Marketing Pilgrim

It’s only been a month since we blogged about YouTube’s attempts at monetization—so it’s about time for them to try something new, isn’t it? paidContent reports that YouTube is testing a choose-your-own-ad feature to give us all what we really want: the choice between instant and delayed gratification.

I know when you read “choose your own ad,” you were hoping you’d be given the choice between commercials for Swiffer and Burn Notice. (What? You don’t stop whatever you’re doing to watch Michael Westen or join in with “Baby Come Back”?)

Falling short of that, YouTube’s test feature is still okay, I guess. YouTube’s new test lets users choose between one single pre-roll ad (usually 30+ seconds) or four 15-second commercial breaks dispersed throughout the clip. But will there be any choice? Back in December, Hulu reported that 88% of its users chose a two-minute pre-roll instead of 30-second ads interspersed throughout a half-hour (23-minute) program.

23,000 users couldn’t be wrong. Or within the margin of error. Nope. comScore is definitely, totally, 100% correct when they report that their May data indicates Facebook has just barely edged out the formerly most popular social network in the US, MySpace—70.278M to 70.255M.

Okay, even if the difference—0.03%—is well within the margin of error, the point stands: Facebook has at least caught up with, if not surpassed, MySpace in the US.

Facebook has long dominated the world in the social networking sphere—just a few months ago, Nielsen pointed out that they’re the most popular social network in almost every country. But until now, MySpace has held on to its lead in the US.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld says that the trend isn’t likely to change in the future:

When it comes to any kind of reputation management study, I’m normally deadly serious. This is my field of expertise after all.

Today, I’ve decided to have a little bit of fun with Weber ShandWick/KRC Research’s survey of 151 executives in Fortune 1000 companies. Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for the report, but while reading the summary of findings, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting trend.

Observation 1: 66% of executives believe that the reputation of current CEOs is largely negative.

Observation 2: Of those that suggest CEO reputations are negative, 48% of them still aspire to one day accept the role of CEO.

Observation 3: The majority of these executives believe that CEO reputations will likely improve by the year 2013.

So you thought the search engines had click fraud under control to a degree? Has Google’s “See No Click Fraud, Hear No Click Fraud” approach made you curious but you just figure its part of the search marketing landscape so get used to it? Well, decision engine pioneer, Microsoft, may have crossed into some uncharted territory by suing a suspected click fraud perpetrator so they now can experiment with the new tagline of “Microsoft: Makers of the Decision Engine for Click Cops Everywhere”.

So what brought this about? The New York Times reports that it is the result of a year long investigation and the end result is

Microsoft filed the civil complaint on Monday in United States District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia, along with several corporation names they were believed to have used, and several unnamed parties.

Unless you’re an SEO, you’re probably blissfully unaware of the bombshell Google’s Matt Cutts dropped at SMX Advanced recently. Jordan did a great job of summarizing the issue here.

Well, Matt kind of owed us a deeper explanation and he’s obliged over at his personal blog.

It’s a lengthy post, but here’s what you need to know:

• This devaluing of PageRank sculpting actually happened “more than a year ago” and you didn’t even notice! That means that this change is not the big bombshell we all thought, It’s kind of like getting annoyed that your cable company took away the National Geographic channel a year ago, but you’ve only just found it.
• We get official confirmation that when you link to another page, PageRank flow sees a “decay factor” of “10-15%.” Again, something we’ve known, but Matt confirms.

While likely to be no surprise, the Wall Street Journal reports that radio ad revenues have fallen sharply along with just about anything else that has the word advertising attached to it. That is unless you are in some sectors of Internet advertising and even then it depends on who is doing the research to supply data that determines whether that is true or not.

It looks like the Internet and all of those who participate in the commercialization of it (i.e. advertising, marketing and general trouble making) are responsible for the end of the media world as we know it.

….intensifying competition for listeners, from satellite radio and the Internet, helped slow growth in advertising. The recession sent revenues off a cliff. Station ad revenues fell 7.8% in 2008 and are expected to drop a further 15% this year, estimates consultant BIA Financial Network.