February 11th, 2010 SkyHorse Forrester’s forecast on online advertising for the next 12 to 24 months, covering RTB, DSP, and other three-letter acronyms no one had heard of a year ago. Caught it on ExchangeWire , here’s a copy, well worth seeing:
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October 8th, 2008 SkyHorse After US congress put a halt to ISP-based tracking while they try to figure out where the “creepy factor” line is, NebudAd suspended it’s activities, Front Porch was forced to shut off the behavioural tracking part of their system and the latest to throw in the towel is now Adzilla who have put up on their home page “We have stepped out for a little…”.
With an opt-in model being tried out in the UK by Phorm starting last week, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is not dead yet, but it has definitely taken a step back.
Or forward, depending where you stand on the privacy concern fence.
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July 24th, 2008 SkyHorse I’ve been recently discussing with industry friends what is going to be pricing model of the future: the publisher-friendly CPM or the advertiser-dream CPA. The industry as it stands now sees CPA as the bastard child of online advertising and many times regarded as the “dirty cheap stuff” associated with online gambling, porn and other not so desirable campaigns. Affiliate networks, of course, capitalized immensely on this perception and the fact no one else dared touch it. Advertising.com, mainly a CPA based network, is now only second to Santa in terms of reach in the UK. This means the publishers, one way or another, are also playing in to the game.
The reality is that CPA is out of the control of the publishers. It’s the network and/or the agency that owns the reporting, the data and the technology to reduce the number of impressions required for a conversion. This is the single most important reason why blue-chip publishers cannot afford to trade primarily on CPA deals as this would mean giving complete control of their value to an outside party.
But is there a shift in the market? Yes. Recently publishers have been scrambling to update their sales force and their technologies to improve their efficiency, from data analytics to yield managers, but most importantly with state of the art behavioural targeting and reporting tools such as wunderloop, Revenue Science, Rapt and Magenta. What this will create is a power shift from the agencies and networks to the publishers, if and when the technologies start to be used correctly and wisely by a refreshed sales team (yes, sometimes they do need to go back to school). When this happens then Sales Houses are doomed to die, be assimilated with big publishers or convert into specialist yield management consultants. Networks? They will become ad exchanges.
In the end CPM and CPA will cohexist in harmony as all reports will include both impressions and conversions and a new pricing model will appear: the combined CPM / CPA model where a minimum is guaranteed on both values. CPA alone will never fly as the main model for publishers because there are unmeasurable side effects, such as brand awareness and offline behaviour that has to be paid for. Unmeasurable until the tricks up some companies sleeves become reality, but that’s a whole different post altogether…
Long live media lunches!
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February 2nd, 2008 SkyHorse 
So after Yahoo stocks hit an almost all time low, Microsoft did what they do best: snap the competition up. And what a catch they had this time! Yahoo, founded in the very early 90s (saw its first million page views in 1994) by two Stanford grads, is now one of the top contenders in the “new media advertising industry” heavyweight championship, industry which is estimated to be worth £1.3 Billion ($2.5 Billion USD) at present in the UK alone with an additional £8 billion ($17 billion) in the US in the end of 2006.
So what is Microsoft really buying into?
Yahoo has survived and strived by being able to keep up with the Joneses (aka Google) even if they didn’t really innovate. Microsoft on the other hand right now is simply an “also-ran” on Web 2.0. What Yahoo enjoyed simplyfing (web mail, directory index, online games) Microsoft enjoyed ‘businessfying’ (remember HoTMaiL before Microsoft?). And with their platform-agnostic approach it’s no surprise Mac users have much higher affinity to Yahoo products and services than anyone else’s. Yahoo is the Apple of web 2.0, lifestyle included. Just look at their acquisitions: Photo-sharing with Flickr, del.icio.us social bookmarking, blogging site MyBlogLog, BuzzTracker, Rivals.com, Upcoming.org, video editing JumpCut, Blo.gs, Bix.com.
But Yahoo isn’t just a lifestyle brand. It was also gearing up to online advertising in a big way, and has been doing so for a while with even more acquisitions that started with Overture in 2003 and followed by TeRespondo (brazilian ad network), AdInterax and more recently RightMedia and BlueLithium.
So, who’s left?
There’s Google, AOL and possibly WPP. Really that’s it. Everyone else left in the online advertising space is a horde of small and medium size players either filling a niche spot or waiting to become the “next big thing”. But some other contenders may have not emerged yet. If say an E-bay or Amazon decided to buy some of these small fish, they could certainly come into the game. One interesting ‘fish’ that hasn’t made any significant move in this space is Apple. Apple cannot be sleeping, but what are they waiting for?
Apple Ads?
They have been selling iPods and iPhones like hotcakes and now have significant cash reserves ($15.4 billion). With analysts predicting they will grow 23% a year for the next five years everyone is saying they must take it out of Reno and invest it somewhere in the next 12 months. Where exactly is leaving people divided.
To be continued… “The state of Online Advertising – part 2″
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September 5th, 2007 SkyHorse So, another Behavioural Targeting company bites the hook. Yahoo! announced yesterday that it reached an agreement to buy BlueLithium for roughly $300 Million in cash (£150 Million), apparently making Gurbaksh Chahal, BlueLithium’s Chairman and CEO, a very happy man at 25. But despite his young age this is not all new to him, as his previous company ClickAgents founded when he was only 18 followed the same steps and eventually got merged with ValueClick, making it the largest ad network at the time. Good for you mate, keep us posted on what you’re up to next, as no one believes you’ll stick around BL for very long.
Yahoo! Announces Agreement to Acquire BlueLithium: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
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