Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Top Sites And Brands
Nielsen released its May 2010 figures for most popular websites and brands. For sites according to U.S. unique visitors, Google was #1 with 160 million uniques and Facebook was #4 with 125 million uniques. But Facebook crushes all the big players in “time spent” with a whopping 6+ hours a month in comparison to Google’s 1.7 hours per month. Read more. Is a crushing display advertising strategy far behind?
I Can Has Revenue
The NY Times features I Can Has Cheezburger mastermind Ben Huh and his empire in an article highlighting the manual version of content creation as the Cheezburger Network reaches 16 million uniques across 53 sites. Former Lookery commando and current Cheezburger CRO Todd Sawicki tells The Times that “the company will generate a seven-figure sum from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales.” Read more.
News Corp Circles Content Wagons
News Corp announced that it was buying e-reader platform, Skiff, and making an investment in Steve Brill’s Journalism Online LLC which “is dedicated to enabling newspapers, magazines and online-only publishers of quality content to collect revenue from their online readers.” Read the release and more from News Corp’s Jon Miller.
Tech Star: The Video
GCA Savvian’s Terence Kawaja released the final cut of his “Tech Star” video originally launched during GCA’s Digital Media Summit last week. Echoing the lyrics of a popular Nickelback song, Kawaja gets most of the players in the ad tech industry to sync their lips and (for some) shake their booty. See it.
Sell-Side Platform Evolution
Ad servers are adding analytics as Mediaplex, a division of ValueClick, announced that it has released a single-tag-based system which “works seamlessly with existing advertiser conversion tracking tags” allowing marketers to combine analytics from their site side data with their ad campaign data. Read more.
Verify It All
Click Forensics VP of Marketing Steve O’Brien says brand marketers aren’t just concerned about brand safety but such things as audience verification, too. O’Brien concludes on MediaPost, “Until these services become more widely embraced by the media inventory brokers and providers themselves, the biggest opportunity for the display market may lie just out of reach.” Read more.
Internet Week Sucked
Paul Carr sticks it up the collective hoo-ha of NYC digerati in a post on TechCrunch about the recent New York Internet Week festivities. Carr writes that his experience as a moderator for a panel about the online dating business is case-and-point of what’s wrong with The Week, “[…] asking me to help navigate the minefield of online dating is like asking Rudolf Hess to give guided tours of Dachau. Nice try, New York.” Quote, unquote.
The AOL Content Plan
Fear not. The AOL content plan includes the Jonas Brothers as an NY Times article covers AOL’s new Cambio site which is focused on Millenials, er something like that… the Times says it’s “a next-generation video network for the Web, a kind of MTV without the pesky middleman, intended for 13- to 24-year-olds who spend hours online but not enough time on AOL’s sites.” Read more.
Mobile OS Stats
Quantcast released May 2010 mobile operating system usage data and the winner is…. “Well, the biggest player by far is Apple’s iPhone OS (from now on to be known as iOS), but the biggest winner is clearly Google’s Android.” Read more on the Quantcast blog.
Presentation Bias
Greg Linden unearths a new study from Googlers which says the obvious about presentation bias (such as bolding and other tricks), which can influence performance. But, there are some benefits to the study. Linden writes, “First, it is a decent survey of some of the current work on position and presentation bias. Second, it exposes some of Google’s struggles with the difficulty of deriving searcher satisfaction from the noisy proxies that we have available like click data.” Read more from his blog. And, download the paper (PDF).
Divesting Forbes Assets
Forbes Media appears to be undergoing a transformation or at least a house cleaning. JEGI Inc., an investment bank, announced that Forbes is putting its Investopedia financial site up for sale and JEGI has been retained. According to the release, the site has been growing users and is profitable since Forbes Media acquired it in 2007. Read more (PDF).
