Nielsen confessed yesterday that a bug in their NetView product, and possibly other products, has created the appearance of a 22% decline in time spent online. The error is triggered by visiting a url with more than 2,000 characters which then caused the rest of a user’s session to stop being tracked.
Anyone with a modicum of experience with web publishing knows that counting web traffic is never as precise as you would expect. Quantcast, Google Analytics, Compete.com, comScore and Nielsen report different numbers for the same site, sometimes by a huge margin.
You would think by 2010 we would have this figured out, but it turns out you better count your traffic twice. When someone asks you can always give them the bigger number.
Ad Age just published an article about Martha Stewart the brand that bumped up my (already high) estimation of the former-model-turned-media-giant’s brand. It draws parallels between her brand and that of Paul Newman, who’s name has come to mean quality salad dressings and pasta sauces as much as Cool Hand Luke.
I suppose everyone knows this already but in a time where everything is getting more transparent TV networks are still managing to pull one over on advertisers. And according to Jim Edwards in this article at BNET, advertisers don’t care. He makes a pretty strong case for advertisers getting *more* screwed than ever in these deals as audiences fragment and go online. I guess if it were me I’d try to squeeze as much out of the dying beast as possible too.
Yahoo has bought content mill and page view generator Associated Content. Yahoo’s new property specializes in cranking out content about hot topics determined algorithmically using 350,000+ contributors. This kind of low-cost content (and often low-quality) is turning up more and more around in search engines as publishers attempt to eek a margin out of their sites.
Yahoo has been successful at getting premium ad rates for content created by professional journalists in the past so this acquisition is a big endorsement for the new school of wide and shallow journalism.
The problem of making money on Internet video isn’t any closer to being solved but Google just took one step towards a better user experience on its YouTube website by adding a skip button to pre-roll advertising. The company says is wants to learn which ads users decide to skip as a measure of quality. It would make sense that this development is a step towards performance based pricing.
So this ridiculous Cocoa Krispies Box implies that eating sugary cereal will protect your kids from H1N1 aka Swine Flu. Obviously this is a dubious claim but the fact is, of course, that H1N1, while scary, is a only a minor threat to the well-being of America’s youths.
This fact did not deter USA Today from publishing an article resulting in Kellogg’s removing the claim from their box. Perhaps a compelling argument for self-regulation?
I’m reminded of this cartoon by xkcd which serves as proof that marketers will always find a way to irritate me via cereal boxes.
The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news website, launched this week. It’s hard not to be cynical about the future of a such an organization while traditional journalism is struggling to define its raison d’etre to the YouTube generation. It’s made especially difficult for the Tribune after it gets called out by the Austin Chronicle for paying its top 5 employees a total of more than $800,000 per year, a hefty sum for a nonprofit startup.
According to this report from AdGooroo, Google charges $99.44 per click on ads accompanying search results for the keyword “mesothelioma”. Yikes! I guess all the ambulance chasers have finally made it online. Mesothelioma, it turns out, is cancer caused from exposure to asbestos.
I just discovered The Beancast which is a really quality marketing podcast. The latest episode covers the new FTC endorsement rules, Twitter premium accounts and Facebook gifts among other things and features as guests, Åsk Wäppling of Adland.tv, Ken Wheaton of AdAge.com and Alan Wolk of Toad Stool Consultants.
Nielsen confessed yesterday that a bug in their NetView product, and possibly other products, has created the appearance of a 22% decline in time spent online. The error is triggered by visiting a url with more than 2,000 characters which then caused the rest of a user’s session to stop being tracked. 
Ad Age just published an 
Yahoo has bought content mill and page view generator Associated Content. Yahoo’s new property specializes in cranking out content about hot topics determined algorithmically using 350,000+ contributors. This kind of low-cost content (and often low-quality) is turning up more and more around in search engines as publishers attempt to eek a margin out of their sites.
