While the news of a possible Microsoft/Yahoo! acquisition/merger has been on the front page of every periodical including every Blog on the planet, I’d like to add my 2 cents with linking to this article from Information Week - kudos to Stephen Wellman for a thought-provoking article on why Nokia should buy Yahoo! without thinking another second. I’m in favor - anyone else?
Mike Shields, from MediaWeek, posts this today, indicating that eMarketer sees an uptick over the next several years in advertising buys for podcasting.
James Belcher from eMarketer sees Google as the catalyst - with Adsense for Podcasting coming into play. Given that the dynamic duo from dMarc, Chad and Ryan Steelberg, left Google/dMarc last week over strategic differences, could it be this becomes the best platform dMarc is used for? This would assume Google can’t convince traditional media buyers or traditional media platforms to play the game their way - and while podcasting may be a great platform to use it for, I haven’t found anyone that wants to bet against Google attacking the traditional media advertising model.
Tracking and reporting is still an issue for podcasting, but according to the article from MediaWeek, that’s not holding anyone back from including podcast media buys in the mix.
Yesterday, Steve Rubel articulated the issues around RSS and large, profitable web properties - specifically Yahoo!. He updates today with a broader discussion of this issue here. I’ve been discussing this in presentations for the past year that RSS, while a phenomenal “new” service that web users can benefit from, requires a web property focused on pageviews to rethink their advertising strategy.
Namely, should a frequent reader only subscribe to your feeds, there is NO reason for them to come back to your website. That is, unless you are primarily an e-commerce website. So, can you monetize your RSS feeds significantly enough to replace the the money you’ll see disappear from your CPM reduction? So far, advertising in RSS feeds is still nascient, so I’m thinking that you won’t be able to. Thus, those web properties focused on ad sales to survive have to reconsider how quickly they adopt an RSS strategy.
The big surprise for me is that Yahoo! appears to not have considered this when they started or at least when they saw RSS taking off. Poor strategic planning, guys.
What do you think CNN, WSJ, and Time should/will do in light of this discussion? AOL already has enough revenue problems and now, they have a new leader (Randy Falco) who doesn’t appear to appreciate email - is that a sign that he’ll adopt RSS or that he doesn’t yet know what it stands for….?
My continued discussion on Media Swamp with Giovanni regarding the Google Radio advertising platform that is due for release in October. The discussion centers on how this advertising model can make a dramatic impact on the radio ad model we’ve come to know. Additional discussion regarding the capabilities of MSN VS. Google VS. Yahoo! and the relative strategies for each.