Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

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Music Biz Proves Again It Deserves Sleazy Reputation

September 6, 2007 / / 7 Comments

One of my all-time favorite quotes is this one: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” It’s credited to the late Hunter S. Thompson.

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Well, the industry is living up to its reputation quite well, thank you very much, if the news on The Journal’s front page today is any indication.

YouTube kool kids, you’ve been had. Tricked, scammed, bamboozled.

Note to music industry (and this label’s part of the Disney brand, for crying out loud!): the new world of marketing and promotion on the web is about transparency and honesty and disclosure. Not cheap Hollywood tricks and lies.

And the nice little rich girl from Brentwood, Marié Digby, ought to be ashamed of herself, too. This kind of front page exposure in the WSJ is definitely not what she and her parents had in mind.

You have to hand it to the Journal, though. My hat goes off to reporters Ethan Smith and Peter Lattman for bringing this one to our attention.

Yahoo Eats Blue Lithium

September 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The advertising M&A game just keeps going and going…. MarketWatch reported earlier this evening that Yahoo will buy ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Yahooeatsbluelithium Blue Lithium, as I reported in my blog post How the Top Ad Networks Rank on August 18, is currently the fifth largest ad network. A few minutes ago, this Red Herring article went up, noting that Blue Lithium was founded in January 2004 and was backed by Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The article went on to state:

BlueLithium is also known for its behavioral targeting, which has become the must-have for online marketers. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to target users based on the sites they’ve visited, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. Yahoo recently launched SmartAds, a nascent effort in this area.

YHOO was up 5.46% today, closing at 23.97. In after hours trading, it was up another 0.63% to 24.12 as of about 8:00 pm Eastern.

Business Week Sucking Wind; Forbes Rocks On

September 4, 2007 / / 0 Comments

When a news release hit my inbox early this morning saying the publisher of BusinessWeek, Geoffrey A. Dodge, was joining Salesforce.com as SVP of media sales, I was surprised. But then I quickly realized that, if I lived in NY, I would have probably heard about this last Thursday, because I see the news broke in the NY Post and Silicon Alley Insider then. And it turns out it was probably not such a big surprise at that time to those in magazine circles, since he’d been passed over for the job as president of BusinessWeek some months ago.

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I think the bigger story here, however, is the pain being felt by BusinessWeek these days, as it lags category leader Forbes by a long shot in ad sales, and has been much slower in integrating its print and online properties. Forbes wrote the book there, and is doing the best of the major biz pubs, by a good margin. Reason: they “got” the Internet early on.

For the lowdown on the status of business publications these days, read this nice analysis from Media Life that came out with the Dodge news. I show one chart from that story here (Copyright 2007, MediaLife Magazine.)

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Surfrider Foundation Benefit: ‘Art for the Oceans’

September 3, 2007 / / 1 Comment

I’d like to take a little break in my tech blog here to put in a plug for an art auction benefit coming up September 17 in NYC, for one of my favorite organizations: The Surfrider Foundation. I’ve been a member since inception (1984), and one of my best friends has been executive Director for the past couple of years — Jim Moriarty, whom I met through our common involvement in the tech startup community. But that was before the Surfrider Foundation was lucky enough to snag him. Jim’s really been doing great things to grow the Foundation and increase its impact, worldwide. And I think this art benefit is an insanely great idea. Kudos to you, Jim!

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Any of you lucky enough to be in the Big Apple on September 17 should get yourselves over there, have a good time, and bid on some surfboard art!. It’s at the XChange, a cool, new event space you you can read more about here. I hope some people upload Flickr pix of the event — and I’d love to see some blog reports, too! (Because, unfortunately, I’ll be getting ready to leave for San Clemente right about then, which is ironically the Surfrider Foundation’s home base — so I’ll be rooting from the other coast.)

Again, this is the second annual “Art for the Oceans.” The first event was a big success, as Surfline reported here: Surfrider’s Art for the Oceans raises over $300,000 in NYC. And here’s how Surfrider’s annual report summed up that original event:

Nearly 700 people, including celebrities, New York socialites, and a host of East Coast surfers descended upon Milk Studios in New York City’s Meat Packing District for the Surfrider Foundation’s first-ever “Art for the Oceans” Auction. Master shaper Al Merrick created a whole school of 6’2” fishes, then gave them to artists to have their way with them. Some of the work was done by surfing artists and some was handled by artist surfers. Among the contributors were Thomas Campbell, Raymond Pettibon, John Van Hamersveld, Drew Brophy and Gus Van Sant. In addition, Herbie Fletcher and Gene Cooper each shaped 10-foot plus Hawaiian guns for the auction. Herbie’s was adorned by Julian Schnabel with his much heralded “Blind Girl Surf Club” motif, and the board took the honor of the highest bid, raising $75,000 from an anonymous donor. Following the auction, the crowd was entertained with an hour-long musical set by Citizen Cope.

I’m sure Surfrider is expecting even bigger attendance and attention this year. Right on, guys! I hope you raise tons more than $300k this time — gazillions! Because you’re doing great work, and surfers and beach lovers everywhere support you….

By the way, for more on the Surfrider Foundation, in addition to their great web site, also see their YouTube page.

The Coming Explosion of Advertising on Blogs

August 30, 2007 / / 2 Comments

I read an interesting article yesterday on Mediapost’s Marketing Daily: 8 Of 10 Americans Know About Blogs; Half Visit Them Regularly. This is a publication read by marketers, both traditional and online, across all industries. And it reminded me, again, that this is a topic I’ve been meaning to blog about.

Okay, my headline above may be a bit sensational, and maybe not a prediction the article makes per se. But read between the lines, people. Sure, ads are already blaring at you everywhere on major blogs like Tech Crunch, Read/Write Web, and GigaOm, but they’re really big media properties now. I’m talking long-tail blogs. Here’s an excerpt from the article (by the way, Mediapost, I love you, but how about starting to put *links* within your stories? like to more details about the study itself?):

Ad spending on blogs is still in its infancy … the eNation study, conducted in late July, shows there is real potential for ads on blogs. Among people who have visited a blog (485), 43.2% said they have noticed ads on blogs, and three out of 10 people in this group said they have clicked on ads while visiting a blog. Among the youngest consumers, a whopping 61.2% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they have noticed ads on blogs.

Some advertisers are trying to slip brand names in through the blogosphere’s back door by recruiting bloggers to write favorably about their brands…

That latter point is something I wanted to focus on today. It speaks to a major trend to watch in how advertising will be spreading onto blogs: that is, “sponsored content” versus traditional ad banners or text-link ads. The former seems to be coming on strong, on multiple fronts. Sponsored content can be whole stories written in news or editorial style and placed on blogs (or social networks, for that matter) — much the same as many “mat services” have done for decades as a service for small, weekly newspapers (which you know if you’re in the PR business) — to a blogger’s own writing that is directly influenced by and paid for by a sponsor (and hopefully disclosed by the blogger!), to even paragraphs written by a sponsor and paid for and just dropped in by the blogger, with blogger editing even allowed (yes, it’s being pitched out there — I know). There are many creative ways that “advertising” will be infiltrating and propating on blogs. So, hold on for the ride….

What do you think? Which kind of advertising would you rather see on blogs? (Relevant ads, of course — that’s a given.) Or how about on this blog right here?

For that matter, should I even be accepting advertising at all, in whatever form?

UPDATE: And for more on the growing readership of blogs: Blogs Make Tech Impact: 78% of Tech Journalists Read Them.

2nd UPDATE, 9/4/07: And yet more: One-third of blog visitors have clicked a blog ad, study says.

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