Mobile Web Browsing Statistics Now Available

I am now linking to the Mobile Web Browsing Statistics report that Opera publishes about mobile web browsing habbits.  This report is based on anonymous data collected from their significant mobile web browsing market share via their mobile browser (You can find it in the Research Sources section).  Key take-aways form the altest report here:

Top Trends

Social networking stands supreme
Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

One Web will triumph over WAP content
Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic. This share continues to decline as more consumers both use Opera Mini to access rich Web content and become more comfortable browsing the Web on their phones.

Ian Schafer Turns Twitter into Money

Ian Schafer, the very vocal founder and CEO of Deep Focus marketing agency, auctioned off a sponsorship of his Twitter account, which basically consists of owning his Twitter background and receiving periodic shout outs. His goal is to raise awareness and instigate discussion around social media marketing. The auction apparently came down to VideoEgg and Metacafe bidding until $1082.01, when Metacafe won out.

Metacafe sponsoring Ian Schafer reminds me of Seagate sponsoring Robert Scoble - they basically sponsor his entire web identity at this point, because people who are interested in him and his output are an audience that likely would appreciate Seagate products. Well Metacafe sponsoring Ian Schafer is about the same - many of us who follow his output are now often going to be reminded of Metacafe, a site that we might be able to leverage. Ian Schafer and Metacafe don’t have to have a impeding relationship, and this type of branded ownership kind of makes sense.

Could Twitter create a revenue sharing opportunity if they help to build up the value of these packages?

CPMs of large websites dropping while CPMs of small websites rise

The PubMatic AdPrice Index tracks eCPMs across 3,000 sites that work with PubMatic ad-network. While I can’t speak to the list of sites that is included, the findings aren’t surprising - large sites (that have over 100 million page views monthly) are dropping in eCPM because social networks have more page views than they know what to do with and are difficult to monetize because performance is so poor. As these sites eat up more of the user time and attention spent on the web, niche content sites that have more engagement and perform significantly better can charge higher premiums. more findings on the PubMatic site, and continual update of data.

Facebook Lexicon Mines Facebook Talk

Facebook released a new tool today called Facebook Lexicon that allows anyone to trend words and phrases that have been written on walls of users, groups, or pages. The raw data isn’t shown, so its only valuable for trending and comparison of discussion. Some thoughts on use:
- is your viral campaign gaining attention
- is your product launch gaining attention
- what day of the week to users talk about…
- what time of day do users talk about…

This tool will be linked to in the Media Tools section of this website for future use.

Making Promotional Videos Viral on Youtube

This weekend a video was posted on YouTube that discusses the methods of making a video viral on YouTube. The strategies come from a viral video agency that has written a number of controversial articles about their success in-market. The video does really well to summarize the overall strategies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0EQ5HYPz1w

On top of that, certain “jump-points” were listed as how they get the initial viewers that will lead to the viral explosion:

Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.

Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.

MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.

Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.

Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.

Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

[bullets supplied by TechCrunch article found here]

New In-Stream Video Advertising Executions

As video becomes more and more a focal point on the web, countless players are working to find ways to best monetize video without ruining the user-experience, while providing advertisers with worthwhile ROI. This month Yahoo and Google released information on new video advertising executions; Yahoo Video and Google’s YouTube are two of the highest volume video stream hubs, so it’s worth learning more about the options.

Yahoo has a while now sold :30 second non-clickable pre-roll adjacent to an accompanying 300×250 banner; their newly launched products move towards more progressive video advertising models. The first does away with the accompanying banner and creates a clickable call-to-action over the :30 second pre-roll video. The second advertising option creates an overlay banner bar along the top of the video, which can be clicked to pause the video content and drop to a full overlay that offers additional ad content (a game, a form, a :30 sec spot, etc).

Google now has several videos that discuss advertising opportunities across their YouTube property, including targeted banner ads and video-overlays that function similarly to the dynamic content on Yahoo.  Google runs a teaser overlay at the bottom of video content, that can be initiated to expand and provide additional content while the original video is paused.  Google Operating System provides video and descriptions of Google’s options, and discussion of content concerns (they can restrict to professionally produced content, and safe environments).

Consumers watching more and more TV online

In the last few months, online video as received increased attention spurred by experimental video offerings from the major broadcast companies, as well as increased interest in archived video content in response to the writers strike. By the end of 2007, the number of broadband users who watch full shows online weekly reached 16%; this means online television is becoming a viable opportunity for target audience reach, and a viable alternative to other forms of advertising.  Broadcast companies are slowly but surely increasing the video quality, and experimenting with more and more content available at a time (ABC is currently offering every episode of the first 3 seasons of Lost for free high-quality streaming online).   Also promising for advertisers is research showing younger audiences are more and more likely to accept in-stream advertising.  Studies by BurstMedia point to almost 60% of 18-24 year olds accepting in-stream advertising, up significantly from older age brackets.  Advertising infront of full-form television shows has been evolving as broadcast companies test user receptiveness, with “sponsored by” bumpers, and 15 - 30 second mid-roll breaks.  This will be a quickly growing and evolving space in 2008, and it will be interesting to see if it factors into TV upfront buys.

Using Google News Archives to Tell the Story of Your Brand

Here is an interesting way to see the timeline history of your brand.  Google News Archive Search lets you view a timeline history of the news about a particular topic.  By appending the parameters in the search string and choosing timeline view you can display a specific set of years to illustrate a story of your brand at a particular period of events.  You can display the trend of quantity of news about the subject, as well as organized captions commenting on each significant time period.

The Value of Advertising in a Podcast

“Most people, when thinking of Podcasts focus too much on the small size of the market. What they conveniently over look is the fact that,

Despite the small base of users, podcasting represents an attractive medium, given its targeting, its low cost and its obsessive/passionate user base… “These people constitute an excellent media target,” Belcher said. “It’s a self-selecting medium. These people are into it, and they’re really into it.”

The emphasis in the quoted text above is mine, and should make my point abundantly clear.

1. Podcasts are very strongly focused/targeted.
2. Podcast advertising is very low-cost.
3. The user-base is passionate about the subject matter covered by the Podcast.
4. The medium is self-selecting.”

via PronetAdvertising

ComScore Says Panama Increases Yahoo! Search Performance

ComScore Networks has found that Yahoo’s new ranking model has increased click through rates on its ads, at least initially. The study, based on the online behavior of comScore’s U.S. sample of 1 million Internet users, compared the first two weeks after the launch of the ranking model to the previous week, and found a 5-pecent lift the first week, and a 9-percent lift in CTR the second week.

ComScore also found that Yahoo’s search ads are gaining ground as a percentage of total clicks. Prior to the Panama launch, ads held 10.1 percent of clicks, which increased to 10.6 percent of total click volume in the week ending February 11 and 11.1 percent in the week ending February 18.

via SearchEngineWatch.com