In all my posts today on this subject I have been missing a key point – traditional internet ad spend is a tiny proportion of marketing spend on social networks. The vast majority goes on profile pages and sponsorship.
To put some numbers around that estimates of spend on banner ads on MySpace built up from Nielsen/NetRatings [...]
This is from eMarketer – analyst Debra Williamson.
She says ad spending on social networks in 2006 will be $280m in the US and $70m in other markets. This is mostly on profile pages and sponsored promotions. Social network ad spend will be 1.7% of total online ad spend in the US this year.
This is actually a [...]
The inspiration for this came from Thomas Power – Chairman and Founder of Ecademy. A key value driver there is the large number of face to face meetings they organise between members.
Meetings are good because they encourage loyalty and you can charge for them. They are a bit old school and are difficult to organise [...]
One of the problems of advanced western society is that people struggle with their sense of identity. In times gone by people found their identity in their religion, their standing in the local community or from their work. To a greater or lesser extent these have all ceased to work for large portions of the [...]
In an insane rush for traffic MySpace and YouTube are going toe to toe to see who will be the BIGGEST video site – see Mashable.
As everything goes full circle and I will become dust again when I die so we seem to be valuing businesses on eyeballs again.
All good fun though, and lots of [...]
From The Daily Graze.
CNBC did a piece on real businesses going into Second Life.
Text100 an international PR firm has opened a virtual office in Second Life
Starwood Hotels are previewing “aloft hotel” in Second Life a year before it actually opens
MTV is increasingly active
It’s all gathering momentum.
Fred Destin over at Atlas was the first to report on this. Their €12m narrowly squeezes in ahead of the $15m Bebo received – but watch the exchange rates!!
Also of interest today was Business2Blog’s map of international (read non-US) web2.0 start-ups. The list isn’t long and these businesses have a scarcity value to VCs at this [...]
Social search and collaborative filtering are hot areas/buzzwords at the moment.
So what are they?
Defining social search is tricky – this ZD net blog comes at it from a very techie angle and argues social search is difficult because putting social input into search algorithms is very hard. I see things a little differently and would argue [...]
They pass 100m videos per day and TechCrunch want to know if they are going to make it. As with MySpace et al they need to monetise their traffic – only more so as streaming video ain’t cheap. According to TechCrunch on the link below their single banner ads won’t cut it.
Techcrunch – YouTube Serves [...]
Web2.0 in the enterprise – social bookmarking and tag clouds
I’ve been reading a lot about this lately – including Framfab blog/discussion page and Jeff Nolan and I’m seeing a few start-ups in this space in the UK.
Cool stuff, and I think there might be a software opportunity here. The idea is that enterprises empower employees to create their own tags for documents which are shared [...]