Business Quests in the Information Age

Blog Ad Network by Six Apart helps monetization of smaller blogs

Six Apart is one of the few companies of the so called web 2.0 wave whose focus on sustainable business models is a major strength. Using their position as a blogging platform to structure and manage an ad network is really a no-brainer from a business standpoint, while it is also in keeping with Six Apart's consistent policy of offering easy-to-use solutions to its customers. They are uniquely positioned to generate substantial business value from this initiative. I am very curious about their pricing mechanism and about the degree of visibility they will allow into their profit margins from this activity. And perhaps even more than those aspects of the scheme, I will be interested to understand their targeting philosophy (serving the relevant ads to each micro-audience) because that's one of the big battles of tomorrow's advertising.

clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Six Apart Launches Blog Ad Network, Blog Services clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Blog software company Six Apart acquired creative agency Apperceptive, a company that built blogs for sites such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, and iVillage. Now they’re launching an advertising network for blogs. They are also venturing into design, programming, and blog marketing services. As an ad network, Six Apart is competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, Blogads, and others. Here’s how it will work - they will get advertisers, bloggers put the ads up, and the two share revenue (not sure what the payouts are like, but I believe it’s typical to get 20-30%). Six Apart is working with Adify to provide back end support so bloggers can see their payouts and manage their account. they are targeting their services to the little guy The ad network is currently in invitation-only beta and it’s just for bloggers who use Six Apart’s Vox, TypePad, or LiveJournal.

The American spirit of rising to the challenges ahead

Being in NYC these days, I am spending quite some time observing the city and its people as well as watching those huge screens displaying TV programs on the avenues of the city that never sleeps. These are uncertain times for the US economy and one of the things I was looking for was how people would react to that. First of all, I see none of the gloom and doom even though people acknowledge the ride ahead may be quite bumpy for a while. Secondly, I am impressed with this very American way of seeing opportunity and rising to the challenge in troubled times. To illustrate this, I see quite a few people who are turning the current pressure some people feel into a business opportunity selling books and workshops on how to make real estate decisions or how to reduce debt. Some authors do that positioning themselves as experts while others occupy the "consumer activism" space defending customers from the nasty tactics of credit card companies and other providers of financial services. And this is quite intense.

So there's a big difference between US and Europe: the Americans are able to see opportunity in almost any trouble, while Europeans see trouble in many opportunities. For example, the way we handled the expansion of the EU to Eastern Europe is perhaps iconic of this: the French started complaining about Polish plumbers "invading" their market and no public figure, no political leader trumpeted the only message that was constructive back then (and perhaps now): "go East young man!"

Free music picking-up steam

At long last music is going to be freed from the straight-jacket of clumsy protection systems that end up bothering legitimate users without preventing fraud. Jamendo's CEO used to say that "DRM is the only technology that has a failure rate of 100%", meaning that it is always circumvented by fraudsters almost before it is adopted. Laurent was visionary in his assessment done as early as 2005, that DRM would end-up failing to provide the benefits expected by the old-school music industry and by extension by content industrialists represented by the RIAA and the MPAA. These organizations have yet to recognize that the mass availability of content leads to a paradigm shift in which the competition for human attention is just much more intense. Hopefully their positions will evolve and the new business models of their industries will go mainstream. In that perspective I expect Jamendo and its team will have fascinating business quests of their own in this space.

clipped from slashdot.org Your Rights Online: Amazon DRM-Free Music Store Goes Beta Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 25, @03:57PM from the 2-million-songs-from-20-thousand-labels dept. LowSNR writes "Amazon this morning moved their DRM-free music store into open beta.  According to the release, 'Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(tm), iPods(tm), Zunes(tm), Zens(tm), iPhones(tm), RAZRs(tm), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(tm) and Windows Media Player(tm), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free.' Not to mention Linux." Of course, without DRM few of the major labels play with them.

Google's weaknesses?

The panel discussing weaknesses in Google's model have made some pretty interesting contributions, but they seem to focus their thinking around the idea that Google is about search more than anything else. Their argument is that advertisers don't need to access audiences through search and that instead they can or should access the audience directly based on online behavior. That's all great except for the fact that Google is much more than just search and that when the audience becomes acquainted with and strats using more massively the rest of Google's services, the story will definitely change. Mike Yavonditte of Quigo made a very interesting remark saying tat Google is after every single platform or channel there can be and that their motto of "organizing the world's data" with actually end up applying to this space as "organizing the world's advertising". And there was an interesting question from the audience claiming that with the advent of video, the importance of text based search will lessen, which should be Google's biggest weakness right now. I certainly agree with that.

Joost starting a beta

Quite cool: the Venice Project becomes Joost and I Joost got an invitation to join their new wave of beta test.
From what I ave been able to gather over the web, this is going to be great and I certainly trust the creators of Skype to build something amazing... again.
The product installed without a glitch and I am absolutely impressed with the quality of sound and image.
At this point I do not have sufficient experience with the functionality of the software package to give and opinion as to how it is going to affect the landscape of online media. All I can say is that television will never be the same again and that my first impressions of user experience are very very positive.