A little bit about everything, by Even Aas-Eng

The problem with writing a blog about online media is that there is so much stuff happening all the time. That means that if you haven’t posted anything in a while it gets difficult to decide what to write about. That’s where I am today! So I have decided to do things a little bit differently this time and provide a summary of interesting events that have taken place the last month.

First Microsoft finally makes a move and invests in facebook. From the outside it resembles Googles deal with myspace a couple of years back. They are paying to distribute display and search ads, they are buying themselves a ad network. Microsoft is buying 1,6% of facebook for 240 million dollars, this values the company to 15 billion in total. This means that the price for social media has had a rising curve the past years… Murdoch bought myspace in 2005 for 580 million dollars and Google bought youtube for 1,65 billion in 2006.

Let’s stick with facebook. There have been rumours for a while that they would launch an ad concept with social targeting possibilities. This month the facebook flyer appeared and yes there are interesting segmentation options. But even more interesting is how this product resembles the adwords model. It’s a long tail tool open for small and medium sized companies and perfect for small local campaigns. You buy based on CPM or CPC with your own credit card. So the concept could really be the first adwords competitor to appear in quite some time. Unfortunately though the people I have spoken with that have tried it says that its full of bugs.

Okay, back to Microsoft. Their new exec Brian Mcandrews (former head of aquantive) has stated the bleeding obvious; display ads will trump search in the years to come. This is off course already the case in many European markets where SEM is playing catch up and I am sure it will happen in the states to. Apparently this is suppose to solve Microsoft’s challenges in the advertising market, it doesn’t. They still has to get into search (buy yahoo!) and they are also trailing googles enormous inventory for display ads (adsense/site targeting, youtube, myspace deal) A good start I guess would be to buy more of facebook so that they can sell display ads in the US as well, this is not covered by the deal mentioned above.

And at last! The daily show with Jon Stewart will revamp its website and actually show their content there! Revolutionizing stuff, apparently advertiser will also be able to buy ads!!
Great news for all Jon Stewart fans and it’s great to see that Viacom is doing something for the users, not just suing youtube!