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Is User Generated Content a Myth?

posted on November 7, 2007

I enjoyed reading Scott Karp’s thoughts on sites like YouTube, which focus on User Generated Content (UGC), being media for real creative talent to be discovered. What I don’t agree with is the way in which he chooses to subscribe to the idea that an average person’s contribution to the same site is not commercially viable.

Scott does a very nice job on covering the latest talent discovery for Apple and its iTouch product, where a young man from England was discovered by Apple execs after posting a very high quality amateur commercial online. Scott goes on to imply that maybe the commercial was posted on YouTube with the intent for the young man to be discovered or that maybe Apple had generated the idea itself and was attempting to create some marketing buzz via the amazing discovery that they made of this young talent.

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Facebook’s Announcement

posted on November 6, 2007

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch is liveblogging Facebook’s announcement as we speak I type this. The first fifteen minutes were filled with soundbites from Zuckerberg about the social graph, how cool and popular Facebook is, the history of advertising and how revolutionary this announcement is. Just moments ago, Zuckerberg began on the actual announcement:

2:48: “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing a new advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.”

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Quigo to be Acquired by AOL for $300 Million

posted on November 6, 2007

Quigo, a New York/Israel-based company that specializes in ad targeting, is in the process of being acquired by AOL, according to a report in Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper. Time Warner Inc. is purchasing Quigo for $300 million in an attempt to better compete with Google and Yahoo.

Quigo has two main services that they provide their clients, AdSonar and FeedPoint. Adsonar is very similar to Google’s Adsense in that it provides targeted advertisements on various websites, and FeedPoint is their search engine marketing tool.

Last June, Time Inc. signed an exclusive deal with Quigo that provided their 15 web titles with a custom version of the company’s pay-per-click ad service and allowed the online magazines to be sold as a single network.

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T-Minus One: Facebook’s Announcement Tomorrow

posted on November 5, 2007

With all the big announcements coming out today, I’m sure your head’s already spinning—but be sure to keep your eyes open for tomorrow’s Facebook announcement! Amid all the other buzz today, there are plenty of rumors flying about what Facebook’s big secret will be.

According to TechCrunch last week, at least part of the announcement will be “Project Beacon“: an effort to better integrate Facebook profiles with nonFacebook websites. In Michael Arrington’s example, a Facebook user purchases a product (like a book) from a partner site (Amazon, in this example). The purchase appears as a popup in a user’s mini-feed—which, like other items in their feed, they’ll be able to delete and turn off.

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Death to Russian Scammers

posted on November 5, 2007

Here’s one way to eliminate spam – corporal punishment. We all hate spam, especially the ones that advertise Viagra, and pills for penis enlargement (and as I write this I’m thinking of the related ads I might trigger just by writing this). You can rest easy knowing that the man responsible for around 30% of those ads won’t be spamming you anymore. He’s dead. Or at least that’s what everyone thought. Now it appears the story is a scam.

The story made the home page of Digg, and quickly got picked up by bloggers. The story goes that a man named Alexey Tolstokozhev (which in Russian means ‘Thick Skin’) was shot in his luxury house near Moscow. Shot by Russian hit men.

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Ad:Tech: Snap.com Launches Snap Shots Ad Network

posted on November 5, 2007

image Snap.com will today announce the launch of its Snap Shots Ad Network. You may recall that Snap offers the link mouse-over pop-ups–briefly tested by us last year–designed to show you the location of a link before you actually click on it.

With its launch of its Snap Shot ads, you’ll be able to buy ads that will use content from the page a user is on, plus content from the link a user mouses over, to present contextually relevant ads.

Advertisers will be able to tap into the 2 million sites that currently use Snap Shots. Ads are available in just 3 formats–simple banners, text, rich media–and will be served using DoubleClick’s Dart platform.

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Ad:Tech: BuzzLogic Launches Conversation Ad Targeting

posted on November 5, 2007

image It seems that BuzzLogic has found another use for all of the conversation mining and sentiment analysis it conducts in the blogosphere. The company will today announce the launch of its Conversation Targeting™ ad system. The new service will enable advertisers to identify influential blogs and other social media conversations occurring around specific products, brands, and discussions. Once identified, advertisers can buy ad space "into the online conversations shaping consumer perception and buying behavior."

To leverage the BuzzLogic Ad Targeting feature, advertisers create BuzzLogic conversation queries (similar to key word searches) to discover the opinion leaders who are driving online conversations on virtually any topic, as well as the community of sites listening to or participating in a particular discussion. Once influential sites are identified, advertisers develop text or display ads directly from the BuzzLogic dashboard, then customize a list of influencers for site-level campaign targeting.