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!

Viewing User Generated Content seventh most popular online activity in UK …

Posted on March 21, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Mobile, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, Traffic, Travel, Trends, User Generated | Leave a Comment

iLevel Internet Usage statistics - the “Activities on the Web” category is quite interesting - UGC (I guess this covers MySpace etc. as well as reading comments on news sites etc.) is seventh most popular category:

Using e-mail 25.00 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Sourcing Info on Activities/Interests 21.27 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Making Travel Plans 17.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Cinema/Theatre/Concert Listings 14.88 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Listening to Music 12.12 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Job Opportunities 11.59 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at User Generated Content 11.13 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Downloading Music (whether paid or free) 9.98 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Instant Messaging 9.41 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To watch video clips 9.30 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To play games 9.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor

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.]

Concierge.com goes mobile - including guides to over 200 destinations

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Mobile, Sites I Use, Tools and Services, Travel | Leave a Comment

Spotted a brief reference to that fact that concierge.com was going mobile in the Wall Street Journal.

“Go to Concierge.com on your mobile device to get free access to nearly 200 destination guides, plus weather updates, stunning travel images to wallpaper your screen, and Condé Nast Traveler’s Gold List of the top hotels in the world”.

The guides are very good - for example see Amalfi Coast.  From my Nokia E61 it looked like it was just the standard web page - rather than being optimised for this particular device - although it functioned quite well the scrolling made it unworkable.  I think the idea is that you find the destination guide or whatever you want and then get it sent to your phone - you can do this from your desktop machine or mobile although I couldn’t get it work for my UK phone on the T-Mobile network. 

ABC launch report to measure print and online audience

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Newspapers, Tools and Services, Traffic | Leave a Comment

 ABC has announced the launch of a new system that will allow publishers to measure audience across print and online.

The Group Product Report, which launches today, is billed as a tool for media owners to publicise their ABC-audited and verified figures across media platforms, all on the same report.

The Guardian and News International have already agreed to provide Group Product Reports.

U.S. traffic to UK Newspaper Web Sites - Quantcast v Compete

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Newspapers, Tools and Services, Traffic | Leave a Comment

Following on from the recent article by Matt Marshall on VentureBeat - “Traffic measuring continued: Why Compete doesn’t work, and why Quantcast does“.  I take on board the comments Mark makes but it turns out compete.com  and quantcast.com are remarkably consistent in terms of measuring the volume of U.S. Unique Users to UK newspaper web sites.  I guess that they might not be accurate in terms of actual numbers but they should be in terms of overall rank (unless one or more of them have the tracking pixel from quantcast.com).

Unique Visitors from U.S.
Rank News Site www.compete.com www.quantcast.com
1 guardian.co.uk 1,781,531 1,800,000
2 dailymail.co.uk 1,314,027 1,400,000
3 timesonline.co.uk 1,310,784 1,300,000
4 telegraph.co.uk 840,806 843,709
5 independent.co.uk 671,007 709,228
6 Thesun.co.uk 656,315 592,674
7 ft.com 575,770 634,923
8 scotsman.com 490,604 549,443
9 Themirror.co.uk 154,987 120,994
10 Theherald.co.uk 25,889 19,446

Interesting that Quantcast seems to round the Unique User numbers when it gets into the millions.  Need to do some more work on rank, visit duration, pages per visit etc. Also need to get stats from alexaholic.com.

New top level domain for mobile surfing

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Music, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, WWW | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports on DotMobi - a new top level domain for sites that have been configured especially for mobile devices/cell phones.

Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.

Sounds like a bad idea on many levels.  The article goes on to states that:

The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of “device neutrality” have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.

More than one million unique, historical newspaper pages online …

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Good Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

Announced on the 15th February via press release, Small Town Papers Inc. have partnered with World Vital Records, Inc., to make over one million newspaper pages from small towns across America available and searchable online.  

The press release states that:

“We selected World Vital Records to distribute our collection of small-town newspapers because of their commitment to the millions of people who want to research their family history,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc. “World Vital Records is delivering on their mission to help people discover their ancestors with an incredible collection of exclusive materials, including SmallTownPapers.”

Current editions are available from over 250 small town newspapers and users can also search the archive.  Users have to register to access added benefits such as the “Scrap Book” and “Notifiers”.  The revenue model appears to be advertising rather than subscription based and the site looks to be reasonably well monetised via display and contextual (Google AdSense) advertising deals.  Geo-targeting of ads also appears to be pretty good - while looking at an edition of the Mifflinburg Telegraph from November 10th 2005 I was getting sky and banner ads from The Sun (UK national) and Talk Talk (UK Broadband service).  

There is a “order a digital reprint” link but it doesn’t work so I guess there are plans to offer this service online eventually.

They are looking to extend the service.  On the ”For Publishers” page it states:

“Would you like your newspaper to be included in the  SmallTownPapers web site? We can convert your paper or film archives to a fully-searchable image archive. Small community  newspapers can participate with little or no cost.” 

As far as I could tell boolean operators are not available in search and pages are not segemented into individual articles for search or display purposes - meaning you can’t search for “apples AND pears” within the same article.  If you search for  ”Edinburgh garden” you get “Edinburgh” from one article and “garden” from another which makes it harder to find things.

Saying that - not bad for a free service.  

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery

Posted on February 21, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Entertainment, Good Things, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery has some great maps, photograhs and posters - this is one of a series on “Air-Raid Precautions and Civil Defense, Illustrated Posters of “Air-Raid Defense”.  

“You can run the keyword or layered search, and view the detailed descriptions and digitized images of the records preserved by the National Archives of Japan. You can, according to your circumstances for the use of the Internet, view the digitized images in the formats of JPEG2000, PDF or JPEG. You can also run the cross-file search linked to various data bases worldwide to share a wide range of information and knowledge.”

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