Armstrong: Mission Is To Make A Sick Company Healthy
AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong knew he would have to do a lot of investor soothing given that it posted another tough earnings report for Q2. He described the mission before him as very simple: making a sick company a healthy one. Invoking Warren Buffett’s “snowball” metaphor for the growth of his portfolio depending on finding a wet snowball and a steep hill to roll it down. “We’ve got a tightly packed snowball” at AOL, Armstrong said. He also described a “platform war” currently going on in Silicon Valley and how “content is the ammunition” and AOL will be a central supplier of that firepower. In explaining the dismal ad prospects, despite the recovery, Armstrong said advertisers continue to lag consumers in adopting online media. Video is going to be a focus for AOL and Armstrong noted that there will be some branded entertainment partnerships announced shortly. StudioNow, which it bought last winter, grew 25 percent in terms of video output from the last quarter. “You will see a new home page that is targeted heavily around video this quarter,” Armstrong said. On the local front, AOL’s hyperlocal play Patch added 39 new towns for a total of 83 localities in its network. “Nobody likes to show up to these calls and report down numbers,” but Armstrong wanted investors to known that he has his own money tied up in AOL as well and asked for continued patience as he attempts to turn it around. Meanwhile, Q3’s results is looking “choppy.” In terms of products he is happy about, Armstrong again focused on the homepage—which attracts about 15 million uniques—and Patch and Mapquest.
Read More: PaidContent.org
Google CEO Schmidt: “People Aren’t Ready for the Technology Revolution”
Eric Schmidt spoke at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe today and dropped some serious rhetorical bombs. “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.” The Techonomy conference is a gathering of people from around the globe seeking to use technology to solve the world’s big problems. Schmidt spoke there today and said that people need to get ready for major technology disruption, fast. The bulk of what’s contributing to this explosion of data, Schmidt says, is user generated content. From that content, far more prediction than we’ve seen today is possible and will be a factor in the future. “If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt said, “we can predict where you are going to go.” “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.”
Read More: ReadWriteWeb.com
Demand Media Extends Content Model To Other Publishers, Hearst And Gannett First To Sign Up
Demand Media on Thursday debuted a new service for publishers to pad their online offerings with the work of independent freelancers. Two of the first properties to employ Content Channels, so-called, include Hearst Corp.’s SFGate.com and Chron.com. “Hearst is the second major publisher to select our product for their sites,” said Steve Semelsberger, SVP and general manager of the Business Solutions Group for Demand Media. (The first major publisher was Gannett’s USA Today, which recently employed Demand to power its “TravelTips” section.) Semelsberger said Demand Media’s studio team worked closely with the editorial teams of both SFGate.com and Chron.com to make sure the Content Channels met their editorial standards. In the case of the Houston Chronicle‘s Chron.com, the team worked with Demand Media to create a “Small Business Resource Center” to complement its existing business news coverage by incorporating thousands of business-related articles and videos. Content Channels also went live this week on San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate.com for its “Home Guides” section.
Read More: MediaPost
IAB Report Slams Most Online Research Methods
Watch out, research firms! The Interactive Advertising Bureau has embarked on a broad initiative to improve online brand effectiveness research, and its initial findings aren’t pretty. What’s wrong with most research that attempts to measure ad effectiveness? Small respondent size and low response rates for starters, according to an initial report from the IAB. Above all else, the validity of such research is threatened “by the extremely low response rates achieved in most IAE studies,” according to Paul Lavrakas, Ph.D., the report’s author, and former chief research methodologist for the Nielsen Company. Average research is also “threatened by the near-exclusive use of quasi-experimental research designs rather than classic experimental designs,” in the words of Lavrakas, author of “Telephone Survey Methods: Sampling, Selection, and Supervision.” Worse still, industry research is often compromised by “a lack of valid empirical evidence that the statistical weighting adjustments … adequately correct for the biasing effects,” Lavrakas attests. “In instances where the sample size is at the lower end of this range [less than 800 participants] and the clients want subsample analyses to be conducted … these subsamples may not have enough members in them to provide precise analyses,” Lavrakas concludes. “Thus, subsample analyses based on small sized subsamples [fewer than 100 participants in the subsample] will have relative large sampling errors.”
Read More: MediaPost
