AdKeeper Wants You to Store Ads, Not Block Them

PC Mag

 

Some users use ad-blocking tools to eliminate ads from their Web browser. But a new startup, AdKeeper hopes that you'll bookmark them.

AdKeeper, a new online advertising service run by the former chief executive of About.com, Scott Kurnit, hopes that by storing the ads into a small online repository, users will go back to the ads, interact with them, and ultimately, buy.

The service is in beta and will formally launch in 2011. But AdKeeper said its group of "charter advertisers" included Allstate, Ally Bank, AT&T, Best Buy, CBS, Ford, Gap, General Mills, InterContinental Hotels Group, JetBlue, Kmart, Kraft Foods, Macy's, McDonald's, Pepsi, Sara Lee, Sears, Showtime, The Advertising Council, Unilever and Warner Bros.

The service supplies interactive ads, as others do. The difference is that ads designed by the AdKeeper service contain a small "K" on them. When the a user clicks on the "K" (for "keep") the ad goes into a Keeper application for the user to interact with later. The Keeper is actually the AdKeeper Web page, where users don't even have to log in; the service "tracks you with very anonymous cookies," a company spokeswoman said.

"Internet advertising was modeled after TV advertising – where the consumer views content, then interruptive ads, then more content. But the web is a totally dynamic environment that places consumers in the driver's seat," said Scott Kurnit, the company's founder and the former founder of About.com. "It's time for the advertising experience to catch up with the rest of the web experience. AdKeeper affords consumers the opportunity to engage with the advertising that interests them most, at the time and place of their choosing. It's 'on my time advertising.' It's invitational, not interruptive. It's for brands that respect their consumers. And it's for consumers who want to take charge."

AdKeeper representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Online advertising generates $300 billion of economic activity in the U.S., according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which tracks online advertising. But site operators are making less on them. Although cost-per-million estimates are difficult to acquire, online ad network Adify released data last year that found that ad impressions on automotive Web sites fell from $17.26 to $12.47.

While Web site operators make money from ads, installing FlashBlock or plug-ins like AdBlock have become more of a common practice for users; note the comments in our list of recommended add-ons for Firefox; Mozilla itself also recommends the plug-ins.

An IAB representative said that the group does not have any estimates for the amount of revenue lost via ad-blocking software.

To compensate, advertisers have become increasingly focused on serving targeted ads to specific users, attempting to determine their online habits through a variety of methods, including identifying their location and browsing habits. AdKeeper represents another avenue to boost CPMs.

The IAB will release its semi-annual report on the online advertising industry on Tuesday, in conjunction with PWC. Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. hit $5.9 billion for the first quarter of 2010, a 7.5 percent increase over the same period in 2009, the IAB reported in May.

In March, Conde Nast-owned Ars Technica served users with a blank page each time the site detected ad-blocking software was in effect, canceling the experiment after 12 hours.

"Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn't see our content," editor-in-chief Ken Fisher wrote in a response. "We tested just one way of doing this, but have devised a way to keep it rotating were we to want to permanently implement it. But we don't. Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on."

AdKeeper's board includes Jeremy Allaire, founder and chief executive of Brightcove; John Battelle, founder and chief executive of Federated Media; Peggy Conlon, president and chief executive of the The Advertising Council; Janet Robinson, president and chief executive of The New York Times; and George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group.

UK Regulator to Expand Supervision Over Online Ads

PC World

The U.K.'s advertising regulator will increase its oversight of online marketing, scrutinizing how companies advertise on their own Web sites as well as social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said on Wednesday that the new code, which will take effect starting next March, is in response to nearly 3,000 complaints in the last year over advertisements that were not within its purview to act on.

The ASA already oversees paid-for online advertisements and sales promotions, investigating complaints over misleading advertisements and other issues, such as social responsibility and child protection. In some cases, advertisements have been withdrawn or removed by search engines, said Matt Wilson, ASA press officer.

For advertisements that are not withdrawn, the ASA has worked with search engines to publish a notification next to the ad that there is a problem with it, Wilson said.

The new rules will cover companies or organizations running promotions in unpaid space, including their own Web sites and social-networking sites. Companies are increasingly using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to draw people to their brands or causes.

The ASA said that assessing whether material constitutes advertising or marketing communication will require a "careful assessment."

User-generated content, for example, is created by private individuals, the ASA said in its guidance notes. But if a website owner solicited the content and used it in marketing material, it would be subject to the code. Even if a private individual provided unsolicited content that is incorporated into marketing material, that would also be subject.

The code will apply to companies and organizations that have a U.K. presence or a U.K. registered website, Wilson said.

Advertisements targeting the U.K but placed outside the country "are subject to the jurisdiction of the relevant authority in the country from which they originate if that authority operates a suitable cross-border complaint system," the ASA said.

The initiative will be funded by a 0.1 percent levy on paid-for advertisements appearing on Internet search engines through media and search agencies. The ASA, which has a £7 million (US$11 million) annual budget, will have to add 9 or 10 staffers to enforce compliance, Wilson said.

US FDA warns Pharma firm about Facebook Promotion

Bloomberg / Business Week

 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned a pharmaceutical company that its use of the Facebook Share button to promote a cancer-fighting medication violates FDA requirements for disclosing information about drugs.

The FDA, in a letter sent to drug-maker Novartis Pharmaceuticals July 29, tells the company that its use of Facebook Share to promote Tasigna is incomplete and misleading.

This is likely the first time the FDA has issued a warning to a pharmaceutical firm for using Facebook to promote its products, said Jeffrey Chester , a privacy advocate and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

The FDA, which posted the warning letter on its website this week, asks Novartis to stop using Facebook Share to promote the leukemia drug.

"The shared content is misleading because it makes representations about the efficacy of Tasigna but fails to communicate any risk information associated with the use of this drug," said the FDA letter, signed by Karen Rulli, acting group letter of the agency's Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications. "In addition, the shared content inadequately communicates Tasigna's FDA-approved indication and implies superiority over other products."

FDA rules require that most medication promotional pieces contain information about risks associated with taking the drug, the letter said. In addition, promotional materials are misleading if they suggest a "drug is safer or more effective than another drug when this superiority has not been demonstrated by substantial evidence or substantial clinical experience," the letter said.

Novartis also failed to notify the FDA of the Tasigna promotion, as required by the agency, the letter said.

Novartis, in a statement, said it takes the FDA letter "very seriously."

"We have addressed its concerns by taking the direct and immediate action of taking down the widget referenced by the FDA," the company said. "Novartis will continue to have active discussions with the FDA to understand fully all of the concerns. We also will assess all of our Web assets and materials based on these concerns."

The warning letter highlights a problem with Facebook and other websites targeting advertising dollars from pharmaceutical and companies, said Chester, who asked the FDA in March to investigate the online marketing of drugs. Facebook should be responsible for creating safeguards for the marketing of medications and other health products on its site, he said.

Websites "see digital dollars in their bottom lines and are ignoring the health risks confronting consumers who are targeted using social-media marketing," Chester said. "This letter is a wake-up call -- for the pharma industry, Facebook, and social media application companies."

The FDA's letter is appropriate, Chester added. "Risk warnings must be prominently disclosed -- and not purposefully ... hidden by making a consumer click for more information," he said.

A representative of Facebook didn't have an immediate comment on the letter or Chester's perspective.

The Rise Of Real-Time Bidding Is The Biggest Online Advertising Story Of 2010

San Francisco Chronicle

AdMeld, a New York City based ad inventory optimizer, just closed on a $15 million round of venture funding, in the latest sign that the real-time bidding (RTB) market for display advertising is on fire.

Last month, Google paid a reported $70 million for demand-side platform Invite Media. And just a few weeks ago, brand safety startup AdSafe, which will increasingly work with RTB platforms, raised $7.5 million.

The rise of RTB is the biggest story of 2010 in online advertising, and has been written about extensively in ad industry publications. But people outside of advertising don't seem to know anything about it.

Here's the basic gist:

    * Sites across the web track your browsing behavior via cookies and sell basic data about you. The Wall Street Journal has a fairly hysterical article on this today that is attracting a lot of attention, but there's no fire here: this is anonymized data, used to serve you ads. It means you're more likely to see ads for things you actually care about, and it keeps the Internet free. Good times.

    * Web publishers offer up display inventory to the RTB market through services like AdMeld's; rather than signing up for a fixed CPM, they sell each individual ad impression to the highest bidder, based on whom that individual ad is being served to.

    * Advertisers purchase these impressions directly, or increasingly through demand-side platforms like Invite, MediaMath, or Appnexus. They run algorithms that know who they are looking to advertise to and how much they are willing to pay, and automatically purchase the best ads in real time. The slogan, rapidly becoming a cliche, to describe this is: "buying an audience instead of buying inventory."

    * That said, the context of search enginge optimization still matters -- brands don't want their ads served next to objectionable content, no matter how well the audience fits. Brand safety companies like AdSafe keep an eye on where publishers' ads are going.

The upshot of all this is that each ad impression is worth much more. AdMeld CEO Michael Barrett says ads sold through RTB generate 2-3 times as much revenue for his customers on average, and up to 10 times as much in some cases.

The RTB market will be worth around $1 billion this year, Michael tells us, still only a small fraction of display advertising, but given the rapid growth and obvious upside, we asked if he thought RTB would completely replace the old model of ad networks.

He gave about the most straightforward answer we've ever received to a question like that: "Yes, actually. in the fairly near future.

MySpace Said to Hold Ad Talks With Microsoft, Yahoo, Google

Bloomberg / Business Week

 

News Corp.’s MySpace, seeking to replace a search advertising contract with Google Inc. that expires in August, has held talks with Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to a person familiar with the company’s plans.

Any deal would carry a substantially lower price than the $900 million Google agreed to pay in 2006 to place search ads within the social-networking site, a person with knowledge of the discussions said. MySpace also remains in talks with Google about extending their partnership, the person said.

MySpace has struggled to maintain ad revenue during an exodus of users to Facebook Inc. and the departure of key executives. Bought in 2005 for $580 million in cash, MySpace lost its status as the world’s top social-networking site in 2008. News Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rupert Murdoch said last year that the site would fall short of traffic commitments to Google, lowering income on that deal by $100 million in 2009.

“We’re currently talking to multiple providers across the many facets of search to bring our users the best possible search experience in a social environment,” said Tracy Akselrud, a spokeswoman for Beverly Hills, California-based MySpace, who declined to name specific companies.

Microsoft is looking to boost users and ad revenue for its 13-month-old Bing search engine, which claimed 12.1 percent of searches in the U.S., compared with Google’s 63.7 percent, according to data tracker ComScore Inc. Microsoft has forged a separate agreement to handle searches on Yahoo’s site -- a deal that’s scheduled to take effect by December.

Pete Wootton, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment on negotiations with News Corp. May Petry, a spokeswoman for Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California, and Jane Penner, a spokeswoman at Mountain View, California-based Google, also declined to comment.

MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn left in June, becoming the most recent high-level executive to depart the business. He had taken the co-president role in February, after Owen Van Natta stepped down as CEO.

Google Buys Online Ad Startup Invite Media

Mercury News

Google has acquired Invite Media, an online advertising startup based in New York and Philadelphia.

The Mountain View Internet giant announced the deal Thursday in a post by Neal Mohan, vice president of product management, on Google's DoubleClick Advertiser Blog. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. However, Peter Kafka of the AllThingsD blog estimated the value as "in the $70 million range."

According to Mohan's post, Invite Media's technology allows advertisers and ad agencies to use "real time bidding" to buy online display ads on exchanges including Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange. "We're big believers in the benefits and future of this type of display ad buying," he wrote.

The technology "enables advertisers and agencies to tailor their bids on an impression-by-impression basis, based on their own data, when bidding on websites that choose to make their ad space available through an advertising exchange," Mohan wrote.

According to Invite Media's website, the company was founded in April 2007 out of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It has been funded by Comcast Interactive Capital, First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures and angel investors. The co-founders are CEO Nathaniel Turner, President and Chief Operating Officer Zachary Weinberg, Scott Becker and Michael Provenzano.

As of November, according to the company's site, Invite Media had 28 employees with offices in New York, San Francisco, London and Philadelphia.

Marketers Advised: Use Social Media but Get Back to Basics

Miami Herald

Heads of independent marketing agencies from around the globe gathered in South Beach to tackle industry issues, like making sense of marketing with social media.

 

 

 

Consumers don't want to have a friendship with their toothpaste.

That was the message this week for marketers from Jonathan Salem Baskin of Advertising Age, who said the social media push by companies is getting away from the basics of advertising: making money for the client.

``As an industry, we've allowed this nonsense to get out of hand,'' Baskin, a marketing consultant and columnist for Advertising Age, told about 70 attendees at the global Worldwide Partners advertising conference in Miami Beach. ``Ultimately, we're about selling stuff, and I think that's what we have to get back to.''

The annual conference -- held in a different location each year -- brings together owners of 91 independent advertising agencies from Taiwan to Texas to explore trends and best practices. It concludes Thursday.

Baskin's comments about social media fly in the face of the current marketing obsession: how building fans on Facebook is good for brands. Baskin didn't dismiss social media and interactive websites but stressed that too often companies are investing significant resources on social media without seeing sales.

One of his examples: a Ford Fiesta campaign that gave free cars to consumers in their 20s in exchange for posting their videos about driving the Fiesta on YouTube.

``How the hell does this sell cars? Well it doesn't,'' Baskin said. ``It's to get Ford to win some awards to keep the social media team employed.''

Keeping up with technology while still making money was a topic that hit home for several attendees.

One was Manny Machado, chief executive of Miami marketing agency MGSCOMM. His firm urges clients to participate in social media, but not to dismiss broadcast and print advertising, he said. Spending on those traditional mediums has returned to the levels of two years ago.

``All of a sudden, social media was the very essence of our existence,'' Machado said. ``But we said, `Hey, let's not forget what has been feeding us so far and make sure we're still addressing everyone that wants to listen to the radio or read the paper.' ''

Baskin's remarks on social media reflected a larger point echoed by other attendees: the need to be more truthful with consumers.

Case in point was BP's green sun logo and slogan, ``Beyond petroleum,'' designed to marry the oil company with an eco-friendly image -- one that now seems out of place given the company's oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

``This brilliant branding hurts all of us,'' Baskin said. ``Because how do we show that we're better than that?''

Ian McAteer, group chairman of The Union Advertising Agency in Scotland, worked with BP in the 1980s to promote its solar power use in Africa. Now, he told the crowd, he feels guilty for making a big deal about BP's few green activities.

``We made ads about that and what a great company BP was, and what we're seeing today is possibly the end of BP.''

What Earnings Reports have Revealed about Advertising

Bloomberg / Business Week

Here are highlights of recent quarterly earnings reports from selected Internet, media and advertising companies and what they say about the state of spending on advertising:

April 15: Google Inc. says revenue surged 23 percent from last year, its best growth rate since the summer of 2008. Prices paid for Google search engine optimization ads were 7 percent higher than the average at the same time last year.

April 16: Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper publisher, reports its smallest drop in ad revenue in more than a year: 8 percent. CEO says year is "off to a great start."

April 20: Yahoo Inc. reports first revenue growth in 18 months. Although total ad revenue increased just 3 percent from the prior year, display advertising rose 20 percent. That category includes online billboards that companies use to promote brands.

Omnicom Group Inc., which owns marketing agencies, reports that its revenue was stronger in the U.S. than in Europe, but the CEO says that the overall business environment "continues to stabilize and improve."

April 22: The New York Times Co. says advertising revenue fell 6.1 percent from a year ago, the smallest decline since the third quarter of 2007. Company says print advertising trends in current quarter look even better.

McClatchy Co., which publishes The Miami Herald, The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee and other newspapers, says ad revenue fell 11.2 percent in first quarter from a year ago. That was better than the 20.5 percent decline in the last three months of 2009.

April 28: Comcast Corp., which owns cable channels distributed nationwide and sells ad time on other channels shown to its cable TV subscribers, says its advertising revenue jumped 23.5 percent from a year earlier.

April 29: Viacom Inc., which owns cable channels such as MTV, says its worldwide advertising revenue climbed 3 percent from a year ago. U.S. ad revenue rose 1 percent. Viacom's CEO predicts that ads will cost more in this spring's "upfronts," which is when advertisers bid on commercial time for the rest of the year.

InterPublic Group of Cos., which owns advertising agencies, says business is improving as marketers are more willing to spend money on ads.

April 30: WPP Group PLC, another owner of ad agencies, sees indications of an improvement in "client attitudes" and notes that "2010 has started in a very different way to how 2009 ended."

Tuesday: News Corp. says it is seeing an increase in consumer spending and advertising. That helped the company's cable channels increase their operating income 38 percent in the latest quarter from a year ago. The newspaper division, which includes The Wall Street Journal, increased its operating income more than fourfold.

Wednesday: Time Warner Inc. says the latest quarter was its first in a year and a half with growth in advertising revenue. That included increases in revenue from commercials on the Turner cable channels and from print ads at the Time Inc. magazines.

CBS Corp. says its local broadcasting revenue rose 19 percent with the help of higher spending on political ads. The CBS network saw a 25 percent jump in advertising revenue, powered by the most-watched Super Bowl in history.

Friday: Washington Post Co. says advertising revenue at its namesake newspaper fell 8 percent in the first quarter from the same period of 2009. That marked a slight improvement from a 9 percent drop in the previous quarter.

Craigslist Faces Host Of Rivals

Business Week

Fabrice Grinda is bullish on Brazil and betting big on Internet classified ads in South America's largest country. This year, Grinda's New York-based company OLX opened an office in São Paulo, hired locals to translate the OLX site into Portuguese, asked top real estate brokers and auto dealers to offer low-priced listings, and recruited an executive from eBay (EBAY) in Latin America.

That approach has worked well for OLX in Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and a handful of other countries. And in September, OLX became the leading classifieds site in Brazil, surpassing local rival QueBerato in visitors, according to researcher comScore (SCOR). Craigslist, which has come to dominate the U.S. and other markets by charging no fees for most ads, is a distant No. 42 in Brazil, according to comScore. "I would like to think we have a chance to become the Craigslist of the rest of the world," Grinda says.

Craigslist is a worthy target. Founded in 1995, the popular site for free online listings has almost singlehandedly replaced the classifieds business of print newspapers and now dominates the U.S. online market. Yet critics say Craigslist has done little to innovate, ignoring opportunities to expand through search, social networking, and wireless communication. It's also been slow to penetrate some developing overseas markets. Internationally.Craigslist is "asleep at the wheel," says Grinda.

New players are raring to overhaul online classifieds. "Classifieds have gone through two chapters," says Craig Donato, co-founder and CEO of classifieds startup Oodle. First came newspapers, then Craigslist, he says. "We are focused on the third chapter." Craigslist declined to make an executive available to comment for this story.

Most of the innovation in classifieds has happened in specific areas such as job postings on Monster (MWW) and real estate listings on Trulia. "Those sites all have a lot of traffic and they co-exist with Craigslist," says Greg Sterling, founding principal of researcher Sterling Market Intelligence. Jobs are one of the few areas where Craigslist charges a fee for postings. It also charges for New York real estate listings.
No. 2 OLX tries harder with locals

Newcomers find it tough to challenge Craigslist's array of listings, which range from used Apple (AAPL) iPods, to beachfront properties in Miami, to solicitations for "casual encounters," often a euphemism for consensual sex.

Still, upstarts are making headway. In 2009, its fourth year, OLX became the world's second-most-visited online classifieds property, leapfrogging eBay's Kijiji sites and approaching Craigslist. Co-founder and CEO Grinda says the site encompasses 90 countries and 40 languages, compared with Craigslist's 70 countries and 6 languages. Unlike the more established site, OLX works hands-on with locals in all its major markets to translate its services and to relate to merchants in the community, Grinda says. Hands-off Craigslist relies mainly on local sellers to post listings. It does next-to-no marketing.

OLX makes money by promoting ads to the top of listings, charging $2 to $10 a week. The company saw its first profit in June and expects more than $10 million in sales this year.

"OLX is the leading classifieds site in a bunch of markets that are small today but have the opportunity to be the same size as Craigslist," says Jeremy Levin, partner in Bessemer Partner Ventures, which contributed to OLX's $29 million in funding. "When you add them all up you get something that's substantially larger than the U.S. market and a business that generates—if it is successful—hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue." This year, Craigslist is expected to bring in $100 million in sales, according to the AIM Group. The closely held company doesn't report financial figures.

Craigslist's dated technology also gives rivals a lever, even in the U.S. Oodle, which started in San Mateo, Calif., in 2005, is pursuing what it considers a missed opportunity in connecting classifieds to social relationships on sites such as Facebook. Classifieds are "not about inviting some anonymous person over to my house to test-drive my car," says Oodle co-founder Donato. "We're trying to create a different experience, based on trust and reputation."
Craigslist ads search poorly

Oodle's approach is best demonstrated on Facebook Marketplace, a classifieds site on the social network. There, Oodle lets users buy and sell items in an environment where people and merchants use real names; users can quickly share good deals with Facebook friends. The company earns revenue by taking bids for prominently placed ads, similar to OLX, and through a subscription service that helps real estate brokers and other professionals find customers. Besides Facebook, Oodle has partnered with Wal-Mart (WMT), AOL, and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. Oodle has raised more than $20 million in funding, including some from Greylock Partners.

Another complaint about Craigslist is that it lacks sophisticated search. Shoppers can't search within a limited geographic area—say, a tri-state area. Its listings typically don't get picked up by search engines such as Google (GOOG). San Francisco-based Vast is trying to help online classifieds become more searchable by working with publishers to help users quickly retrieve listings tailored to them. For example, Vast powers the search for cars on the Web site of Kelley Blue Book.

Such online niche sectors as travel, autos, and real estate are already worth at least $1 billion apiece, says Vast CEO Kevin Laws. His company collects most of its money from fees paid by advertisers each time the search engine refers a customer. Some real estate brokers end up sharing a significant percentage—sometimes more than $1,000—upon completion of a sale.

Craigslist's new competitors may not soon edge out the classifieds king, says Kelsey Group analyst Peter Krasilovsky. Craigslist has the critical mass of millions of users that many upstarts struggle to achieve, he says. In the U.S., the service had 44.1 million unique users in October 2009, up 20% from a year earlier, according to comScore. "There's no evidence that Craigslist has been cannibalized," says Krasilovsky, who nevertheless contends there's room for new players to grow. "There's more participation in classifieds than there's ever been before."

Facebook Changes May Benefit Brands

from Online Media Daily

Facebook on Wednesday laid out a "roadmap" for developers, outlining upcoming changes aimed at making it easier for users to find and use applications and help app creators build their business on the social network.

Among the key updates in store, Facebook will enable developers to ask for users' primary email address within applications to facilitate direct contact. At the same time, developers will only be able to send notifications and invitations via email, a user's Facebook Inbox or the News Feed and other activity streams.

New application and games dashboards are slated for the home page, making it easier for people to see the latest apps they have used as well as discovering new ones based on what friends are engaging in.

To provide easier access, the applications bookmarks will be moved from the bottom left side of any page on Facebook to a more prominent location on the left side of the home page. An "Ad Bookmark" button will also be created for apps.

Among broader changes in the works, Facebook will end its verification program for apps, instead applying the initiative's more rigorous standards to all apps. Facebook is also launching an "Open Graph" API (application protocol interface) so any Web page can, in effect, become a Facebook brand page -- users can become a fan of the page, and it will show up on that user's profile and in search results.

"This means that Facebook could become a more important distribution channel for publishers even if they don't have a Facebook Page -- which could be very powerful for both Facebook and publishers in general," noted Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith in a blog post Wednesday.

Other social media experts said the changes planned in the next six months could have far-reaching implications for brands, especially the Open Graph initiative. "This is a big change because it means Facebook is no longer a destination and the experience is spread to all kinds of places," said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at digital consulting firm Altimeter Group. In that sense, Open Graph is a developer focused follow-up to Facebook Connect, the service that lets users log onto third-party sites using their Facebook account information.

Social marketing specialists also noted that the new developer rules open the door to email marketing and branding via Facebook. The ability to collect email addresses "is enormous for our brands and agencies because we will be able to create strategies around giving Facebook users ways to opt-in to share their primary email addresses with the brands," said Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which helps companies manage their social media presence.

He added that the step will bridge the gap between the more established technique of email marketing and newer approaches via social media. In a blog post Thursday, Facebook's Austin Haugen said the email practices the company is developing will be similar to signing up for or creating accounts on other Web services. "When you do so, those services can email you directly to confirm a purchase, or provide newsletters or updates for which you signed up," he wrote.

But he also emphasized the voluntary aspect of the new email feature for users: "Keep in mind that applications will never be given your email address unless you explicitly grant them permission, and like other websites you can always choose to unsubscribe if the service is no longer of value."

Facebook has had a series of privacy stumbles from the Beacon program, informing friends about users' purchases on other sites, to its terms of service controversy, where it was forced to revise its rules after appearing to claim perpetual ownership of material posted to the site.

The company separately Thursday posted an updated privacy policy as part of the public comment process it adopted for all new Facebook governance policies it adopted in April following the TOS controversy. As with the revised terms, the latest version of Facebook's privacy rules are intended to do away with legalese in favor of plain language and greater clarity.

Yahoo Says Online Ad Market Improving

From Business Week

Results from the Web portal gave further evidence that the online ad slump is ending, though executives stopped short of calling a recovery

While no match for the resurgent third quarter reported by Google a few days earlier, Yahoo's (YHOO) results and its forecast for current-quarter sales beat analysts' expectations and gave further evidence that this year's swoon in Internet advertising may be ending.

Investors were pleased with the results, boosting Yahoo's shares almost 6% in extended trading after the market close. "It was a clean 'beat' quarter," says Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at financial services firm Collins Stewart (CLST.L). "You see signs of stabilization, which is very positive."

Yahoo, in the midst of a sweeping reorganization and rebranding campaign under CEO Carol Bartz since she joined in January, emphasized that the online advertising market is stabilizing. But still-declining revenue signaled that a full-blown recovery has yet to materialize. "Ad spending is starting to free up, and we are a great value proposition for advertisers," Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Tim Morse said on a conference call discussing the results. Bartz did not participate in the call because she had a minor illness. However, she said in a statement that Yahoo had a "solid third quarter that signals our major businesses have stabilized."
Profit from Alibaba Sale

In the third quarter, Yahoo earned $186.1 million in net profit, or 13¢ a share. That's up from 4¢ a year ago. Gross revenue of $1.58 billion was down 12% from a year ago. Net revenue after commissions to advertising partners, a more closely watched metric, was $1.13 billion.

About 5¢ of the profit came from the sale of Yahoo's stake in China's Alibaba, but remaining results were still ahead of forecasts. The company was expected to earn 7¢ a share on gross revenues of $1.52 billion, or $1.12 billion after payments to advertising partners.

In particular, Yahoo saw relative strength in selling display ads on its own sites, such as its home page. Revenue from those so-called guaranteed ads, whose placement is planned in advance, grew at a mid-single-digit percentage rate. That was much better than "non-guaranteed" ads, which run on pages with less valuable audiences, such as e-mail pages. Those ads declined, partly thanks to a recent Yahoo drive to rid itself of lower-quality ads for weight loss and other schemes.
Losing Ground to Google

Although display ad revenues overall grew 2% from the second quarter, the second straight quarter of sequential growth, they were still down 8% from a year earlier. Moreover, Yahoo's search business fared much worse, with search revenue falling 19% from a year earlier. That means Yahoo continues to lose ground to Google SEO (GOOG), which saw growth accelerating in the third quarter.

Yahoo said it expects gross revenues of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter. Operating income before depreciation, amortization, and stock-option costs is expected to be between $400 million and $450 million. Both of those are somewhat higher than Wall Street forecasts.

More than Google's results, Yahoo's may be indicative of the broader trend in online advertising, since Yahoo is a leader in the display ads that most Web sites depend on for revenue. Overall online ad revenue is expected to fall 2.9% this year but rebound to 5.9% growth next year, according to forecasts by market researcher eMarketer.

Eliminating Annoying Ads

There are some other glimmers of improvement in display ads. Prices for ads sold through middlemen known as ad networks have been rising each month this year, and are up 32% since the start of the year, according to PubMatic, which helps online publishers run the most lucrative ads. "The market has bottomed," says PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel. "Marketers are returning to the fray."

Yet the display-ad market will not bounce back as quickly as the market for search ads, the mainstay for Google, says Bryan Weiner, CEO of digital ad agency 360i. While marketers can measure the effectiveness of search-related ads through several means, including whether they result in the sale of a product, they've been less successful in testing the effectiveness of display ads other than by counting clicks, widely acknowledged to be inadequate for brand-oriented display ads.

Yahoo SEO faces unique challenges as well. Even as it cuts some operations, it's making some costly investments in its many Web properties, as well as spending $100 million on a new branding campaign. It's also revamping its ad systems to eliminate annoying ads as well as ads advertisers pay to appear in search results. Those and other changes are expected to cost Yahoo about $60 million in revenue a quarter but eventually pay off in the form of more satisfied users and advertisers.
Losing Search Share

Still, all that means lower sales and higher costs in the short term. Meantime, a deal announced July 28 to let Microsoft (MSFT) handle Yahoo's search operations likely will take until early next year to be approved by regulators. The companies estimated the deal would boost Yahoo's operating profit by $500 million annually, but it might take Yahoo a couple of years after the deal closes to reap that benefit.

Despite Yahoo's struggles since it rejected several Microsoft buyout and search deal proposals last year, its stock has risen 31%. But that's just under the Nasdaq's 32% rise—and Yahoo has underperformed the index even more than that in the nearly three months since it finally reached a search deal with Microsoft. Investors were disappointed that Bartz didn't craft a more lucrative deal with Microsoft, which did not include the multimillion-dollar up-front payment many had expected.

Moreover, Yahoo has continued to lose search share since then. Share fell by half a percentage point, to 18.8%, in September, while Google and Microsoft's Bing gained, according to market researcher comScore (SCOR). That's why some investors remain bearish. "We don't think Carol Bartz has a coherent plan for Yahoo in search," says Jeff Donlon, managing director of technology research for asset manager Manning & Napier, which holds shares in Google and Microsoft but not Yahoo.
Hoping for a Faster Turnaround

Analysts, however, have turned moderately more positive on the stock of late, with 14 recommending a buy, 14 advising a hold, and only one calling for a sell, according to FactSet (FDS). Wall Street is hoping Bartz's cost-cutting and strategic focus will set up Yahoo for a faster turnaround as marketers open up their wallets starting in the fourth quarter. And if the Microsoft deal passes regulatory muster, Yahoo will not only reduce its search costs but start to get significant revenue from Redmond.

Beezag - The Reinvention of Advertising

Reuters

Beezag® has officially launched its NEW exclusive invite-only online and mobile advertising platform that is revolutionizing the world of advertising. Beezag benefits both the "Beezagger" (user) and the advertiser by providing the user with monetary returns while giving advertisers a direct and targeted medium to interact with the most attractive segment of the Web 2.0 and mobile market, educated adults ages 18-24, which tallies 72 million strong in the U.S.

"Our strategic vision at Beezag is to capitalize on an opportunity to create digital advertising distribution that works in today's environment, where traditional advertising models are becoming more fragmented by the changes in technology and consumer behavior," said Richard Smullen, Co-Founder of Beezag.

Beezag is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Richard Smullen and Laurent Alhadeff (the young founders behind South African media, technology and fashion market leader SouthWinston Investments). They have created an impressive team of business-savvy technologists, including six-year Google veteran Brian Dick to manage worldwide revenue; Steven Spencer, the former-Upoc/Dada Entertainment(TM) CEO/CTO as Beezag's CTO; and Ex-Forbes Digital VP Nicholas Ricci as the Beezag USA Sales VP.

Beezag's target audience is tech-savvy 18 to 24-year-olds, typically college students, who know every trick to avoid ads. Knowing that this demographic constantly needs extra spending money, Beezag has developed its invite-only service in which members login and watch a full ad from start to finish. Beezag then rewards them with discounts and cash which can be paid into accounts like iTunes, PayPal(TM), their favorite charity or even their personal bank account.

Advertisers see Beezag as the solution to technology like DVR and online "banner-blindness," which is the root cause of this massive fragmentation that we are experiencing.

Through Beezag's Proprietary Profiling Engine, Beezag ensures delivery of a brand's full message to loyal, hand-raising customers, not prospects. When Beezaggers login to view ads (online, on Facebook or on their mobile phones), they discuss the specific brands/products they use (and are looking for) - whether it's the coffee they drink, sports team they follow or airline of choice. The secret behind Beezag is its patent-pending technology, which guarantees a complete view of each commercial, and if Beezaggers don't absorb the ad in its entirety, the advertiser does not pay and the user does not earn. 

Within a study issued by the DVR Research Institute in 2008, "77 percent of agency higher-ups said that DVR usage will prove to be the greatest challenge to the current ad model," (Ad Week, June 2009). Within this traditional advertising model, advertisers pay hundreds of billions of dollars for consumers' attention, but with new technology like the DVR, statistics are showing that "90 percent 'always/almost always' fast forward through commercials," (2008 Starcom USA-Tivo custom study). Advertisers see Beezag as the solution to technology like DVR and online "banner-blindness," which is the root cause of this massive fragmentation that we are experiencing.

Beezag provides a new online and mobile model for advertisers to directly target these consumers. The Beezag guarantee is that advertiser dollars are going towards ads that will be 100 percent viewed - start to finish.

Beezag is the game-changer in the advertising industry and is changing the way  consumers interact with brands and view ads so that instead of avoiding them, they will want more.

Through digital and affiliate agencies, some of the country's biggest brands have joined Beezag as advertisers. Two of the most recent include Dr. Pepper and Dentyne.

About Beezag:
Beezag is a privately funded company headquartered in New York City's bustling Chelsea neighborhood. Its founders had an epiphany when they set out to create a revolutionary philosophy for the only effective way to advertise in this info-laden age: through the targeted delivery of customized video ads to vetted and invited individuals in real time through any Internet-capable device.