Tag Archives: digital media

January 23, 2013 · 10:10 am

RTB Means Really Tough Business

The always reliable Digiday did a piece yesterday on Real Time Bidding (some folks say Buying) and the effect it’s having on web publishers. Entitled “Publishers Face RTB Pressures,” it’s an excellent though depressing overview of what’s happening in the digital publishing business due to the steady growth of programmatic ad buying. I can’t sum it up any better than this:

The drive for more efficient buys in RTB is putting pricing pressure on the entire display ad market. According to Magna Global, display advertising globally rose just 1.5 percent in 2013. That’s not very good in a market that expanded 14.4 percent overall for the year. In fact, the reason Magna identified: price drops.

That’s the situation today, when 17 percent of buying is through exchanges. In five years, Magna director of global forecasting Vincent Letang expects 43 percent of display advertising to be bought and sold via exchanges.

In other words, there’s too much inventory and these formulae don’t give the quality of your content enough consideration.  Heaven forbid that humans actually enter the equation!  Before all of my friends who sell non-digital media get too smug, one can rest assured that when the efficiencies of this buying protocol become evident that someone will push it on TV and print just as sure as the sun shines.  So is this a bad thing?

If you’re buying audiences for your marketing messages, no, it’s not.  It is, however, if you’re a content creator who tries to make money off your content by selling the audiences it attracts.  I suppose that means that if I were in the content business I’d get the hell out by selling off my audience monetization to someone else – a publisher or distributor.  I’d give up some of the upside in return for protecting the downside push to the bottom RTB is forcing.  As the article says “Efficiency is a great thing unless what you do is what is being made more efficient.”  It’s not going to be long (and it may be here already) before the quality of the content is impacted as the resources to produce consistently great stuff just aren’t there.

If I were back being a publisher, I’d be spending a lot of time having someone think about our syndication strategy and fast.  Let  someone else ride the ad wave down to the bottom.  My content – and yours – is worth more than that.

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December 20, 2012 · 10:58 am

Who Is Working For Whom?

Have you ever been in a clothing store where the customers were busy stitching together the goods?  Maybe there is a guy in the corner screening designs on to T-shirts or a grandmother doing embroidery on a scarf.  How about a restaurant where the customers cook the food (OK – I have been to one of those – many Korean places let you grill at the table but still…)?

I ask this because it’s something pretty common in the digital world.  After all, what would Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Quora, and dozens of other sites be without the user-generated content that makes them worth a visit?  Sure, each of those sites provides the platform and the tools with which to interact, but if no one ever posted anything what would they be?

What’s triggering this are a couple of things.  First, the Instagram fracas I discussed yesterday.  Second, Twitter is deigning to let users download all of their tweets as if Twitter had anything at all to do with the content itself.  It got me thinking of all the crappy students who got paired up with smart kids in school and got an “A” because the smart kid did all the work and wouldn’t let the team fail.  The least one can do is to have an appreciation of and respect for the horse that got you here.  The platform is a “C” student – it’s along for the ride in most cases.  The importance of the content to those sending and receiving it doesn’t change based on the platform although the platform can help get it into a form that makes it more digestible.

When any of us who run businesses start minimizing the contributions our customers make to us, we’re in trouble.  In the case of many digital businesses, where the customers literally make the stuff on which the business depends, we should be thinking of as many ways to reward those folks and how to say “thank you” each and every day.  Screwing around with privacy or your data use policy or being obnoxious about using your customers as currency (even though we all know we’re being sold) is a sure way to blow up the business.  You with me?

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December 6, 2012 · 10:18 am

Time Spent Apping

A piece came out in TechCrunch yesterday concerning the increased time people are spending in mobile apps.

Kicking Television

(Photo credit: dhammza)

According to their analysis time spent with mobile apps (127 minutes a day) has surpassed time spent on the web via a desktop (70 minutes) and is gaining on TV usage (168 minutes).  It’s an interesting comparison and the piece goes on to say the usual things about how mobile may be the future but it’s still an unknown business model for marketers and investors (except for the carriers – that business model seems to be pretty well-defined and pretty damn good!).

I have a few thoughts I’d like to share.  First, while the piece implies that TV is somehow threatened by this, the fact that TV use has not declined should demonstrate that it’s not going anywhere.  In fact, according to the data presented in the piece, TV usage has increased over the last two years.  What’s not clear from the piece is what is being consumed on the TV.  Does watching streaming video via Netflix on my TV count as TV?  I’m assuming this does include time-shifted TV which may or may not include watching the commercials that are a piece of commercial TV’s business model.

Second, as someone who rode a train two hours each day for many years, I can tell you that there is an awful lot of downtime.  For the last few of those years when I had a smartphone, I began to use some of my commuting time to do some of the things cited in the study – social networking, catch up on news, etc.  No streaming video then but I’m sure I’d be watching it now.  All of those minutes are incremental involvement with content (and the marketing that supports the content) I otherwise might have foregone.  It’s pretty easy to spend a few minutes of downtime at lunch on your mobile device.  I don’t see these numbers as negatives.

Finally, the piece does ask the right question which is how companies can capitalize on all of this mobile activity.  There is too little information  it’s too hard to scale, and the marketing model within apps is still not impactful.  The app world is way more fragmented than is the TV world or the worlds of other “mass” media.  Then again, the app world is only five years old (dating it to when the first iPhone came out).  The commercial web is still searching for a business model in many ways and it’s going on twenty.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.  What do you think?

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