Yahoo! Buys Associated Content
Low-cost content just got a hefty endorsement. Yahoo has reached an agreement to acquire Associated Content, the six-year-old company that produces thousands of search-friendly articles written by freelancers on a wide variety of general interest topics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Yahoo, Associated Content manages a team of 380,000 contributors who produce content ranging from “How to Eliminate Odors From Curtains” and “Tips for Selling Your Collectibles Online” to topical stories on sports, finance and news. The content lives on AssociatedContent.com and on multiple partners’ sites, including digital properties managed by companies like Turner, Fox and Scripps. Dubbed “The People’s Media Company,” Associated solicits contributions on its site, promising writers that they can “get published, reach millions [and] get paid.” Per Quantcast, the company reaches 17.5 million unique users. Yahoo, which has recently been hiring more journalists as it attempts to build out a distinctive voice for channels like Yahoo News, views Associated Content as complementing its own content offerings, allowing it to dig deeper into certain verticals. “This is the next phase for our content biz at Yahoo,” said Jimmy Pitaro, vp, Yahoo Media. “You will be taking the most powerful media sites in the world and extending those sites’ offerings to niche content . . . that in the past we haven’t been able to scale.” For example, Pitaro said that Yahoo Sports has previously had light coverage of soccer and lacrosse, which Associated contributors can now help bolster. The company plans to spread content from Associated on Yahoo Sports, Finance, News, Entertainment and various lifestyle sites. “Across each media vertical we will identify holes,” said Pitaro.
Read More: AdWeek
Facebook And Zynga Make Up, Make Deal
Facebook and Zynga have apparently put aside their squabbling long enough to forge a five-year deal that promises to “increase their shared commitment to social gaming on Facebook and expands use of Facebook Credits in Zynga’s games,” according to a joint press release Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Facebook and Zynga have enjoyed a fruitful symbiotic relationship over the last few years, with the social network providing an ever-growing audience for Zynga’s social gaming apps and Zynga helping attract users to Facebook with wildly popular games like “Mafia Wars” and “FarmVille.” With 243 million monthly active users, Zynga is expected to post hundreds of millions in revenue this year and has reportedly been valued as high as $4 billion as a result of its tight relationship with Facebook.
Read More: MediaPost
How Does Facebook Make Money?
Facebook revenues reached $500 million in 2009, up from $300 million in 2008, according to Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick, who cites “well-informed sources” in his upcoming book, The Facebook Effect. Facebook expects revenues to reach $800 million in 2010. Where did 2009′s $500 million come from? Self-service ads, which appear on the right side of the screen on Facebook, accounted for about $250 million to $300 million. They look like this:
Read More: BusinessInsider.com
DSP Focus: A Multitude of Possibilities
DSPs, or demand-side platforms, are hot. The online trade press is full of articles and commentary, but the definition of a DSP is still amorphous. Is it an agency exchange buying business unit like Cadreon or VivaKi? Or is it a technology platform that enables exchange buying? For now, DSP is used interchangeably to mean both of these things. This will change as we begin to realize that the agency units are, in fact, specialized media buying units no different than the specialized buying units that have existed in agencies for outdoor, local market TV, newspapers, etc. They use DSPs to do their job – whether that DSP is owned technology or outsourced. But this current framework of specialized display buying powered by a technology to aggregate display inventory is too narrow. It may deliver more efficient display buying, based on better audience composition, but this is a relatively minor advancement from the client’s perspective.
Read More: MediaPost
On-the-Fly Advertising Swiftly Becoming More Commonplace
Time was that marketers, particularly package-goods marketers, were known for their deliberate pace. Media plans and ads were created months in advance, and mid-course changes took months. But in a growing number of cases even the biggest marketers in the world, such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever, are adjusting creative and media plans on the fly within days, weeks or even hours based on changing events or the shifting tides of social-media feedback. Rapid-fire changes may still be more exception than rule for big campaigns, but they’re fast becoming routine in a marketing culture increasingly driven by real-time data dashboards. Consider Scotts Miracle-Gro making weather-triggered ads the centerpieces of its marketing plans; Visa running ads in the last winter Olympics featuring medal winners within minutes of their victories; P&G creating new Olympic ads based in part on social-media feedback from old ones; and Unilever’s Dove Men Plus Care putting video ads on major sports websites featuring New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees’ “victory shower” within hours of him winning the Super Bowl.
Read More: AdAge
Facebook To Dominate Display Ads The Way Google Dominates Text Ads
It is customary to divide online advertising into two categories: direct response and brand advertising. I prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. they have purchasing intent).* When users are actively looking to purchase something, they typically go to search engines or e-commerce sites. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Google and Amazon are the biggest financial beneficiaries of intent harvesting. When the user is not actively looking to buy something, the goal of an online ad is to generate intent. The intent generation market is still fairly fragmented and will grow rapidly over the next few years as brand advertising increasingly moves online. P&G – which alone spends almost $4B/year on brand advertising – needs to convince the next generation of consumers that Crest is better than Colgate. This is why Google paid such a premium for Doubleclick, Yahoo for Right Media, and Microsoft for aQuantive (MS’s biggest acquisition ever).
Read More: BusinessInsider.com
Q&A: The Internet’s Traffic Cop
As more people go online for everything from video to social-networking updates, Internet service providers have to race to make sure the network has the capacity to deliver what customers expect. Behind the scenes, a company founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, works to ensure that that network is running more efficiently. Akamai is probably best known for storing things like videos on its servers, which are located closer to households. The closer the servers are to a user, the better the person’s experience is because the data doesn’t have to travel as far across the lines of the Internet. Akamai also uses algorithms to direct traffic on the Internet in the most efficient way — which isn’t always the way that normal Internet protocols would try to direct it. And the company has been expanding into areas such as security and “cloud computing” — where things like email and documents are handled and stored online rather than on a person’s computer. Digits spoke with Akamai’s co-founder and chief scientist, Tom Leighton, about how information is getting delivered to consumers and what needs to be done to speed up delivery. His responses are summarized below.
Read More: Blogs.WSJ.com
Adify Licenses NetSeer Technology To Lift Ad Conversions
The ad industry continues to automate systems to squeeze every dollar from campaigns to improve return on investments. Ad network Adify will announce this week that it has licensed NetSeer’s Contextual Services and concept-based analysis technology to better predict sites where ads will attract consumers to produce best. Knowing how to sort through the millions of Web sites to discard those with dribble and keep the ones with great content has become an art. NetSeer aims to help Adify find those sites to help clients gain the best ROI. John Mracek, chief executive officer at NetSeer, says contextual signals, when done correctly, can play an important role in increasing performance and understanding consumer intent. NetSeer will help create the “short list” that Adify will use to trim down and present to clients. It will give Adify a sense of the sites that fit specific criteria through NetSeer’s categorization abilities and KnowledgeBank, a concept graph supported by spiders crawling the Web to determine what’s important. It opens up advertising for companies that Gropper refers to as “mid-tail” — companies that fall well below those on the comScore 500 list.
Read More: MediaPost
