May 2009
68 posts
April 2009
61 posts
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Time Warner Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript — Seeking Alpha
I guess I was more interested in the copyright policy.
“Nielsen Wednesday began informing advertisers, agencies and television networks that rely on its national TV ratings that a significant number of people don’t use its so-called “people meter” system properly. In fact, new data being released by Nielsen shows that the more people that are present in those TV ratings households, the more likely it is that they are not reporting their viewing accurately, and that the overall affect has been understating the national TV ratings by about 8%.”
—MediaPost Publications Nielsen Probe Finds People Not Pushing Buttons Properly: The Bigger The Audience, The Bigger The Discrepancy 04/30/2009
“The number of prime-time viewers who simultaneously go online while they watch TV more than doubles from Monday to Thursday night, leading a new study to conclude that marketers with the objective of driving Web traffic can benefit by boosting their TV ad spending later in the week.”
—Viewers Go Online While Watching TV
“Frankly, at this point, despite any positive Ms. Tizzy’s blog may have done for SL Art, her territorial and uncollaborative attitude of blowing up before engaging in any courteous dialogue or fact-finding, makes any association with any of her enterprises anathema to this SL and RL arts presenter.”
—Music Island - “Not Possible in Real Life” you say, Or maybe you shouldn’t.
Less than 1% of Facebook Users Voted and...
UPDATE on Friday, April 24: The auditors have just confirmed the official vote results. There were 665,654 votes cast and users supported the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Principles by an overwhelming margin — 74.37 percent. We will adopt these documents and post them to Facebook and the Site Governance Page in the coming weeks.
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We’d hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we’re going to consider lowering the 30-percent threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding.
(via Facebook Blog)
“Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills. But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers. “It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States. “Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”
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Internet Users in Developing Countries Drag on Sites’ Profits - NYTimes.com
“Sure, we can’t control if others use outside shortening services to shorten our URLs, but we can at least control our own generation of shortened URLs. We can promote URLs that contain our branding and increase the trust of folks who might be wary about clicking through on those links if they were using a URL they didn’t recognize. And we can worry a bit less about URL shortening services shutting down, redirecting or breaking URLs we’ve promoted with our name attached to them.”
—How To Easily Create Your Own URL Shortener With WordPress
“In co-operation with MTN, a big mobile carrier in South Africa, American academics and several other innovative groups, iTeach has launched Project Masiluleke. Using a form of text messaging similar to SMS, this sends out up to a million short messages a day, encouraging the recipients in their local language to contact the national AIDS hot line. The response has been spectacular, especially among young men who have proved hard to reach in the past. When people ring, they are often told about clinics outside their immediate community; in future they will be offered special test kits they can use at home. This scheme is already the world’s biggest field trial of mobile health technology (or mHealth), and Ms Thabethe is convinced it can be copied across Africa. She believes it works not just because so many people have mobiles but because it “sidesteps the stigma as mobile phones are very personal. And unlike radio or billboard ads, a message on your phone forces you to take a moment to think and maybe act.”
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This is a fantastic case study.
“In a conference call with analysts Bartz said, “You have three people telling project engineers what to do, and nobody’s fucking doing anything. We have to…get them focused on the right stuff. That’s the most important thing Yahoo’s going to do to become a big, strong, growing company.”
—mediabistro.com: WebNewser
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Even though Couric acknowledges that she’s crossing into trendier territories by stating “my daughters think it’s really funny I have a Facebook Page…funny weird,” we still think that she’s doing a fantastic job combining her star power with social media savvy to raise her profile on Facebook and grow the CBS audience through potentially viral channels. The power of massive comments, likes, and user-created Facebook videos, is that the CBS message gets dispersed to new audiences (friends of friends) with every act of sharing.
Oddly enough, we’re unable to share the video with you here due to Facebook’s archaic video sharing limitations (you can only share videos with your Facebook network on Facebook). But, should you be interested in participating in the challenge, you can watch the video and participate here.
” —Katie Couric and CBS News Get Creative With Facebook Pages
Play
“Bringing those together allows us to focus faster, more clearly,” Filo said in an interview. “We wanted to find someone kind of technical-focused, because at the end of the day, technology is what really drives a lot of these products.”
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Yahoo’s Balogh Works on Tearing Down ‘Wall of Shame’ (Update1) - Bloomberg.com
Yahoo thinks technology drives Social Web services? That explains everything.
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Trusting News From Social Media
The big question: Can you trust the news you get from social media? Maybe not, says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists.
“You know, just because a person says it, and says it online or says it on a Twitter page, does not make it true — not even close,” Tompkins says.
Professional reporters, says Tompkins, have an obligation to verify information before they publish or broadcast it. But the widespread use of cell phones, computers and digital cameras has turned that tradition on its head. For non-journalists, he says, it’s often “report first, verify later — if at all.”
“The enemy of truth is speed, and in our business in journalism, we are always fighting that friction, aren’t we? The Web, very often, has very little concern for truth and verification — let’s get it out there, and then we’ll sort it out,” he says.
The challenge is to figure out what’s true and what’s not to be believed.
” —Thumbs To The News: Public Turns To Twitter : NPR
“Starting next Monday, CW will air new ads that aim to travel with the audience they target. The network intends to unveil its first “cwingers,” or ads that push viewers to move from TV to online and then back again, starting April 27 during the network’s flagship “Gossip Girl” program.”
—CW’s ‘Cwinger’ Ads Debut in ‘Gossip Girl’ for Dove Brand - Advertising Age - MediaWorks
