Amid mounting anger about the capability, at least two are resisting. Fox and NBC both said Wednesday they won’t accept ads promoting the satellite-TV operator’s new digital video recorder that contains the ad-skipping capability.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here’s an aggressively adorkable video mashup, called “ADmented Reality — Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads” by Rebellious Pixels.

Project Glass, which the search giant unveiled earlier this week, could bring the world augmented reality glasses.

Oh joy.

Here you go:

The Internet company is spending big sums on TV, magazine and newspaper ads to promote new services, including its Google+ social network and Chrome Web browser. Google’s ad-spending as a percentage of revenue is now almost on par with rival technology companies such as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to new data.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But during last night’s super-media-saturated Super Bowl, I somehow managed to ignore digital media.

This wasn’t intentional (and it was very unlike our previous Footballmer dual-liveblog extravaganza, during which I balanced a laptop with a smartphone with 3-D glasses). The original plan was to watch the game at home and simultaneously monitor my multiple feeds. During the pregame festivities, I even used Foursquare to gauge how many people had already checked into a Boston-themed bar in downtown Manhattan.

Then a friend called and urged me to join him at a neighborhood bar. I brought along a tablet, its interface dotted with Super Bowl-related apps, on which I could keep an eye on the online stream. My Twitter app was open on my smartphone, and I eagerly awaited the smart and sassy commentary from the Twitterverse.

But once the game started, something happened. I decided to actually watch the game on TV and converse with the people around me. My phone was at hand, of course, in the event that someone might call or email with news, but I didn’t check my many apps.

I also paid attention to the commercials — even the ones I’d already seen on the Internet — and listened for the reactions of my fellow viewers.

By the end of the night, I had tweeted exactly once.

Apparently, my digital defection put me in the vast minority: My AllThingsD colleague Peter Kafka reports that social media commentary last night increased sixfold from the previous year’s Super Bowl broadcast. There were so many tweets flying at the end of the game that a new record for simultaneous Twitter messages was set; in television ratings, Super Bowl XLVI turned out to be the most-watched program in TV, with 111.3 million viewers.

But last night — even without reading updates on Facebook or Twitter — I sensed that the Audi “Vampire Party” ad was likely a winner, that people liked the idea of a slingshot-bound baby snatching a bag of Doritos, and that the newest Go Daddy commercial didn’t exactly resonate. According to data from the CNBC/Collective Intellect Super Sunday Ad Tracker, Doritos ads captured 15.8 percent of all engaged consumers, and the Go Daddy ad was deemed “offensive.”

Anecdotally, people like dogs. Also, Ferris Bueller triggers nostalgia in some, even if they could care less about Honda’s CR-V. And all you need to do is talk to people to get a feel for this. According to Hulu, “The Bark Side” and “Matthew’s Day Off” were the most-liked ads of the game.

Some people thought Madonna’s half-time “Vogue”-ing was impressive; others felt it was arthritic. This was later supported by postgame social media analysis from Networked Insights. But everyone I saw was glued to it, nonetheless — TiVo says so, too.

I knew that Tom Brady’s performance would be a hot topic of discussion, and that New Yorkers were pumped about the Giants’ victory, not because of Facebook status updates, but because when I walked through midtown after the game ended, the whoops and cheers could be heard for blocks.

Fortunately, I was not bound by my job to liveblog, tweet, tumble, update, text, post, buzz, pin or ping about the the big game. (AllThingsD’s Ina Fried, however, did an excellent job of liveblogging the Super Bowl for us.)

I’m sure if, say, CNBC’s Darren Rovell said, “I decided not to report on the game and just watch instead!” his bosses might have a different reaction than mine would. Not only that, but a strong voice in the field of sports business reporting would be sorely missed.

I doubt mine was missed all that much last night.

Generally, I enjoy monitoring — and contributing to — Twitter feeds while I watch live TV. I used Twitter while I watched the most recent State of the Union address. I followed along while the news of Osama bin Laden’s death was unfolding. And I chimed in during last year’s Academy Awards and March Madness games. I think the people I follow on Twitter are some of the brightest in the biz, so to speak, and I usually glean some good insights by following their tweets.

Unaccountably, last night, I just didn’t. And it ended up being the same game it would have been if I had been engaged in social media. I’m wondering if I didn’t even have a bit more fun because I communicated face to face instead of reflexively checking my little screens.

Even though I immediately returned to the social media water cooler this morning, enjoying a social Super Bowl in the old-fashioned sense of the term seems a good reminder that we don’t always need to be connected to feel connected.

(Image credit: Rickshaw_Man) | Flickr

But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick.

The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live.

The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.)

After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos.

The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app.

The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price.

“We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.”

Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, while a poll conducted by Velti and Harris Interactive shows that nearly 60 percent of mobile users plan to look at or use their mobile device during the game. We’ll likely see some interesting data after Sunday, as well, about mobile usage during the Super Bowl. These metrics are key for advertisers as they try to gauge how many eyeballs are on second — and third, and fourth — screens during big television events.

And what about those Super Bowl ads, you ask? NFL Magazine’s Super Bowl app won’t feature any third-party ads this year, but it will include NFL promotions, as well as ads for The Daily, the tablet newspaper owned by News Corp. (which also owns this site), since the NFL is using The Daily’s technology platform to power the app.

Berman said that since this is the first time NFL Digital has done a commemorative Super Bowl app — it’s the NFL’s first tablet-only app, as well — they’re not focused on signing up a bunch of ad partners to start, though it’s a possibility for future versions of the app.

Revenue generation aside, the app means something else for rabid sports fans: The ability to call up key plays on your tablet whenever you feel like watching them. And rewatching them. And showing them to your friends. And discussing the nuances of the plays.

And unlike a commemorative magazine — which, by the way, the NFL will be producing, as well — the app provides an interactive and updatable experience. Look, Ma, moving pictures!

Over four months in 2009, Mr. Whitaker, a federal prisoner and convicted con artist, was the lead actor in a government sting targeting Google Inc. that yielded one of the largest business forfeitures in U.S. history.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In an incremental but important step for Twitter’s ad business, Dick Costolo’s company is going to start letting marketers place ads in front of people who haven’t asked to see them. Users won’t have the ability to opt out of the ads, either.

This is technically an extension of the ad product Twitter started selling a month ago. That one helped marketers place ads in front of users who were already following their brands’ Twitter accounts. The new twist to the plan will let advertisers place ads in front of Twitter users who are similar to ones following their Twitter accounts.

In discussions with ad buyers, Twitter is describing the concept, which will roll out to a small subset of users by the end of September, as “Promoted Tweets to users like your followers.”

That means that users who aren’t following Virgin America on the service might still see an ad for the airline in their “timeline” — if Twitter thinks they have things in common with people who do follow Virgin.

This marks the first time that Twitter will show ads to users who didn’t take some direct action to trigger them, either by following a specific account or by searching for a term on the service.

The company has always said it would get around to targeting users this way, but it has moved very slowly since it introduced its first ad products in April 2010. The company has ambitions of building up a big ad business — a la Facebook, if not Google — but it’s been incredibly cautious about the way it rolls out new ideas.

Twitter won’t comment specifically about the new ad plan, but offered up this statement via spokesman Matt Graves: “We’re always talking to marketers about ways they can get more value out of Twitter. While we have nothing to share about the way that the business might develop this fall, I can say the last month of testing for Promoted Tweets in the timeline has gone extremely well.”

Messages that Time Warner’s HBO sent out to fans of its “True Blood” show, for instance, were retweeted “nearly 1,000 times,” Graves said.

Twitter won’t tell buyers how they’ll determine which users are like other users. But the service already does something like that now, when it offers up Twitter users that are “similar” to ones you’re already following.

Like the “Promoted Tweets to Followers” that Twitter started selling this summer, the new ads will only appear on Twitter.com. And Twitter still can’t guarantee that Twitter users will see a marketer’s message — like its other ads, it will sell them using a modified auction, and only some buyers will get a chance to deliver their ads.

The big picture here is that Twitter is steadily trying to increase the number of places where advertisers can get their message across, without spooking users who generally think of Twitter as an ad-free zone. Twitter may generate more than $100 million in ads this year, but that’s not nearly enough to support an $8.4 billion valuation. Get ready for more.

That honor goes to something that isn’t a conventional ad at all, but a six-minute promotional video that Apple put up last year to introduce the iPhone 4. So says Visible Measures, a Web-tracking company that specializes in viral videos.

This one has generated more than 17.3 million views, via different outlets, since it went up in June 2010, says Visible Measures.

Meanwhile the “1984″ spot has a mere 10.3 million views. But — no offense to the folks who put made the iPhone 4 clip — I’d rather watch this one anytime.

Visible Measures has a full Top 10 list, of course. I’m still a big fan of the “Think Different” campaign, in large part because of its (well-received) hubris.

The Justice Department said that the forfeiture was one of the largest ever in the U.S. and represented the gross revenue received by Google as a result of Canadian pharmacies advertising on Google, plus gross revenue made by Canadian pharmacies from their sales to U.S. consumers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Great idea, says Dave Morgan.

If you pay attention to Web advertising but haven’t kept track of Morgan recently, his position might strike you as a bit odd, coming from a well-known Web entrepreneur who built and sold two big digital ad companies.

But Simulmedia, Morgan’s newest effort, has nothing to do with Web ads. Instead he’s helping TV advertisers buy the same TV ads they’ve always bought. He just says he can help them spend their money efficiently, using data from cable companies’ set-top boxes.

Simulmedia has been working on this for a couple of years, and originally focused on a relatively narrow slice of the TV ad market: TV networks advertising their own shows on other networks. But earlier this year the company changed strategies–you can go ahead and call it a pivot without being embarrassed–and is now targeting the entire $70 billion TV ad market.

Morgan raised another $10 million last week–an inside round from previous investors including Avalon Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Time Warner–which brings the company’s total funding to more than $20 million.

That’s a good reason to ask him to provide an update on his business, which he does in the video interview below. I’m particularly struck by the comments Morgan makes about adapting a go-go Web start-up mentality to accommodate the TV industry’s deliberate pace.

“I had some assumptions that there were things that had not happened in television because people didn’t understand the changes, and they were Luddites and didn’t want to change,” he says. ”The closer I’ve gotten into the marketplace, I realize they absolutely know what’s going on–they’ve made very calculated decisions.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110517/web-ad-pioneer-dave-morgan-adapts-simulmedia-to-tvs-reality/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110404/facebook-gets-new-friends/ http://allthingsd.com/20110404/facebook-gets-new-friends/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:00:34 +0000 Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38479 A new generation of agencies is trying to crack the code for placing ads on Facebook Inc. in a bid to lure more big-ticket marketers to the website.

In February, more than a third of all online-display ads in the U.S. appeared on Facebook, according to comScore Inc. That’s more than three times as many as its closest rival, Yahoo Inc., had.

But Facebook doesn’t come close to capturing a third of the online-ad budgets of major marketers, partly because its ad rates are relatively low, and also because of its hard-to-navigate in-house systems for buying ads.

Enter a new set of specialized Facebook agencies that seek to offer an easier way to buy ads on the social-networking site. The emergence of more than a dozen firms, including Blinq Media LLC, Kenshoo Ltd. and Web-trends Inc., follows a move by Facebook in 2009 to start opening direct access to its internal ad systems to select outsiders.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110404/facebook-gets-new-friends/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110322/microsoft%e2%80%99s-advertising-arm-still-weighing-do-not-track/ http://allthingsd.com/20110322/microsoft%e2%80%99s-advertising-arm-still-weighing-do-not-track/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:57:49 +0000 Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37978 The latest version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer includes a do-not-track tool that broadcasts users’ wishes not to be monitored online–but that doesn’t mean Microsoft’s advertising unit is honoring those requests yet.

“Our view is that that’s an industry discussion,” Erich Andersen, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, told Digits. “We’re trying to take a leadership role in helping users send a signal of their intention. But the key thing is that a definition of ‘tracking’ needs to happen.” Microsoft Advertising serves ads based on users’ browsing behavior as well as on Bing searches and sites like MSN.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110322/microsoft%e2%80%99s-advertising-arm-still-weighing-do-not-track/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110308/a-digital-magazine-with-one-subscriber/ http://allthingsd.com/20110308/a-digital-magazine-with-one-subscriber/#comments Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:05:42 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1685 Each morning, the President of the United States gets briefed on the day’s news by some of the smartest advisers around. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. We have to sift through newspapers, magazines and websites to find out what’s going on around us. Now, thanks to a free iPad app called Zite, the news-gathering process may get a lot easier for those of us who aren’t leaders of the free world.

Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it’s used.

Wednesday, Zite launched in Apple’s App Store, and for the past week I’ve been testing an early version of it. As someone who is regularly overwhelmed by information overload, just on technology news alone, I found Zite to be a huge help. I realized every time I grabbed my iPad, I anxiously checked this app to see what new content it gathered for me. And I found myself reading stories from sources I don’t usually read.

Zite joins the ranks of other personalized digital magazines, like Silicon Valley-based Flipboard, which came out last July. Flipboard differs in that it takes data from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as other topics or people you can manually choose to set up, and builds a personalized digital magazine with this content.

Zite isn’t just a mirror of your social-networking account. It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics.

It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.

By now, you’re probably wondering what Zite does with this knowledge about your reading preferences. Zite CEO Ali Davar says the company won’t sell user data to third parties, but may use it internally on an anonymous basis for advertising purposes. The company will share aggregate data with publishers (like number of clicks on a story), for ad-placement purposes, but this won’t include a user’s individual data.

Flipboard is more polished than Zite, including images that take up the entire iPad screen and clever animations that mimic real pages turning. Zite’s animations are limited to more straightforward gestures like swiping from right to left to turn to a new page of content, though there is a cool animation on Zite’s home screen that swings several images from stories onto the magazine’s first page. Both Zite and Flipboard pull text and images from sources, but Flipboard usually just displays a portion of a story on its digital magazine pages with the original website on which content was found displayed below it.

Above, ‘Top Stories’ compiles stories Zite thinks a user wants to read. Top, a Customize option lets users add favorite sections.

Zite displays entire stories on its own formatted reading-mode pages, though some stories, like one I read from the New York Times, appeared in the article’s original Web-page format. Mr. Davar said this is because roughly 3% to 5% of articles are tagged in a way that doesn’t allow for reformatting in Zite.

There are currently no ads in Zite, but Mr. Davar said the company will begin to put ads from publishers in the reading-mode pages of the magazine in a few months. He said the site may have ads that aren’t from publishers, but publishers have control regarding ads that appear on their content.

Setting up Zite was a cinch. I entered my Twitter username (not the password) and Zite took a minute to churn and grab content that interested me, setting up sections of my magazine according to topics I follow in Twitter. I didn’t enter my Google Reader account. Users who don’t have Twitter or Google Reader accounts can skip those steps and still use Zite by selecting sections of the magazine that interest them.

Upon opening Zite, a section called “Top Stories” appears first. This is a compilation of the stories Zite thinks I’ll find most interesting, and its content refreshes about every 30 minutes depending how often I use Zite.

My auto-generated magazine had a list of topics including Gadgets, Mobile, iPhone, Google, Mac, Social Media and Technology. I tapped a Customize icon to pick some additional sections for my magazine. I could choose from over 2,000 topics ranging from Wedding Photography to Gardening, from Wine & Mixology to Celebrity Gossip & Industry Rumors. A search box lets users look for even more topics, like “Martha Stewart,” which I added to my Zite. Topics can’t be manually added.

I ran into a couple bugs while using my early version of Zite, which Mr. Davar said are being fixed. A Mashable.com article crashed the app four times in a row when I tried to read it. And though videos from major providers like YouTube and Vimeo are watchable in Zite, I had trouble playing a video that used HTML-5 playback.

For now, Zite is limited to Apple’s iPad, just like Flipboard. Mr. Davar said he plans to get Zite on other tablets by this summer and on mobile devices and Web browsers before the end of this year.

If you’d like a smarter way to handle information overload, Zite can do the dirty work of amassing relevant content for you. It’s designed to get more personalized over time and I certainly plan to keep using it to see what it uncovers for me.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Zite at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Email her at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110308/a-digital-magazine-with-one-subscriber/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110217/sharethrough-ceo-on-why-you-should-care-about-social-video-ads-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110217/sharethrough-ceo-on-why-you-should-care-about-social-video-ads-video/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:34:23 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=3717 Sharethrough is a new kind of ad platform: One focused exclusively on video and social sharing. It doesn’t make viral videos, but it does help sites create custom ad units that fit with the flavor of their community of sites, like Reddit and BuzzFeed. The company charges on a cost-per-view basis. And yes, it guarantees it can get your funny ad a lot of views.

In advertising speak, San Francisco-based Sharethrough combines earned media and paid media. For example, it helped get this recent short film for Lego by Pereira & O’Dell, which was rather nifty on its own, 1.5 million views in two weeks on various platforms.

Sharethrough competes with companies such as Visible Measures, TubeMogul and Jun Group. And together, they’re competing with more conventional video ad units, like pre-rolls. The various firms are all trying to gain visibility in the emerging social video ad market by releasing stats and forecasts. Visible Measures said social video ad campaigns generated more than 2.7 billion views in 2010, up from 820 million in 2009. And here’s a recent demographic breakdown of Jun Group data.

Sharethrough, for its part, said it is now signing $75,000 campaigns on average, up from $20,000 a year ago. It has also doubled its number of customers to 100 in the last year.

If you count YouTube, according to Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg, the social video ad market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Everyone else probably counts for about $50 million combined, he said.

Here’s a video of Greenberg explaining Sharethrough and what it does. His company has raised a total of $6 million from investors including North Bridge Venture Partners and Floodgate.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110217/sharethrough-ceo-on-why-you-should-care-about-social-video-ads-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/inside-twitters-sales-machine-a-secret-guide-for-advertisers-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/inside-twitters-sales-machine-a-secret-guide-for-advertisers-video/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:45:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29862 Twitter hopes to generate something like $100 million from advertising this year, but first it has to teach people how to buy its ads. Here’s how it’s doing that: A hand-holding how-to video, which walks through everything from pricing to dealing with angry users.

The tutorial, which runs 40 minutes, is up on YouTube, but it’s unlisted and is only accessible via a private link. Thanks to a helpful reader, I’ve been able to watch it myself, and I’ve uploaded it at the bottom of this post so you can see it, too.

But it is 40 minutes long–and most of you don’t need to watch all of it. Here’s what you need to know if you’re interested in advertising, technology and Twitter’s first attempts at making real money:

Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s first big ad product, hasn’t taken off.
Instead, at least for now, Twitter is pushing customers to spend most of their money on Promoted Accounts, its pay-per-follower product it rolled out at the end of last year. Twitter tells advertisers they ought to spend $4 on Promoted Accounts for every $1 they spend on Promoted Tweets–the original Google-style ad concept CEO Dick Costolo introduced last year. Twitter says that’s because it’s a lot easier to buy the former than the latter, because there’s a lot more inventory available. (And because Promoted Accounts will “turbocharge” Promoted Tweets.)

Promoted Tweets should get a big push in the next month or so.
Until now, the only way you’re going to see a Promoted Tweet is if you click on a search term that someone has purchased, or if you’re using Twitter app HootSuite. But Twitter says the ads will start running in users’ regular “timelines”–the primary Twitterstream they see–on its own Twitter.com site, by the end of Q1. That’s going to make them much more visible, and should hopefully help with the inventory problem noted above.

Twitter is telling customers to expect an “engagement rate” of 1 percent to 3 percent.
Ad buyers are usually trying to measure success by figuring out how many people looked at or clicked on an ad. Click-through rates for most Web ads are very tiny, and according to an ad buyer who has seen Twitter’s presentation, the company says a realistic click-through rate is 0.3 percent. But “engagement” rates–which measure when a user retweets an ad, or likes it, etc.–are supposed to be much higher. My tipster, by the way, says Twitter is requiring new ad buyers to make a purchase of at least $5,000 worth of inventory in order to participate in the company’s beta tests.

Twitter is warning buyers that some users will have a problem with their ads.
At the end of the presentation (around the 35-minute mark), the company takes time out to coach buyers about “dealing with negative user feedback,” which it more or less assumes they’ll be getting. “People are averse to change, especially when it comes to advertising, and this type of feedback is to be expected,” Twitter’s off-screen instructor explains. The company’s suggested coping strategy: Don’t worry! The complainers are an “extremely marginal percentage of the total.”

[UPDATE: So how do the ads actually work? A Twitter ads tester would like to share their experiences with the rest of the world, but can't.]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/inside-twitters-sales-machine-a-secret-guide-for-advertisers-video/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20110216/heres-the-texas-ags-letter-demanding-googles-search-policies-and-ad-rate-formulas/ http://allthingsd.com/20110216/heres-the-texas-ags-letter-demanding-googles-search-policies-and-ad-rate-formulas/#comments Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:14:45 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=57901 The antitrust investigation Google is facing in Texas is quite a bit broader than originally thought. A civil investigative demand sent last July by the office of Attorney General Greg Abbott, and first reported by Bloomberg, reveals an inquiry not just into ad pricing, but site ranking and “the manual overriding or altering of” search results as well.

The 13-page CID includes 39 different requests for documents ranging from those setting forth Google’s policies and procedures for calculating AdWords prices and minimum bids to minutes and agendas from search quality team meetings and records of the “black listing” or “white listing” of specific Web sites. Also requested: Documents that “describe, analyze, or discuss competition for advertisers from Bing and Yahoo” and others concerning the strategy for e-commerce services like Froogle and Google Shopping.

It’s an extraordinarily thorough set of demands and shows the Texas AG to be reviewing not just Google’s ranking of search results and setting of advertising prices, but questioning whether the company favors its own businesses and advertisers in results. Has Google complied with them? That’s not yet clear, though company spokesman Adam Kovacevich says discussions with Abbott’s office continue.

“Since we started Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry, and while there’s always going to be room for improvement, we’re committed to competing fair and square,” he said. “We’re continuing to work with the Texas attorney general’s office to answer their questions and understand any concerns.”

Texas_GOOG_CID –

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110216/heres-the-texas-ags-letter-demanding-googles-search-policies-and-ad-rate-formulas/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110215/hulu-plus-gets-an-art-house-upgrade-with-criterion-collection/ http://allthingsd.com/20110215/hulu-plus-gets-an-art-house-upgrade-with-criterion-collection/#comments Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:29:00 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29836 Hulu’s primary appeal is for people who want to watch TV shows on the Web, but the joint video venture does offer a selection of movies, too. Now that selection just got a bit bigger, and more appealing to cinephiles: The Hulu Plus pay service is adding some of the Criterion Collection’s art-house movies to its catalog.

Criterion specializes in classic movies from the canon of great directors–Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, etc.–and has about 800 titles digitized so far, many of which are also available via Hulu competitor Netflix. [UPDATE: I'm told that this will be an exclusive deal, and that the Criterion titles that Netflix does offer will expire this year].

Hulu Plus subscribers will initially get access to 150 Criterion films, including “The 400 Blows,” “Rashomon” and “Breathless.” Hulu says the movies will run without ad interruptions, but may feature ads before the films start; the free Hulu.com service will offer a handful of Criterion titles, which will run with ads.

Hulu, owned by Comcast’s NBC, Disney’s ABC and News. Corp.’s Fox (News Corp. also owns this Web site), introduced the Hulu Plus pay service last year. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar says the $7.99-per-month offering is on track to reach one million subscribers in 2011.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110215/hulu-plus-gets-an-art-house-upgrade-with-criterion-collection/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/ http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:30:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29572 Twitter’s “promoted trends” ads may be the company’s most consistent source of revenue. Now the company wants to wring more money out of them: It has told buyers to expect a significant price bump for the ads in the next few months.

Twitter doesn’t have a formal rate card, but ad industry sources say the going price for a one-day promoted trends purchase has settled between $70,000 and $80,000, after starting out as high as $100,000 a day.

Now Twitter has started telling buyers the coming price hike will consistently push the ads into the $100,000 to $120,000 range.

Promoted trends give an advertiser a chance to essentially purchase a small sliver of Twitter’s site, by inserting their message at the top of the “trends” section of users’ pages. For now, Twitter sells only one per day, and has been selling the slot out with some frequency.

And promoted trends could become even more valuable for Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his company if they start carving the ads up into different geographies, giving them the ability to sell more than one per day.

If, say, Twitter could sell at least two different promoted trends, in two different territories each week, at $100,000 a pop, those ads alone could generate $20.8 million a year. Play around with those assumptions, and you can quite easily bite off a big chunk of the $100 million-plus ad revenue estimates we’ve seen floated.

Ad buyers also tell me Twitter has been bullish about its “Promoted Accounts” product, which it rolled out toward the end of last year.

When I first wrote about the concept last summer, and described it as a way to let marketers (or anyone) “buy” followers, the concept upset some Twitter traditionalists.

But they’re going to have to get over it, because it’s exactly what Twitter is selling: It prices the ads, which show up on users “Who to follow” list, on a “cost per follow” basis. Buyers pay between $1 to $3 for every new account that follows them.

The one Twitter ad product I haven’t heard buyers talk that much about is the first one Twitter rolled out. “Promoted Tweets” were supposed to work like Google’s AdWords–”organic” tweets, tied to keywords, that showed up in search results, and later in users’ regular streams.

That seemed like a promising tactic at first. But I’ve never seen a promoted tweet “in the wild”; the only time I’ve seen them is when they’re attached to the promoted trends.

But perhaps I’m just missing them. If you’ve bought one, or if you see one, please pass drop me a line (peter@allthingsd.com) and let me know.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110211/twitter-tells-advertisers-to-dig-deeper-promoted-trends-are-going-to-get-more-expensive/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:06:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2938 Get out your scorecards. There’s yet another social enterprise play to keep track of. And like all the others, it’s being actively marketed as an alternative to Chatter.com, the social enterprise app from Salesforce.com.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/social-enterprise-apps-are-popular-and-so-is-attacking-chatter/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/spotify-clears-its-throat-for-a-u-s-launch-in-coming-months/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/spotify-clears-its-throat-for-a-u-s-launch-in-coming-months/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:35:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=29494 Spotify can’t come to the U.S. until it nails down more deals with the major labels. But here’s another indicator of the music service’s confidence in an American debut sometime…soonish.

It’s a note to the European company’s select group of freeloading American users, letting them know they’re going to have to start paying sooner or later. And it says Spotify is “looking forward” to a U.S. launch in ‘the coming months.”

From: Spotify
Date: February 8, 2011
To: xxx
Subject: Spotify Payment Problem- ACTION REQUIRED!

Hello from Spotify!

You are one of only a few people who has access to a Spotify promotional test account in the USA, and we hope you’re enjoying listening to Spotify through our Premium or Unlimited service.

We are really looking forward to launching the service in full in the USA over the coming months, and hope that you will continue to use the service and be one of our key advocates.

We need to make some small system changes to our payment system for our USA launch, and so in order to make the transition for you as smooth as possible, we have credited your Spotify account with 1 month worth of FREE Spotify Premium/ Unlimited!

In return for this, we ask that you please do the following:

• Visit our website https://www.spotify.com/account/subscription/change-payment/
• Login with your username and password.
• Select a payment method (Card or Paypal) and click ‘Change’
• Click ‘I Accept/ Continue’ to accept the new product in US Dollars
• Provide us with your payment details once more, so that after your FREE
month has expired you will be able to keep listening to music through Spotify.

Your next bill is due to us on ’14/02/12′, so please provide us with your payment details before then, otherwise you will revert back to Spotify Free and if you have Premium you will lose access to Spotify on your mobile. On this date, you will then be billed in Dollars!

Thanks for your help, and please feel free to reply to us directly if you have any
questions!

Obviously this note isn’t anything like a confirmed launch date. In order to do that, Spotify needs U.S. deals with the big music labels, and so far only has Sony signed on.

Industry sources keep telling me a deal with EMI is this close, but they’ve been saying that for weeks now. Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. Just that it hasn’t yet.

And no matter what happens with EMI, Spotify can’t go anywhere unless it has Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label, on board. Again, lots of people tell me they’re confident a deal will get done soon, but…

In any case, the note does point out one of the reasons so many plugged-in Americans you know are raving about Spotify, even though the service doesn’t formally exist here–Spotify has quite cleverly been handing out free test accounts to lots and lots of people who might rave about it.

That includes VIPs and their families, all sorts of music industry people and media people, including yours truly.

And if you’re getting Spotify in the U.S., you are indeed getting a really, really good service: Free, unlimited music, anywhere you want it, whenever you want it, without ads.

Which is not what Spotify’s “real” users actually get. The ones who use the free service have a cap on the number of hours they can listen for free, can only listen on their PCs and will encounter a smattering of advertising. To get the real deal–mobile, no ads, no limits–they’ll need to cough up the equivalent of about $13.50 a month.

So far, about a million people are doing just that, people familiar with the company tell me. But how many will go for it if, or when, it gets to the U.S.?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/spotify-clears-its-throat-for-a-u-s-launch-in-coming-months/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110206/chatter-coms-super-bowl-tv-ads-touch-off-an-ad-skirmish-on-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20110206/chatter-coms-super-bowl-tv-ads-touch-off-an-ad-skirmish-on-google/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 05:30:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2864 If the forecasts for the size of the audience are correct, then some 107 111 million people saw the two ads for Chatter.com, the new social enterprise application from Salesforce.com

As you may remember, Salesforce bought “bookend” spots that ran immediately before and after the halftime show, and included Will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas, who were the main musical act of the show itself. Salesforce claimed that the bookend buy on either side of the halftime show was a first, and that it was the first time that an advertiser involved the halftime show entertainment act in a Super Bowl ad.

While the general verdict on the ads themselves has yet to come down, there’s certainly been some grumbling from other social enterprise players, namely Yammer and Socialcast. Both have taken out text ads on Google against the word “chatter,” in some apparent hope of catching the eye of the millions who may have gone from seeing the ad on TV to googling the word “chatter” on their PCs. (I captured a screen-grab of their ads in the image at the right.) “Chatter Isn’t It” starts the ad for Yammer, while the one for Socialcast says “Superbowl Chattering?” Time will tell if they’re successful.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, here are the TV ads for Chatter.com. Judge for yourself if you think they’ll help Salesforce.com persuade companies to sign on to using it for collaboration.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110206/chatter-coms-super-bowl-tv-ads-touch-off-an-ad-skirmish-on-google/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110204/att-swings-back-at-verizon-showing-how-its-iphone-is-great-for-procrastinators/ http://allthingsd.com/20110204/att-swings-back-at-verizon-showing-how-its-iphone-is-great-for-procrastinators/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:28:33 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3573 The arrival of the Verizon iPhone has provided a much-needed boost to the industry.

No, not the tech industry. The ad industry.

Verizon is attacking AT&T, AT&T is attacking Verizon, and T-Mobile is attacking both of them. Only Sprint is staying out of the fray, taking its mother’s advice that if it doesn’t have anything nice to say, it should perhaps just say nothing at all.

Among the more recent attack ads was one from Verizon touting the sound quality of its iPhone. Now, AT&T is firing back at Verizon with an ad touting the benefits of talking and surfing the Web at the same time, which is apparently very important for procrastinators. (That said, Mobilized is a huge procrastinator and rarely ever talks and surfs at the same time.)

The ad comes on the heels of Verizon’s announcement earlier Friday that it had sold out of the iPhones it had available for pre-order on Thursday. The iPhone goes on sale for all customers, including would-be switchers, next Thursday.

In any case, here’s the ad:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110204/att-swings-back-at-verizon-showing-how-its-iphone-is-great-for-procrastinators/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110202/okcupid-and-match-com-to-marry/ http://allthingsd.com/20110202/okcupid-and-match-com-to-marry/#comments Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:39:08 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=2274 Match.com gets a little sweeter. The dating site, which operates as part of IAC, says it has acquired OkCupid for $50 million in cash, plus more payments based on future performance. OkCupid, which is mostly ad-supported, targets younger adults by creating low barriers of entry to participate. Once users get a taste of online dating for free, the hope is to introduce them to pay sites, like Match.com and Chemistry.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110202/okcupid-and-match-com-to-marry/feed/ 2