Online advertising

Microblogging: Trouble for network bandwidth?

Twitter, the “What are you doing” less-than-texting concept, is gaining a lot of buzz, users and funding. Monetizing any social network has proved difficult, and Twitter’s simple approach makes it harder than usual to see how ads might work there, but it still raises a troubling question for networks. Is the real service of the future more signaling than bandwidth? Clearly you can’t be twittering video stuff to each other; and few people have the time for an activity that must occur regularly and also consumes a lot of capacity.

If casual social microblogging is the prototype of future services, then network bandwidth and bandwidth production could be in deep trouble. We believe that the telco side of the market needs to be thinking about how to make casual bit-intensive activities as attractive as short text messages and blogs, or face some unpleasant consequences.

Mobile providers join to launch targeted ad service

Five unnamed mobile service providers have joined with ValueClick to launch a service that targets better demographic targeting of mobile ads. The mechanism used for ad selection is heavily linked to behavioral targeting, and it seems clear that the move is the long-awaited move by some mobile operators to gain some traction for themselves in the mobile advertising space. However, the ValueClick partnership doesn’t necessarily provide them the means of truly controlling their destiny, and we believe the mechanisms used in the trial (at least from what has been described) to be primitive. This comes as an analyst firm predicts that mobile search ad revenue will reach nearly $5 billion by 2013.

Google video ad trials - the clueless approach

Google has launched a trial of its controversial banner-add-on-video strategy, and we believe the step shows the extent to which the online content ad process is detuned from market reality. The approach has continually been shown to be offensive to viewers of video, far more so than the ever-offensive banner ads on web pages. In addition, it shows that Google has no real notion of how to address online content sponsorship other than to try to replicate the banner-and-click approach, and that is not attuned to the current broadcast TV advertising paradigm. Google also plans to put video ads on search result pages, a step that is likely to further clutter the search results and create more user angst.