Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Shelby Bonnie, the CEO of Whiskey Media. He co-founded CNET in 1993 and was the Chairman and CEO from 2000 to 2006. He served as Chairman of the IAB from 2001 to 2003.
OK, Advertising Week just ended… does anyone else feel like the online advertising industry is the orchestra, playing on while the Titanic is sinking?
We have a problem, folks. And I, for one, think we should start to fix it by killing off the CPM, once and for all.
I have been in the Internet media space for 16 years and will start by stating the obvious: The CPM has done more to stunt innovation and drag down quality products than any single thing on the Internet. Maybe it works in other mediums, but it sure as hell doesn’t work on the Internet. Having been both a small and big publisher (now small again), it’s been my experience that the collective focus on CPMs and counting eyeballs by marketers, agencies, and publishers has led to a whole mess of unintended consequences that have produced a series of “solutions” that work for none of those parties. And perhaps more importantly, it’s been terrible for users.
All campaigns start with the best of intentions: “let’s do something creative, engaging, and unique!” But unless someone really senior from the agency or client side intervenes, the road for a campaign always leads to the media buyer and the dreaded spreadsheet, where the two most important columns are impressions and cost. Ironically, there’s usually some good stuff in campaigns, but they are thrown in for free as “value adds.” At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we’ll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content–content that’s often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists, photo galleries, or single-paragraph summaries of someone else’s story? → Read More
It’s mildly annoying when I’m searching for something specific and Google returns results that are led by a huge overview page like the ones found on Wikipedia. I usually just use the Cached option to locate the information that I’m looking for, since that highlights the keywords in the resulting page. But now Google has a better option.
A new feature in Google Search results lets you jump right to a specific area on a page. For example, if you’re looking for “good cholesterol level,” Google’s first result is a page entitled “What Your Cholesterol Levels Mean.” The good cholesterol level is a part of that, but further down the page. But now in Google’s results, you will find a “Jump to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level” directly underneath the main result. Clicking on it will take you right to that section on the page. → Read More
Yay! Drink the Apple Kool-aid for only $50! Check your local AT&T store for availability or buy it online now. [AT&T Facebook page via Gizmodo] → Read More
Before the Internet, when a gentleman wanted to polish the brass knobs of his dear mum’s armoire he would depend on his internal spank bank which, potentially, included nudes he had seen in postcards and museums as well as racy lines about breasts he may have read in the Bible. However, barring a visit to the local establishment of vice, there was little way to view two people giving it the old Charles and Diana, if you catch my meaning.
Thus they had to resort to horological erotic automata. These were watch movements featuring two or more figures giving each other a good, filling Hardee’s breakfast either on command or at a set time.
NSFW LINKS AND IMAGES! → Read More
Poor RIM. One or two analysts lower your stock rating from “buy” to “neutral” (or the equivalent), and then your stock drops some 16 percent. You know who to blame, too: it’s those busybodies at Apple and Palm, what with their iPhones and Palm Pres eating into your bottom line. (Never mind that your own “iPhone killer” was sorta meh.) What is RIM to do? → Read More
Well this is the dumbest story I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard a lot of them! Once upon a time, there was a fugitive in Lee County in Florida. His criminal background—his FourSquare achievements, if you will—included armed robbery and kidnapping. He’s thrown in jail in early September, but then breaks out using a fake ID. But then, only a little while later, he’s arrested again. Guess what did him in? → Read More
It is notoriously difficult for browser plugins to gain traction — getting users to download anything massively raises a service’s barrier to entry. But Shareaholic, a plugin that makes it easy to share content across a variety of social and bookmarking sites, has been doing quite well: the company has seen well over one million downloads since launching less than two years ago. Today Shareaholic has annouced that it closed a seed funding round that includes investors Edward Roberts (MIT Entrepreneurship Center, Sohu), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Eric Dobkin (Goldman Sachs), Brian Balfour (Viximo), David Cancel (Compete), Andrew Payne (FanSnap), and Brian Shin (Visible Measures Corp.). The company declined to share the exact amount of the funding, but says that it was “a few hundred thousand” dollars. → Read More
It’s $29.99, it’s thin, and it can hold two credit cards. It’s the Case-Mate Barely There ID case. I’ve always wanted to stop carrying a wallet and I’m not sure this is quite the solution I’m looking for but it may work for those who just need one credit card and driver’s license at all times.
If only they added a big old money clip in there or maybe a special wallet just for special stuff? Sadly, you’ll never be able to be as bad ass as this with an iPhone in a plastic case. Two videos after the jump. → Read More
Seedcamp, the European startups programme a little (though not entirely) like YCombinator, has announced the winners of its year-long programme to find the best startups in Europe, finally judged over an intense week of mentoring by a long line of fellow European entrepreneurs. Each startup has won €50,000 to develop their product, in return for Seedcamp taking a stake worth between 5-10% of the company. In each case the exact stake has not been released. Each winning team will spend the next three months in London working intensively on their startup. As we wrote earlier this week, overall the standard was strong this year and many of the VCs and CEOs I spoke to during this week have remarked on how much the quality of startups in Europe has improved, especially as reflected in this year’s Seedcamp vintage. So the winning teams are: [Update: I forgot to mention that it’s actually eight in total. Seedcamp already invested in Kwaga (see here) and Platogo (see here) via it’s mini-seedcamp days in Europe. → Read More
HTC’s first foray into a cheap budget-friendly Android smartphone comes in the form of the previously revealed Tattoo (what are you trying to say, HTC, all us poor folks have tattoos?). And just like a real tattoo, HTC wants your Tat to be personal and unique, so the phone comes with removable/swappable front and back covers to provide for that extra level of personalization (or chintzy-ness, depending on your taste). If it were up to us, the device would also come with a set of cute macho geeky Android-themed temporary tatts (picture the Android robot skateboarding, biting a rose, or flexing its guns, for example). You know. For the kids. Not us. Really. → Read More
Oh, Sony. You’re so close to being back, and then this happens. As you all know, the PSP Go comes out next week, and judging by all the random unboxings I’ve seen on various message boards—maybe our PSP Go got lost in the mail? Oh, well.—it looks like a fine, fine piece of hardware. The kicker, though, is: what happens to all those UMD games we’ve bought over the years? The original plan was to have some sort of trade-in or transfer program, whereby for every UMD you bought, you’d get a code to download the game. (Remember, there’s no UMD slot in the PSP Go, so all games have to be downloaded onto the device’s memory.) Turns out there’s a small glitch. → Read More
Today, 0870, a fantastic free iPhone app from freelance mobile developer Simon Maddox is at last available in the UK App Store, after a whopping 429 days in the approval process. And it appears that O2 was largely to blame for the hold up. → Read More
It looks like all of Greenpeace’s needling of Apple over the past few years has paid off, as the house that Jobs built is about to announce its successes in becoming a more green company. Think carbon emissions data,all that jazz. Even though Apple is trying plenty hard to assuage the Green Brigade, it thinks it’s being treated rather unfairly. → Read More
The big news yesterday was that Twitter raised another $100 million. Today, Twitter CEO Evan Williams confirms in a blog post that the company did indeed close a new round of funding. The new investors in the round are Insight Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price. Existing investors Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Benchmark Capital also put in more money.
Williams did not disclose the size of the round or the valuation, but as we first reported earlier this month the valuation is believed to be $1 billion. → Read More
Welcome to the future, everyone! As we mentioned earlier this morning, AT&T is rolling out MMS for the iPhone today. If you’re one of those folks who couldn’t be bothered to sit in iTunes and click the “Update” button for hours on end, go check now. We just got hit by an onslaught of reports saying that it had gone live and, sure enough, we just got our update. To get the update, plug into iTunes, go to your iPhones device screen, and hit the update button. The carrier file will take 5-10 seconds to download. Power cycle your handset, and bam – you’re ready to roll. → Read More
Do you often find yourself thinking, “Oh, crap. We forgot to name this baby. We need a name, stat!”? I know I sure do. While most people tend to spend months toiling over their child’s name, digging through their family history and fretting over each potentially offensive rhyming variation, you’re a modern parent. This is 2009, after all – we have the power of the Internets right in our pocket. We’ve got better things to do than spend time coming up with the name our child will live with for the rest of their life. Fear not, present-day procreators – BabyNames.com is now an iPhone app. It pulls from BabyName’s list of over 15,000 names, and lets you save your favorites. It’s not really so much for on-the-spot baby naming as it is for helping the uncreative in conjuring up a list of possibilities, but we like to pretend. With that said, it does have a random name picker – so if you feel like namin’ your offspring UrbanSpoon style, go right ahead. [Via IntoMobile] → Read More
I know that you will probably wanna snag Wii Sports Resort on September 27 when the Wii drops to $199, but don’t. If you can wait until October 12 to get your MotionPlus on, you will be so very happy. → Read More
It’s time to go back, folks. Waaay back. Back to a simpler time; back when the government was busy with Enron and leaving No Child Behind. Back when the best Nintendo handheld the world knew had one screen and looked vaguely like a clam, and smart phones cost upwards of $600 – on contract. We’re talking, of course, about 2002. Why are we having this little time travel adventure, you ask? Because 2002 also happens to be the same year MMS, otherwise known as “Multimedia Messaging Service” or “How people send inappropriate pictures to each other when they’re drunk”, made its big debut. Today, just 819 days and 3 models after launch, this oh-so-futuristic feature has found its way to iPhones on AT&T’s network. We loves us some iPhone around these parts – but anybody who thinks its acceptable that it took AT&T this long to get a feature found on every dumbphone since 2003 onto their flagship handset is taking too many sips of the fanboy juice. It’s not live quite yet – but expect it sometime around lunch time, wherever you are. Remember, you’ll most likely have to plug into iTunes for a carrier update. Update: The update just went live. → Read More
Hot London-based live music startup Songkick launches a new feature today allowing users to share their experiences of gigs. Users can now connect their Songkick account to their Twitter account and auto-tweet any gigs they plan to go to. That’s not that big a deal. What is pretty interesting however is how they’ve integrated Twitter to bring a realtime stream to their service.
When a user goes to a show, Songkick automatically pulls in tweets that they write during the concert as realtime, live reviews. The tweets are from actual gig-goers, making this way more valuable than just pulling in generic artist searches. This looks like the first time anyone has done this. Furthermore the tweets are then preserved for all time on the dedicated Songkick concert page for that gig, foiling Twitter’s annoying ability to lose Tweets after a week or so in search. → Read More
The TomTom iPhone Car Kit has been getting a lot of media play the last few days. It briefly appeared on the UK’s iTunes Store and then TomTom announced that it will be available there for EUR99.99. But until now the company hasn’t said squat about the retail price here in the good ol’ States. → Read More
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