ESPN but at the time they were not ready to operate in Europe.

Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile?

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content | 1 Comment

Following on from the Roy Greenslade post on newspaper Digital Editions - “Is PDF an acronym for Pretty Damn Futile?”

Digital Editions are indeed an easy leap for old word print editors / execs to make - amazing that they are still going for it with such enthusiasm really.  Half an hour of research would tell them that it simply isn’t going to meet their objectives - if  those objectives include significant subscription or ad revenues.

It ticks the “digital” box, but in reality doesn’t really do much else in terms of value for the regular user.  Any demand there is comes from those that need to keep a record of how the paper actually looked when it was published - ad agencies, media monitoring companies and there also tends to be a small market for certain types of reader who are out of circulation area.  Even if they were available for free most users would never use them - they will go to the newspaper web site or use Google or Google News to find current or older articles. 

Last time I reviewed uptake of digital editions among newspaper titles (to be honest it was some time ago now) it varied between 0.2% and 1% of actual newspaper circulation - at this rate it was always going to be a struggle to get revenue to justify the cost of production.  Even the NYT who invested in their digital edition provider - NewsStand - and were therefore more incentivised than most to make it work, could only make it to the higher end of this range. It could be that uptake has changed for these services - but I doubt it.  Anyone got any stats on this other than the recent report analysis on Norwegian titles?

One area that does seems to work a bit better is specialist publications and magazines where readers like to hold on to copies for reference purposes and build their own archive. 

As more newspapers digitise their historical material there will at least be some justification for the cost of production as the process of turning the newspaper into a Digital Edition can also populate a Digital Archive - allowing users to search from the first edition of the newspaper to the most recent from a single user interface. 

Even this justification will be short-lived as the goal will be to eventually populate the Digital Archive directly from the newspaper / web site production system - The Guardian and Observer already do this for their Digital Editions.

This is quite old but good overview of the key suppliers and issues from J.D. Lassica in OJR from June 2004 - “Are Digital Newspaper Editions More Than Smoke and Mirrors?“

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Yahoo and Dash hook up to provide mobile local search

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Broadband, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Wi-fi | Leave a Comment

In an interesting development Yahoo and Dash have announced a deal that will allow them to integrate local search technology within in-car SatNav and will connect to the internet via mobile phone or wireless network where available.

“It really is a new implementation of mobile search,” says Peter MacDonald, senior director of business development for Yahoo Local. “People need to find information about local businesses and what’s around them not just when they’re at their PC.”

Germany quits search engine project - aimed at developing European competitor to Google

Posted on January 3, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports that Germany has opted-out of the European funded research project aimed at developing a search engine that could compete with Google.

But according to one French participant, organizers disagreed over the fundamental design of Quaero, with French participants favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.

“In Germany I think there was also resistance to the idea of a top-down project driven by governments,” said Andreas Zeller, chairman of software engineering at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, Germany, which supplied advisors to Quaero. “Success in the end is something that can’t be planned but is something that begets itself.”

It sounds like the two countries disagreed on the basic objective. One of the French participants commented that:

“We wanted to develop multimedia search and the Germans wanted to develop text search. Part of the problem is that talk of a European challenge to Google exaggerated expectations.”

Local advertiser move into TV via Spot Runner

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Newspapers, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

WSJ reports on how small busineses are tailoring off-the-shelf TV ads for as little as $499 …

The ads are courtesy of Los Angeles ad firm Spot Runner, which uses its Web site to offer a menu of ready-made ads designed for different types of businesses. With a click of the mouse on their computers, doctors, dentists, real-estate brokers and others can select a format and add personal information such as phone numbers and logos.

In time this is likely to lead to even more pressure on the local newspaper market.

And while local advertisers’ individual marketing budgets are usually pocket change to big ad agencies and media companies, the sector in aggregate generates a sizable amount of money. Local newspapers, for instance, generated $17.5 billion in ad revenue in the first nine months of this year, according to TNS Media Intelligence — much of it from small businesses. With television now seeing weaker growth in traditional advertising, these small marketers are beginning to look attractive. 

 

 

Start-up will seek out content being used without permission

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, User Generated, Weblogs | Leave a Comment

Start-up founded by ex-Yahoo and Verisign execs will help content owners work out if there material is being used withlout permission. Might not be welcomed by social networking / blooging sites:

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as “digital fingerprinting,” which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer’s content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.

And.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.

Time Travel with ABC

Posted on February 4, 2006
Filed Under Future, Trends, WWW | Leave a Comment

The internet and the development of the information superhigheway as seen from 1995 via a number of video clips. Interesting to look back at the debate on whether it will have the power to change society, what shape it will take and also concern at the emerging digital divide.  Also weird to see the multimedia “kiosks” that were going to change our world which - even at the time - we knew were going to be rendered redundant by the world wide web. One commentator notes that in the future people will be able to “shop from home”.

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