The New Economics of Advertising

October 2, 2008

Gawker Media to lay off 14 percent of editorial staff

Filed under: blog — Dash @ 7:30 pm


Gawker Media to lay off 14 percent of editorial staff

Posted by Caroline McCarthy
The financial crisis strikes again: Successful New York-based blog network Gawker Media will be laying off 19 of its 133 editorial staffers, according to an internal e-mail from publisher Nick Denton. The company will be additionally suspending its bonus payments to writers and editors, but will be increasing their base pay and making some strategic hires at the company’s most successful blogs.

“With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites,” Denton wrote in the e-mail. “But I know that’s scant consolation for the colleagues we’re losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories.”

The bonus system at Gawker, a network of snarky and witty gossip- and culture-focused blogs that Denton founded in 2002, has provoked controversy and banter throughout the new-media world: the company pays most writers at a base rate but then adds a bonus for every thousand page views a single post pulls in. The bonuses will continue to the end of 2008, but have been suspended for the first quarter of 2009 at the least.

Equally controversial has been some of the blogs’ own content, which countless pundits have criticized for being puerile, mean, and occasionally invasive. But in New York, where Gawker Media has been arguably the most successful new-media start-up story of the past decade, the layoffs can only be described as unfortunate and sad: its writers and business staff are valued members of the blogging community and Gawker Media’s downtown offices have become a popular hangout and party space…

Look Who’s On Top for ‘Economics of Advertising’

Filed under: blog, top — Dash @ 4:20 am

Ed: After 8 months and 1,000 posts extracted from 10,000 articles, guess who is number one on the new Blog Search from Google?

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Related Blogs:
New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies behind the new economics of buying and selling advertising.

The New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies for buying and selling advertising.

Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics - My experience in online advertising and venture capital

“Pre-emptive Rounds”

6 hours ago by effective cpms  
Looks like they’re battening down the hatches: Social-network apphaus Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures. President and co-founder Rooly Eliezerov called it a “pre-emptive round” in a release …
Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics – http://ecpm.typepad.com/clickety_clack/
[ More results from Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics ]

New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day), Oct 3 2008

7 hours ago by joly  
The revenue generated by advertising provides incentives for online publishers to create high-quality content. The problem of allocating advertisements to online page views is extraordinarily complex. On search engines, millions of …
isoc-ny.org – http://www.isoc-ny.org

TechCrunch50 and Demo 72

9 Sep 2008 by Editor  
Burt (CB) — Collects user data to tailor individual advertising campaigns and target users more effectively; Adgregate Markets (CB) — Brings online stores to consumers through a display ad that is a fully transactional widget …
New Economics of Advertising – http://adecon101.blogspot.com/ - References
[ More results from New Economics of Advertising ]


Google Launches Its Own Memetracker

Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.

Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days…

Top Page of Live Search ‘Economics of Advertising’

Filed under: blog — Dash @ 4:14 am

September 29, 2008

Microsoft Recruiting Blog Sites for AdCenter Ad Network

Filed under: Microsoft, blog — Dash @ 2:26 pm


Microsoft in Bay Area Recruiting Blog Sites for AdCenter Ad Network

Microsoft has begin to recruit Bay Area blog sites to its adCenter Publisher advertising network, which competes against Google’s AdSense. I just had a meeting with Tony Cappaert, Ad Platform Evangelist, he’s in town for the next two weeks and looking to meet up with other bloggers (send me your email if interested.)

Microsoft is keen to try out its contextual advertising technology against Google’s and is inviting “coke and pepsi” test trials. It also allows other ads on the same pages, which many ad networks prohibit.

More importantly, it is invite-only for publishers and will remain invite only. Google AdSense allows almost anyone to join its ad network, which has resulted in a lot of low quality sites, and link farms. By keeping the network limited and of high quality, Microsoft believes advertisers will have a better ROI and thus will pay more for the advertising and that will mean larger payouts to publishers.

Foremski’s Take: MSFT is wise to limit which sites are allowed intothe adCenter network and it shouldn’t be too difficult for it to provide a better revenue stream than GOOG’s AdSense.

It’ll be interesting to see how much better the adCenter revenues will be, and if Microsoft provide decent tools for publishers and advertisers to help optimize both ends of the ad network.

We certainly need a better value recovery mechanism for online content than we currently have with the ad networks. All of them take a much higher cut of the revenues than they should: 30 to 70 per cent of revenues is way, way too much for serving up some ads. Microsoft won’t disclose its share of adCenter revenues but says it is very small right now because it wants to recruit publishers. It will take a larger cut later as the network grows.

September 25, 2008

HP announces an (almost) unbelievable blogger campaign

Filed under: MarSP, blog — Dash @ 2:04 pm

HP announces an (almost) unbelievable blogger campaign

from VentureBeat by Matt Marshall

HP, one of the country’s biggest computer companies, is boasting that it boosted its PC sales by 10 percent in May after it leveraged the blogging community to promote the launch of one of its computer systems.

I’d have shrugged off this announcement, had it not been so unbelievable. Bloggers? Boosting PC sales by 10 percent? In a sluggish economy like this? And how much did HP have to pay these bloggers for them to shamelessly pimp themselves and their blogs to promote the PCs to their readers?

Skeptical, I talked with Scott Ballantyne from HP, VP & General Managers for Personal Systems Group, who oversaw the program. He said HP didn’t pay the bloggers a dime. All HP did was give away 31 new HDX Dragon computer systems to 31 influential members of the PC blogging community, so that the blogs could give them away in a competition among their readers. The bloggers went nuts. They made videos of the systems, wrote up engaging posts and cross-linked to each other — all of their own accord. The publicity this created spurred an increase in sales, according to Ballantyne. Since the bloggers were credible to their readers, and they were talking about the HP systems on their sites, the readers went out and bought systems even if they didn’t win one in the competitions.

HP has strong evidence to back up this up. Until May, the Dragon system was already out on the market for nine months, and they weren’t performing as well as HP expected. Sales had flatlined. But in May, during the blogger competitions, sales of the Dragon system shot up by 85 percent compared to the average monthly sales of the three months before hand. More impressively, overall HP PC sales grew 10 percent higher in the U.S. than the company had forecast, as HP PC systems overall got more publicity from the Dragon campaign. Visits to HP.com increased by 15 percent.

So there you have it. Embracing blogs apparently paid off big time for HP. And HP didn’t pay a thing. “This was for the community, by the community, with the community,” said Scott Ballantyne. If this is true — and I have no reason to believe it isn’t after talking with HP — it’s amazing.

Here’s the list of the 31 blogs that participated.

Here’s an example of a blog post during the campaign.

Buzz Corps is the agency behind the campaign.


02 May – 09 May www.absolutevista.com
03 May – 10 May www.arstechnica.com
04 May – 11 May www.osnn.net
05 May – 12 May www.jkontherun.com
06 May – 13 May digitalmediaphile.wordpress.com 
07 May – 14 May www.bostonpocketpc.com and www.techronical.com
08 May – 15 May www.the-gadgeteer.com
09 May – 16 May www.thedigitallifestyle.com  
10 May – 17 May www.digitalhomethoughts.com
11 May – 18 May www.windows-now.com
12 May – 19 May www.windowsconnected.com
13 May – 20 May www.geekstogo.com
14 May – 21 May bink.nu 
15 May – 22 May www.mediablab.com
16 May – 23 May www.last100.com 
17 May – 24 May www.labnol.org  
18 May – 25 May www.notebooks.com
19 May – 26 May www.slashdotreview.com
20 May – 27 May www.neowin.net
21 May – 28 May www.geek.com
22 May – 29 Mau www.lockergnome.com 
23 May – 30 May www.planetx64.com
24 May – 31 May www.thegreenbutton.com
25 May – 01 Jun www.istartedsomething.com
26 May – 02 Jun www.bleepingcomputer.com
27 May – 03 Jun www.hardwaregeeks.com
28 May – 04 Jun www.geeknewscentral.com 
29 May – 05 Jun www.geekzone.co.nz
30 May – 06 Jun www.thetabletpc.net
31 May – 07 Jun www.gearlive.com
01 Jun – 08 Jun www.gottabemobile.com

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