Financial Services Firms Lag in Digital Marketing – MarketingVOX October 31, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentNearly half of marketers at financial services firms say digital initiatives will be integral to their marketing within two years, but their lack of experimentation, low digital budgets and difficulty with measurement are preventing them from realizing digital’s full potential now
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SanDisk Announces a New Physical Music Format September 22, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentIt’s no secret that music sales comprised of physical media (i.e. CDs) are down in the face of huge competition from iTunes and other digital distribution channels. At the same time, no one ever said the record labels would give up on physical sales easily. Today SanDisk, along with the four major record labels (Warner Bros., EMI, Sony BMG and Universal Music Group) have announced a new format: slotMusic. slotMusic is essentially a microSD card with an album on it, and the partners plan to roll it out in time for the holiday season.
According to the format’s official site, Wal-Mart and Best Buy are already lined up to stock the cards.
With slotMusic, songs will be loaded onto what are known as microSD cards, the fingernail-size siblings of the larger and more popular SD card format. Slots for microSD cards can be found in scores of mobile phones, including those from Research In Motion, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, and Motorola. “There’s a billion phones out there and a lot of them can play music and a lot of them have a microSD slot,” says Daniel Schreiber, a SanDisk vice-president. “We think there’s still a need for a tangible, physical product. People will appreciate walking out of the store playing music on their phones.”
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Yahoo Music Does The Right Thing: Issues Refunds to Customers July 30, 2008
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Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. According to a report on CNet, Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.
Users who were using Yahoo’s subscription service will be transferred over to Real’s Rhapsody subscription service. Rhapsody also offers DRM free MP3s for sale.
Just Burn a CD
As we reported last week, Yahoo was already advising its customers to circumvent its own DRM system by just burning copies of their songs onto audio CDs and then ripping them back onto their computers as DRM-free MP3s. Apparently, though, not all customers were satisfied with this solution, though given the new solution, enterprising customers could also, of course, now burn their songs to CDs and still ask for their money back from Yahoo.
Costly Precedent
Yahoo is setting a (costly) precedent here for other music services than run into similar problems. When MSN Music shut down, it was originally going to take its licensing servers offline within a year, but because of customer complaints, it is keeping them online until the end of 2011. MSN Music is not planning on returning any money to its customers, though.
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YouTube: You Created the Content, Now Sell the Ads June 9, 2008
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentGoogle, Looking to Monetize Video Site, Is Letting Content Producers Sell Advertising on Their Branded Channels
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Published: June 09, 2008
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Google has struggled to find the best way to monetize YouTube. The latest idea: Let content creators sell ads.
Professional content producers — those who come equipped with their own ad-sales teams — are now able to sell advertising on their YouTube channels. That includes the click-to-expand overlays that run across the bottoms of YouTube videos and display units on the page that hosts the video player. The revenue is split between the content creator and YouTube, just as it would be if YouTube sold the ads.
YouTube is by far the largest video site, with more than 4 billion videos viewed in March, according to ComScore, but it has not been able to translate that audience into significant dollars. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said better monetizing of YouTube is priority No. 1 in 2008. Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck pegs YouTube’s revenue at about $90 million this year; other estimates have it as high as $200 million. Even at the high end, that would be just a touch more than 1% of Google’s total revenue. (YouTube’s head of monetization, Shashi Seth, recently left the company to join a Silicon Valley start-up.)
For many professional content creators and producers, being able to control the inventory that surrounds their videos is an important factor when they consider where and how to distribute content online. Revision3, the online-video-production company behind shows such as “Diggnation” and “Techzilla,” is selling advertising on YouTube, starting with GoDaddy, a sponsor that’s regularly integrated into the content of its shows. Many Revision3 shows have integrated sponsors, and the company’s CEO, Jim Louderback, said the ability to pair companion YouTube advertising in and around the videos is appealing.
Targeting
For YouTube, such deals give the site’s sales force additional representation within ad agencies and a carrot to dangle when trying to get high-quality-content creators to distribute on the site.
“They’re really interested in packaging together all their distribution potential, including YouTube, and using that to surround their anchor and tell a story just like our sales force would sell on our platform,” said Shiva Rajaraman, product manager at YouTube. “So we’ve started to work with these partners that do have that capability, essentially enabling them to sell their own inventory on YouTube.”
YouTube targets advertising by channel or vertical, such as comedy or music, rather than around specific videos. Because of that, there should be less channel conflict, Mr. Rajaraman said.
“We tend to do the bundled-audience sell,” he said. “They tend to do more sponsorship sales.” He wouldn’t address specific deals.
It’s easy enough to envision where YouTube could go from here: Content creators could not only sell ads that would appear next to their content but also extend the reach of those ads to third-party-created videos on YouTube. One hypothetical: Revision3 sells ads to GoDaddy to run not only on YouTube pages showing “Diggnation” videos but also on other third-party, tech-focused videos. Under such a deal, revenue could be split three ways: among Revision3, YouTube and the producers of the third-party content where the ad ran.
Good partner
60Frames CEO Brent Weinstein, who produces online-video content that is syndicated across a variety of partners, including YouTube, said the Google property has been a “very collaborative” partner that has helped video producers discover nuances in the environment and see trends. He didn’t elaborate what kinds of distribution deals he’s struck with the site, other than to say it has been easy to work with. “With their market leverage, you’d expect them to have diva quality, but they don’t,” he said.
Mr. Rajaraman said YouTube will conduct a series of brand-effectiveness tests, and it’s not finished experimenting in the ad space.
“We’ll be trying new formats, new ways to engage users,” he said. “No one knows quite how to crack video advertising yet.” Get more great content at Adage.com
Price Is Key to Digital Music Growth April 18, 2007
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , add a commentPrice Is Key to Digital Music Growth
APRIL 18, 2007
A dollar per track is the sweet spot for online, mobile services. Paul Verna – Senior Analyst Two new digital developments promise relief for the music industry, which has been fighting declining CD sales since the turn of the millennium. For one, EMI announced that it will eliminate restrictive digital rights management (DRM) technology from the bulk of its catalog (for a price). The second is Sprint-Nextel’s announcement of a 99-cent-per-track over-the-air (OTA) mobile music service in the US. Consumers favor keeping prices at the dollar-per-track level that Apple established when it rolled out its iTunes Music Store four years ago. When Ipsos Public Affairs asked what consumers thought of the price, more than 70% of respondents rated it as either “fair” or a “bargain.” Only 19% felt that 99 cents was “too expensive.” Yankee Group has noted a substantial increase in the amount of legal online music downloading activity from 2003 to 2005, along with an even bigger drop in the use of illegal P2P networks for downloading music. These findings suggest an inverse relationship between consumers’ perception of price fairness and their propensity to resort to illegal means to acquire music. The question is whether a $1.29 price will stick, or if EMI and other labels that go DRM-free will need to bring their prices closer to the 99-cent sweet spot in order to see a spike in business. The Sprint Music Store’s 99-cent-per-track offering is a challenge to other OTA services, which have been priced in the $2.00-to-$2.50-per-track range. There are also cultural factors to consider. In Japan, a whopping 90% of digital music business is done through mobile devices, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Italy, Australia, South Korea and France all have better than 50/50 channel splits between mobile and online digital music sales. In the US, mobile represents less than a third of the digital music business, and the vast majority of mobile music sales are ringtones, not full tracks. If companies like Sprint, Apple and Cingular succeed in opening up the market, mobile music could grow beyond eMarketer’s most recent US forecast of $2.277 billion by 2010. If the transition to DRM-free downloads is managed with sensitivity to the consumer, the overall digital category could also outpace eMarketer’s current growth forecasts. Get the global view on digital media. Read the eMarketer Digital Downloading: Music, Movies and TV report.
