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CPM in the doghouse

As you may have seen, display advertising was the only part of the online mix to show negative growth in the UK in H1 this year (negative 5.2% as per the IAB).  I think there are lots of reasons for that, not least the economy and growing questions over how much value gets [...]

A final word on ‘free’

When I left to go on holiday two weeks ago I had one chapter left to read in Chris Anderson’s ‘Free’ so instead of taking the book with me I picked two that I hadn’t started yet to save space (Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor and a novel called Little Bee by an author [...]

Facebook, OpenID, data portability and the future of socnets

ReadWriteWeb broke the news a couple of days ago that Facebook is going to allow users to log in with their OpenID credentials granted by other sites, such as GMail, AOL, Yahoo, or dedicated OpenID providers.  You’ve probably seen this on other sites and the main benefit of reducing the number of [...]

Facebook watch – it is still growing really fast

There is a long eulogy to Facebook on CNN today which should give heart to the company’s fans.  Here are some highlights:

They are adding 5m new members per week Average time on the site is 169 minutes per month Older people are now joining in droves – the fastest growth segment is [...]

Track your friends on mobile with Google Maps

The blogosphere is awash with talk of Google Latitude, their new service that allows friends to see each other’s location on Google maps on their mobiles.  The screenshot below says it all.

I think this service will be a big deal.  After all the hoo-ha about privacy and nervousness about how people will [...]

Facebook’s traffic

The web is abuzz this morning with news of Facebook’s traffic, with most headlines focusing on the 10% decline in US unique visitors from March to April.

However, as the chart below shows, year on year traffic still grew at 56%.

The interesting question therefore is whether the decline in uniques is being [...]

Socnet usage patterns

A couple of weeks ago Alan Patrick wrote an interesting post on socnet usage patterns. Back in November in a post on the essence of social networks I wrote about the difference between object-centred socnets (e.g. Flickr, Delicious) and ego-centred socnets (e.g. Myspace, Facebook, bebo) and commented that:

most of the activity on ego-centred [...]

Social network traffic – maybe not declining after all

Last week I wrote about Forbes reporting declining social network traffic.

In the comments some of you said that traffic to niche social network sites is increasing – and this is certainly something we are seeing at WAYN (DFJ Esprit portfolio company), where monthly unique visitors this month will be up circa 185% on [...]

Social objects and social gestures

As you probably know Hugh MacLeod writes a great blog at GapingVoid – and he has been writing a lot about social objects recently, including a good post on social gestures and then yesterday one on social markers.

The social object concept is a powerful one when it comes to understanding social networks. Despite [...]

Buy.at and advertising in the long tail – including on TheEquityKicker

I have been thinking for a while now that I should start experimenting with advertising on TheEquityKicker – and the observant amongst you who have visited my site rather than just reading me in a feed will have noticed that there is now a banner for Lovefilm in my left sidebar. This [...]