Smalltalk with James Robertson

Why, you ask? Because I was trying to read a cartoon, and a Bing ad insisted on rolling over the page and playing video that could not be interrupted. Yes Microsoft, you got my attention - just not in the way you wanted.

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Looks like Digg is the latest victim of an over-reliance on ads as a revenue source. The problem is simple: in the print era, ad space was limited, which pushed prices up. Same thing with over the air broadcasts - time was limited. Now? There are a nearly infinite number of web properties on which you can advertise, and most of us (at least in North America) have access to so many TV channels that it's a very easy matter to avoid any ad you don't want to see.

Scarcity disappeared, and - as should have surprised no one - rates plummeted.

Technorati Tags: digg

Microsoft is fighting a battle that just doesn't matter much at this point:

Microsoft has launched a new Windows 7 campaign to take on Mac OS X. A new tab on the Windows 7 sites compares Windows 7 to Mac OS X in a number of areas--listing out the reasons that Windows 7 is the superior choice.

Sure, Apple took a small percentage (all at the high end) of the PC/laptop market away. But, they've moved on: you'll notice that Apple wound down the "switcher" ads a long while ago now. Why? Because they are focused on the mobile space - phones and iPads. In that area, Microsoft is basically invisible - and that leaves the one/two spot to Google and Apple, with Google playing the license model that Microsoft played with PCs years ago.

The third spot will end up with either RIM (Blackberry) or HP (Palm) - with Microsoft way, way back on the sidelines. Watching the MS marketing machine is just confusing at this point.

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft, mobile

Jeff Jarvis sees the end of the advertising supported business model in sight; I'm pretty sure I agree with him. The entire ad model is based on scarcity; in a world of effectively infinite content choices, ad dollars are going to end up spread so thin that they won't possibly support an entire business. This has huge implications for the existing media model, and those implications still haven't completely sunk in.

Technorati Tags: media

I love this take on the effectiveness of newspaper ads, as compared to social media/web stuff:

I can choose to place an ad in the New York Times if my target is nationwide or in my town’s paper if it is locally relevant. I can direct (control) who sees my ad. The folks following me on Twitter are from all over the world. As far as I know, there isn’t a simple way to reach only the those in a particular market. Nor do I currently have a strong enough local base of followers. I would need to find someone else local with a bunch of followers and hope they’d re-tweet for me.

The targeting thing is only partly correct. Why? Well, what are the circulation numbers? What's the demographic uptake? At least in the US, the readership for printed news drops through the floor the lower the age bracket gets.

The better question is, would traditional ads do you much good anyway? I still think most advertising is a shared fiction, where the buyers and sellers agree to pretend that something useful is happening.

As you might imagine, Google is less than please by the new terms for ad analytics on Apple devices:

Ad analytics collection is prohibited unless it is "provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads," Apple's revised terms read. "For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent."

It's not entirely clear how broad that ends up being, but it sure tilts the playing field Apple's way. While I'm not a huge fan of government anti-trust actions, I have to wonder how smart this action is for Apple, given the fact that the DOJ is already sniffing around. Also, given how much further the Europeans were willing to go with Microsoft, it hardly ends with the DOJ.

Seems to me that Apple is asking to be smacked around.

Technorati Tags: google, apple, iAd

Twitter has decided on (shocker), an ad model for revenues. The fun part is their terms of service, where they want to shutdown anyone else doing something similar on Twitter:

In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing).

But what does that even mean? You could classify my Smalltalk posting as advertising for Cincom, and I do a lot of that (take the daily screencasts as the prime example). I post them here, the posts get auto-tweeted, and then the tweets find their way into the Facebook news stream. How does that get classified by Twitter?

What about the book reviews I do, where I put in an Amazon affiliate link? I don't get paid for those reviews (and the affiliate links don't pay either), but it could be called advertising. What if I actually reach the monthly minimum at some point and get a check from Amazon? Does that count?

The theoretical answer is "no" - they only want to go after bigger players. The vagueness leaves a huge hole for paranoia though, and I'm not the only one asking these questions...

Technorati Tags: social media, twitter

Apparently, gadgets have always had plugins attached :)

I've had my doubts about the viability of a purely ad driven model, and I'm wondering whether the layoffs at Digg are a marker for that problem:

This morning we faced the difficult task of reducing our team by about 10%. This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved. Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support.

It could mean plenty of other things as well; if they plan to go public soon-ish, or get acquired, that could also be the culprit - companies sometimes do strange things in the run up to that stuff. Back at ParcPlace in the mid 90's, we started turning down consulting work in order to make the percentage of revenue from product sales higher - because the lawyers taking the company public strongly urged management to do that. Weird stuff, never made sense to me - I kind of figured that money was all green regardless of where it came from :)

Technorati Tags: digg, management

I think the ad promoting the upcoming Sony Move is pretty good, but the controller? Who dreamed up that shape?

Technorati Tags: sony, wii, ps3