Posted by truecreek on June 29, 2009 under More Dam News | 
By Amanda Lenhart
The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.
While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.
Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.
Overall, personal use of social networks seems to be more prevalent than professional use of networks, both in the orientation of the networks that adults choose to use as well as the reasons they give for using the applications. Most adults, like teens, are using online social networks to connect with people they already know.
When users do use social networks for professional and personal reasons, they will often maintain multiple profiles, generally on different sites.
Most, but not all adult social network users are privacy conscious; 60% of adult social network users restrict access to their profiles so that only their friends can see it, and 58% of adult social network users restrict access to certain content within their profile.
Posted by truecreek on under More Dam News |
By Michael Learmonth
For years, the promise of online video advertising has been just that — a promise. The reality has been a big disappointment: ads that look and feel like TV, and are repurposed from TV creative, only much more annoying.
The reason for this is twofold: advertisers and agencies were reticent to spend money on new creative for online video, and the video market itself was splintered, and lacked the kind of content advertisers were comfortable with.
But with the TV-upfront market frozen and advertisers looking for lower-cost means to reach consumers, a push is on to try formats that could finally realize some of the potential of online video with targeted ads that engage with real interactivity. “As prime-time audiences decrease, it makes sense to go where the audiences are going,” said Chris Allen, VP-video innovation at Starcom USA.
VivaKi, like Starcom a unit of Publicis, is running a yearlong test of different formats for both long- and short-form content known as “The Pool.” Earlier this year Reckitt-Benckiser, marketer of Clearasil and Lysol, primed the market with a $20 million budget shift to the web from TV for campaigns on ad networks like Yume, Brightroll and Nabbr.
Meanwhile, a flurry of innovation is taking place across the industry to move marketers away from static pre-rolls and impression-based pricing to different models that take advantage of the web.
“We’re in this funky transition period in the industry; the lion’s share of what advertisers are doing is repurposing TV creative for video, but some are dipping their toe into new creative and testing new formats,” said Hulu Senior VP Jean-Paul Colaco.
The goal here is to lure more dollars online and increase the size of what IPG unit Magna Global estimates will be a $700 million pie in 2009. Nearly 80% of the U.S. online audience watches video, according to ComScore, but the time spent is just 1% of TV viewing, which is a $70 billion market. So an argument could be made that online video is getting its share, but no one here is making that argument, are they?
Here’s sampling of some of the latest efforts to reinvent online video ads:
# CBS, through its TV.com unit, is experimenting with a system that would allow users to earn credits by watching ads. Earn enough credits and you can watch ad-free. It’s also experimenting with bigger ad loads. Typically a half-hour show online has two minutes of ads, compared with eight minutes on TV. CBS is pushing that up to five minutes with no measureable consumer blow-back.
# Tremor Media has rolled out a host of ad units called vChoice that bring interactivity into the player. Viewers can choose the ad they watch, dig deeper into related content, watch a product demo and play a game all without leaving the video experience. Some units allow advertisers to use their existing creative. Others “push the boundaries of what has been done by allowing new, nonlinear storytelling,” said Shane Steele, Tremor VP-marketing.
# Hulu pioneered the choose-your-own pre-roll “ad selector” unit, which allows users to choose an ad, including a long-form movie trailer in exchange for an ad-free episode. The site has also experimented with ad-free blocks where an advertiser such as McDonald’s buys up the ad inventory to make prime time ad-free. The Disney-News Corp.-NBCU joint venture has also tried live ads, like the faux “telethon” for Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
# YouTube introduced its own variation on choose-your-own-ads just last week. Google’s video site is trying out a system where viewers can choose to watch a pre-roll ad or a “promoted video,” which itself is a media buy. Either way, the view helps YouTube fulfill guarantees made to advertisers.
# Then there are “engagement” pricing models where the advertiser pays for a specific action, rather than an impression. Video-ad network ScanScout, for example, serves rich overlays that allow users to hover over or click to watch an ad or movie trailer. The network did a deal with Universal Pictures for “Fast and the Furious 4,” where the studio paid for a number of completed views of the trailer rather than impressions.
Posted by truecreek on June 26, 2009 under Opinions. Everyone has them. |
So, I’m sitting there checking out the morning emails and two very bizarre threads show up. One tells me that my site login has been changed and the other tells me my password has been changed. Soooooo, I check my blogsite.
HACKED. Very nice.
You have to wonder what purpose is served by these type of immature attacks.
Here’s what happened: during my daily site admin early this week, I took the opportunity to upgrade my wordpress software as recommended by the program. Well, there was some kind of exploit written in to the code and voila. The site was taken over and the user was redirected to some punk’s homepage.
After spending the better part of the day working it out, everything was good last night. At least I thought it was.
But Nooooooooo. This morning, the site was GONE. No one knows what happened, but files were missing, so no site.
You have to be kidding me.
After restoring all the files with the backup, we’re good to go. But that brings up the point: Don’t these people have anything else to do?
