The (Sponsored) Media Oxpecker
october 12, 2012 01:45 pm
Every week we round up media news you may have missed.
- BuzzFeed is looking to sponsored content as a way to profit from social-media sharing:
Executives at BuzzFeed Inc., which has expanded over the past year from posting cute animal photos to breaking campaign news, are betting that sharing could be a big part of online marketing's future. In its brightly painted New York headquarters, decorated with the "LOL" and "OMG" lingo of the Internet culture, a team led by Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti is building a business around helping advertisers craft messages that people will share with their friends.
"There's a basic intuitive premise that the research is proving, which is that when you hear about a product because a friend shared something with you, that is more meaningful than if you see a paid ad," says Mr. Peretti, BuzzFeed's chief executive.
But that's not all. BuzzFeed also wants a piece of the long-form journalism pie.
- And get ready for the sponsored slideshow!!!:
Business Insider has sold sponsored posts and emails in the past, but is now doubling down on those efforts with what it calls "Brand Insider," which will allow advertisers to buy sponsored slideshows, videos, and even create their own blogs on subdomains within Business Insider that would mix branded content with relevant Business Insider editorial.
The site will continue to run traditional ads, which currently account for the majority of Business Insider's projected $12 million of 2012 revenue … But company President and COO Julie Hansen believes there's a lot of untapped potential in selling content opportunities to brands.
- Does giving away the news for free -- and relying solely on advertising for income -- automatically lead to lower quality content? "Yes!" says CJR's Dean Starkman, who argues that it creates an incentive towards higher-volume clickbait.
"No!" says GigaOM's Mathew Ingram, who argues that "the funding model you choose to implement doesn’t pre-suppose or pre-determine anything about the actual product itself, if it ever has." 9 out of 10 alt-weekly publishers would agree with that statement.
- "Digital first may well come to be the industry standard, but we're not there yet," says Editor & Publisher managing editor Kristina Ackermann. "And we won't get there until we figure out a way to make some money doing it."
- The Interactive Advertising Bureau says online ad revenue is up 14 percent year-over-year and has reached an all time high.
- Social ad firm LocalResponse is targeting ads based on "historical intent" by accessing your old tweets:
For example, the company could see that someone had tweeted years ago about being pregnant and derive that that person’s child is now a toddler and promote Gap Kids instead of babyGap to them. Or vice versa, Gap could set date ranges for the targetable data so that it only runs babyGap ads to anyone who tweeted about being pregnant nine months to a year ago.
- "None of the things we're doing now even existed four years ago." - The 2012 election season is giving major daily newspapers an opportunity to test and experiment with video.
- A study by the Jun Group found that for opt-in video ads, users display a willingness to watch the full video regardless of its length, but videos between 30-60 seconds in length had the highest engagement rates.
- SketchCrowd is putting a spin on cartooning with the syndication of "the world’s first crowdsourced comic strip."
- Ann Friedman's quick, crowdsourced guide to the most useful everyday tools for the modern journalist.
- And finally, shut up about liberal media bias, says David Carr: "This election has made clear, as in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. But if the media is putting a thumb on the scale, its usually one that points toward anything more exciting than what they are already covering."
