Sirius xms

In continuing with my theme of online opportunities for local media companies, I thought I would explore market dynamics within the online radio sector for this post. According to Borrell Associates, local online advertising is expected to grow at 8% this year while broadcast radio advertising dollars are forecasted to contract by 15.1%. As with other sectors of the market, online is the bright spot that traditional media companies need to pursue to secure both their market relevance and future revenue streams. When discussing the online radio format, most people think about the challenging dynamics associated with the music format: radio has an unfair economic advantage as they don’t need to pay royalties, Last.fm and Pandora will struggle to support royalty requirements exclusively through advertising dollars, Rhapsody and Napster have strong subscriber-level economics but achieving scale and business model longevity are open questions. However, when I think about radio … [Read more...] about The Online Opportunity For Radio Stations

Since Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, interesting times have been ours to enjoy here in the land of the search engines. On April 5 2008, Steve Ballmer stepped up the game by giving Yahoo! 3 weeks to make a decision on the 44.6 billion dollar offer or they’ll bypass the board and go directly to shareholders. height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> In response to this, Yahoo! made a couple of announcements: They’ll run a two week test of Google Adsense on Yahoo.com in the US. The test is limited to approximately 3% of Yahoo! search queries. With this, Yahoo!’s board is supposedly “exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements.” They announced that Yahoo! was very close to securing a deal with AOL (more on this below in the other scenarios section). Recall that former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was … [Read more...] about Microsoft – Three Weeks Or Else!

Brand new research out today reveals that, since Google AdWords removed its right-hand side ads and brought in an occasional fourth paid ad position for ‘highly commercial’ search terms, this fourth ad appears for nearly one-quarter of all search topics. It’s been an interesting time for search marketers, with lot of early research indicating various different trends and anomalies for the new look SERP. The major worry is that paid search advertising will become more competitive and that organic results are getting pushed further and further down the page. Although one of the surprising developments is that having your ad appear in position 4 may lead to as high CTR as position 1. Today’s research however highlights the need for paid search teams to align their strategies with customer intent. As well as the headline stat, BrightEdge has discovered the following important takeaways you need to be aware of: Searches indicating purchase intent are six times more … [Read more...] about Google Ad 4-pack now shown for 23% of all online search topics

I recently got a new Android phone and found a little card in the box advertising Ingress, the “massively multi-player location-based alternate reality game from Niantic Labs at Google.” Ingress had slipped past my notice despite Greg Sterling’s mention of it nearly a year ago. Yet, here it was, already preloaded as an app in my phone, ready to go. The video game is still in beta, but the invite has apparently been expanded to new Droid Maxx owners. Ingress is a skunk works project that emerged from Google Earth as a pet project of John Hanke, VP Product, Niantic Labs at Google (former founder/CEO of Keyhole, Inc. purchased by Google in 2004, now Google Earth). Hanke had long wished to create a multiplayer game based on Google Earth components, and Larry Page allowed him to set it up with greater independence, start-up style, under Niantic Labs. I’d intended to just dabble with the game a bit, but found it fantastically addictive once I got into it! The concept … [Read more...] about Is Google’s AR Game A Stealth Local Data Effort?

In early Internet days, circa 1996, I had a memorable phone conversation with a webmaster who had put up a site that violated our client’s trademark. The webmaster told me, gently, as if speaking the obvious to a child, that “You don’t understand man. You’re talkin’ about law. This is the internet. The law doesn’t apply to the internet”. Of course he was wrong. We sent a cease and desist order and they ceased and desisted. Now, the saga of RedLasso once again shows that law does indeed apply to the internet. RedLasso was a video search engine in the business of recording TV shows and indexing the clips so that users could find and embed them on other websites, principally blogging sites. Launched in November 2007, RedLasso says it received 24 million unique visits in April 2008. This service was being offered without the permission of the rights holders. RedLasso suspended access to its video search-and-clipping site two days after NBC … [Read more...] about Video Search Engine RedLasso Runs Afoul Of The Law