Feb/100
The Banner Blues: Combating Burnout and Blindness
via Jakob Nielsen for Useit.com
At Image Space Media headquarters, we're all pretty big proponents of online advertising (Cash Rules Everything Around Us, after all). We think it's a great way for publishers to financially support their passions and their expressiveness. And, of course, we believe we provide a unique and game-changing way for publishers to use their unique images to get paid.
But not all online advertising is effective online advertising. And it's not just you, getting sick of seeing the same banner ads above the sites you visit every day - it's a proven phenomenon called Banner Burnout, and it has very real implications for publishers and advertisers.
Let the stats do the talking: A study by DoubleClick found that after the fourth impression, CTR rates for banner ads go from 2.7 percent to less than 1 percent. That's pretty abysmal!
Photo via Flickr user jamescastle3
But before you can even worry about click through rates, there is the critical problem of Banner Blindness to deal with. As you can see from the amazing eyetracking studies shown above, created by Jakob Nielsen, the eye is automatically drawn to areas not dominated by ads. As Nielsen writes, "If users are looking for a quick fact, they want to get done and aren't diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story, they're not going to look away from the content."
To combat the Banner B-problems, advertising experts suggest placing banners with animation, flashing bright colors, and cryptic messages at the top of your site. But what if that's not exactly the style you have in mind for your site? Remember, banner ads are not the only ad solution. These are many great advertising strategies to generate revenue - banner ads, Google AdSense and AdWords, in-text ads, Image Space media ads... Given the number of options in your arsenal, it's important to be tactical about your advertising solutions. How do you want your site to appear visually? Check out our online advertising tag for all of our past coverage of the various ways you can make ads work for your site.
Feb/100
The Friendliest Moshpit in the World
Photo via Flickr user kirstiecat
Let's talk about common misconceptions of internet users. One fairly common belief is that the web is full of creepers -- people who post weird things on Craigslist and spend too much time stalking people on Facebook. Or, the internet is perceived to be full of nerds obsessed with 4chan and World of Warcraft. The last, possibly more recent misconceived notion of internet users is that they are plain old oversharers who Tweet, blog, and vlog every banality. The underlying understanding of the internet, based on these web archetypes, is that it is not a particularly earnest or friendly place.
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and open source advocate, begs to differ. He believes that the internet is "made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust." Watch his TED talk, where he illustrates using three examples that the transfer of data over the internet is best understood as crowdsurfing in a crowded moshpit, or as the process of passing a beer from the aisle to its recipient in the middle of the crowded row -- where none of the people in the middle who receive and then pass on the beer have any stake in its arrival but they do it anyway. Ignore the fact that I can't seem to write a blog post without talking about beer and pay attention to Zittrain, especially his example of the Wikipedia entry for Star Wars Kid.
Beyond Wikipedia and CouchSurfing, the inherent friendliness of the internet has very real implications for social media, for marketing, and for the work that we and you would like to accomplish. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, illustrates how social media, aided with the use of LOLz, can harness the group-consciousness of the internet (his speech is shorter, don't worry).
Feb/100
The Ads of Super Bowl XLIV (Who Cares About Football, Anyway?)
I won't try to presume you're a Colts or Saints fan, and I won't even presume that you know that those are football teams. That Super Bowl XLIV is this Sunday may be news to you. I can be reasonably assured, however, that at some point you will watch a Super Bowl ad on YouTube. In an age of partisanship and global conflict, YouTube, the great cultural leveler, has united the masses over adorable cat videos and embarrassing local news segments. And creative advertising and commercials rank right below bloopers, clips of pets, and Lady GaGa music videos in terms of popularity.
The Super Bowl is a fantastic opportunity for advertisers to showcase their creativity. With millions of viewers, expectations are high. And some of the past decades most memorable commercials have first aired during the Super Bowl (see: Waaaasssuuuuupp). So what can we expect for this year?
Photo by volov via Pixmac.com
As always, there will be beer commercial upon beer commercial. The site I4U News reports that Anheuser-Busch InBev, the owner of Budweiser, Michelob, Stella Artois, and basically every other beer that you drink, is this year's biggest Super Bowl advertiser with five total minutes of ads (which cost the brewery $30 million, no big deal).
And beyond the expected focus on brews, this year's selection of ads has been surprisingly political. Focus on the Family, an evangelical church organization, will show a pro-life ad that features Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother -- a development that has been made more controversial by CBS' rejection of an ad for ManCrunch, a gay dating website.
If you want a run-down of all the ads, the content, and the agencies responsible, check out AdWeek's comprehensive Super Bowl XLIV Commercial Players Chart.
Having taken on the totally arduous task of watching most of this year's Super Bowl ads (it's a hard job, but someone has to do it), I have a few favorites:
Feb/101
Successful Blogs: From Start-Up to Follow-Through
Photo by Sureash Kumar via stock.xchng
Don't lie, you've done it before: started a blog with the best of intentions, had the drive to write a few stellar posts... and then fizzled out. I am certainly guilty of creating at least two blogs that are now abandoned, floating out in the blogosphere, and I will never tell anyone their names because they are too embarrassing.
So how can you avoid the flash-in-the-pan blogging phenomenon? ProBlogging and Chris Brogan's site are fantastic resources for would-be bloggers, written by industry veterans who have years of experience forming their own strategies for building successful blogs.
We have done you the service of aggregating the most helpful advice for the two hardest tasks of blogging: starting a great blog that will attract readers and, importantly, maintain your interest, and then keeping it going with posts that don't feel like a chore to write.
Nathan Hangen of Making it Social provides great tips for the first task of starting a blog in his article 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started. Here are some choice pieces of advice:
Narrow Your Niche
This is something that took me a long time to understand. I thought that by covering a bunch of topics, casting a wider net so to speak, that I would attract more people to my blog. The problem with that strategy is that when you do attract new visitors, you throw them off if your content isn’t consistent. They’ll wind up leaving and you’ll have to recruit new readers for every single post. So, try fishing with a spear instead.
When You Have a Blog, You are the Authority
Own It! – We blog from behind a desk and see our lives as imperfect or incomplete. However, to a customer or new reader, you have an incredible amount of authority. If you have gone through the work of publishing content, then you need to step up to the plate and own that content. Take the authority and use it. You might be a 6 or 7 (on a 10 point scale), but to that new person, you are a leader.
Start Networking Early!
I cannot emphasize this enough. Use Twitter, comments, and guest posting as a tool to meet new people. The wider your reach, the easier it is to get noticed. Don’t wait for people to come to you…get out and network. People love personal connections! Go to conferences and shake hands with other bloggers. You never know which contact could turn into a great guest posting opportunity, a JV deal, or a new devoted fan
But what happens if you start a blog you love and then lose that loving feeling? David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek wrote an awesome post on How to Ease the Pressure of Blogging, the highlights of which are after the jump:
Jan/101
Online Advertising in Plain English
With acronyms like CPA, CPM, CPC, web marketing jargon can get confusing really fast. Understanding online marketing terms is especially challenging for publishers since most info on the web is tailored to advertiser needs and interests.
Photo by Carlos Zaragoza via stock.xchg
In light of this, we'd like to help publishers like you demystify these terms so you can make the best advertising revenue decisions for your blog. Here are some of the most commonly used terms in online marketing:
Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a web-based revenue sharing practice between advertisers/merchants (affiliate merchants) and online publishers, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model. In a traditional affiliate network the merchant usually has a direct relationship with the publisher.
Jan/100
MetaCurators Scour the Web So You Don’t Have To
Where do you go to find the most interesting internet news? Are you a traditionalist who just reads the New York Times? Or - like a new generation of media consumers, do you rely on the host of internet personalities with thousands of Twitter followers to find the best of the web?
Nick Bilton wrote today about the best of the web metacurators for the Nytimes.com Bits blog - people like Atul Arora and Maria Popova who spend hours every day culling and aggregating interesting links for their friends, family, and thousands of semi-anonymous readers across the web.
Maria Popova aggregates some of the most interesting and thought-provoking links on her Twitter account (aptly titled BrainPicker). She describes her process of content discovery as "controlled serendipity." What did I learn from checking out her Twitter? Some pretty awesome stuff:
From the blog Giladon-line, a visualization of the spread of a Twitter hashtag, #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike. Check out the two videos, and see how Twitter really is one big network of funny people. RT @abcdude #CheeringForTheYankeesIsLike pulling for Regina George in “Mean Girls.”
The Inhabitat blog breaks the news that the Olympic Stadium being built in London for the 2012 Olympics will be made out of recycled guns and knives! What will those crazy environmentally-friendly architects think of next?
And finally, the site Universe Today links to an audio recording of Saturn's rings picked up by the Cassini spacecraft - proving yet again that outerspace is pretty creepy.
Bilton writes that metacurators like Maria Popova are a part of the new philosophy of sharing content: "Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small."
Who are the influential metacurators in your life? Whose Twitter is particularly interesting, or whose blog has the best content? Let us know in the comments!
Jan/100
Re-Thinking Internet Advertising
Happy New Year's Folks! Here at Image Space Media we've been talking about how how to make online advertising better and more exciting.
There has been a lot of internet chatter about the effectiveness of web advertising . Brick and morter agencies and their sexier younger digital counter types are still scratching their heads trying to figure out the best approach to branding, product recognition and monetization.
The manpower behind Facebook and Twitter still haven't figured out how to monetize their traffic despite their billion-dollar valuations. Banners ads are largely ineffective and ignored. It also doesn't help that they are often show ads that are completely unrelated to the publisher content.
Mac McKinley has a great post on social media sites might approach the advertising dilemma. He believes clever, well-produced video ads will deliver the best results.
Video and/or clever animation is where it’s at. Being able to quickly opt out of any web video should be mandatory. If a product ad isn’t compelling enough to make its potential customers want to watch, then the viewer should be able to click it away. On the other hand, if it is good enough to bring you back several times, then the production will be well worth the investment.
Continue reading here.
What are your thoughts? What innovations would you like to see for meaningful internet advertising?
Dec/091
Is Chrome the Best Internet Browser?
The title of best internet browser has long been given to Mozilla's Firefox - but the times, they are a-changin'. Google announced today that its Chrome browser is available for Mac and Linux, and opened it up to user customization with over 300 extensions. Marshall Kirkpatrick, the lead writer of the ReadWriteWeb blog and a self-professed Firefox fan, pronounced today that Chrome "may be the best browser on the market."
Alongside the new availability of extensions, Kirkpatrick says that Chrome is faster and more stable than Firefox. Since it runs separate processes in each new tab opened, one slow or crashing tab won't affect any of the others. Who using Firefox hasn't had to deal with a slowly-loading YouTube video affecting the rest of your tabs? I know I have. The fact that Chromium, the developer version of Chrome, can run as much as 10 times faster than Firefox is certainly persuasive.
Having tried both Firefox and Chrome, I have to admit that I'm not 100 percent sold. Yes, the Chrome interface looks awesome, especially as compared to Firefox, and the browser has been running well - even on my lumbering, past-its-prime laptop. But the fact that Chrome lacks the separate customizable search engine that is separate from the address bar that's on the top-right of my Firefox browser is, for now, a deal-breaker. What do you think? Are there any features exclusive to either Firefox or Chrome that you can't live without? Or are you just looking for a fast, reliable browser?
Dec/090
The Best of This Year’s High-Tech Holiday Gifts
As if you couldn't tell from the overwhelming news coverage of Black Friday sales, it is time, once again, to scour the internet for new and interesting holiday gifts for your loved ones. If you are anything like us at Image Space Media, you are probably interested (at least for yourself) in what's new in high-tech gifts. But where to start?
Luckily, CNET has made things easier for you (and us) this year with their aptly titled 2009 Ultimate Holiday Tech Guide. Whether you're looking for the best gaming consoles or the newest smartphones, CNET has you covered. For the budget-conscious, CNET's Cheapskate blog is spotlighting 100 days of crazy-low holiday deals. And, in an awesome feature, CNET's editors have compiled their favorite gadget gifts for this holiday season. They love the Apple MacBook Pro, Amazon's Kindle, and the Sony PlayStation 3 Slim.
If you're understandably more interested in receiving than giving, CNET allows you to make your own wish list and browse other people's lists to see what tech lovers are wishing for this holiday season. What's your dream holiday gift?
Nov/090
Targeting the Real Mom
In a recent report on the new female consumer, Advertising Age and advertising agency JWT identified the differences between the Supermom of a decade ago and the Real Mom today -- and what those differences suggest for advertisers and marketers.
The report, "The Rise of the Real Mom," finds that women today no longer strive to be the "Supermom" who somehow finds a balance between a successful career, perfect children, and stress-free home life. Instead, mothers today are practical and grounded in reality: "real moms understand that tradeoffs are implicit in motherhood; they don't see things as black and white." And, importantly, today's women have interests beyond being caretakers and nurturers.
Capitalizing on this new understanding of the real mom could be very lucrative for producers, given that women control 73 percent of household spending, or $4.3 trillion. The authors of the report suggest that marketers should make mothers feel in control and able to delegate tasks to others so they can focus on their unique interests. Be sure to check out the report -- it's an interesting and informative lesson on the changing interests and needs of one of advertisers' most important demographics.