Kaiyzen Group

CBS has been running into some issues regarding their CBSEyeMobile site.

This is a user generated news content site driven by an iPhone application that they released.

AdMob who was running the ads for the mobile app released a statement (from AdAge):


Jason Spero, VP-Marketing, AdMob, in a statement said: “CBS notified AdMob of an inappropriate piece of content on this application and we worked with CBS to immediately remove all ads from this application until it is fixed. AdMob has a clear and consistent policy against running ads on mobile sites or applications with inappropriate content. CBS has clear guidelines around user generated content and immediately removed the content and banned the user that uploaded it from any future use of the application.”


Also mentioned in the story is another sighting of Google using AdMob to push its services.., mostly mobile search.

This is a perfect example of why user generated content can be dangerous and all users in the general public cannot fully be trusted especially when you have a time trusted news brand of CBS.

The deadline has come and gone for organizations to leave their comments on the suggested behavioral targeting guidlines put forth by the FTC.

The two key areas that the FTC seems to be most concerned about are disclosure on websites that conduct data collection on their consumers (so every site pretty much), as well at the data retention policies of such sites.

This was a nice follow up to the Ehavioral Event that I attended in D.C. late last year.

Although I am not the biggest believer in regulation the online ad space is somewhere we really need the gov’t to pay more and more attention to.  With the privacy implications and potential market share questions that are rearing their head it is better they start to be involved in this type of active dialouge with companies now rather than later.

Just this past week amidst all of the Yahoo!/MS hoopla Yahoo! announced that they are looking to experiment by giving Google around 3% of their search inventory for about a two/three week period.  It took less than 24 hrs for MS to responsd citing potential hazards by allowing Google to get their hands on 90% of the search ad market.  The following day congressman John Conyers released an announcement calling for need to hold a hearing on the state of competition on the internet and online advertising.

Heading out shortly for the night and came across this Wall St Journal posting talking about Yahoo!’s largest shareholder drastically increasing their ownership in the company to almost twice its existing amount.

Capital Research & Management Co disclosed in a quarterly reporting that their 5.2% stake in the internet giant has been increased to 10.1% as of March 31st.

What is unclear is whether this ownership increase ocurred before or after the MS bid.

Supposedly in the Friday’s meeting the Yahoo! board decided that they will start having more formalized talks with AOL next week and continue their talks with MS as well.  These will no doubt mostly be to try and bait the bit up a bit.

Countdown to Yahoo!’s earnings is ten days away on the 22nd of April.  MS’s earnings will come out two days after Yahoo!’s.., a nice deal for them as I can see this being the dagger in the heart of Yang that they need to not raise their bid.  If Yahoo! slips in their earnings their stock will most likely take a good sized hit, and if MS can follow up with a stellar quarter they could receive a nice bump in their stock price thus naturally increasing the value of their bid through the two companies stock prices.  Currently the value of the original bid is down to $29.34/share at thursdays closing price from the original $31/share.

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily has a post regarding alternatives to the Yahoo! purchase suggesting they look to purchase AOL from Time Warner or perhaps MySpace.

Interesting.., yes.., a bit rediculous.., YES.  With their huge investment in Facebook MS has solidified itself in a position where it can supply the site with its display ads and take advantage of their gigantic inventory.  Also don’t forget that Google has their large deal with FIM for serving ads/search on MySpace as well as their 5% stake they tool in AOL when their re-upped their search deal with them.

Just saw from the Wall St Journal that Yahoo! and AOL are close to a negotiation that would combine the two online operations.

Lost of news from the last couple days on the ongoing saga.  TechCrunch has some of the latest here.

I will be catching up on more of this later.

Mediaweek has a very interesting write up about ESPN dropping their ad networks and focusing on selling direct to maximize their brand value.., and ultimately profits.

I did not hear the news but the article references a quote from a keynote by the Martha Stewart president during the IAB annual show.  I guess Wenda Harris Miller equated to using ad networks to treating inventory like “pork bellies”.

Supposedly there are two camps forming.., one for direct selling.., and the others taking the easy way out and just ditching their inventory to the ad networks.

I will have to inquire with a contact if this includes their ESPN Mobile group…, they have been using AdMob to take care of their inventory.  My guess is that the ad networks they have ditched are their primary sites only for right now since dealing with mobile inventory is still growing up and a specialty left to the mobile folks.

I will try to dig into this subject some more

Facebook beacon has been quite of late.  MarketinVox has a post about beacon and some comments from Owen Van Natta.., Facebooks “Chief Revenue Officer”.., whatever the hell that is.

Van Natta says that “beacon is down but not out”.  He blaims the media for hyping up beacons failure and that it was actually well received.

This of course is total bullshite.., and quite ironic of course they would use some PR/media muscle to start to drum back up support.  In case you cant tell I am not a fan of the service, luckily I am not a avid user of Facebook.., probably log in once a week to see if any messages have been left for me.  Here is a previous posting of mine when beacon launched.

The whole monetizing social network traffic is becoming quite an issue.  You can see Facebook needs to pull something out of their arses in the next couple years to justify that $15 billion eval.  Of course everyone knows Googles remarks of their somewhat sub-par growth during Q4 last year saying that monetizing social network traffic is prooving to be mroe difficult than they thought.

It seems so far other that piddly banner ad CPM’s the best way for social networks to make some cashish is to sign lucrative contracts with one of the big players who are dying to feed their ravenous appetites for traffic.

Adage has a writeup on challenges marketers face when trying to playing in the social network arena.  Some look to possible video and branded content, others look to widgets for that next level of revenue.

I have my own thoughts and ideas for methods and services that could generate some nice revenue and brand awareness…, but I will keep those to myself for now until I can flush things out a bit more.

LA Times has a story about Wikipedia’s popularity and how they would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if they would just sell ads.  They talk of them being mostly run by volunteers and them continually relying on donations fofr their operating budget.

This is the second story I have seen in the past view days about Wikipedia and how they should sell ads on their site.

I think a better approach would be to create a program where they syndicate their content to other sites in exchange for a revenue share for the use of their content.  All Wikipedia content falls under a creative commons license.

A TON of sites link to Wikipedia.., hence the uber high ranking on many search results.  They should provide nice widgets to embed on sites and other syndication tools.

I have always liked the idea people syndicating their content and taking a % of whatever $$ is generated while a user is viewing their content.  Whether it be an impression, a CPC ad, or other metric, popular pieces of content have the ability to generate significant amounts of income.