Articles of the Day
Facebook Rate Card Leaked To Blog: $10 CPM+ - A “February rate card” citing a $10 CPM plus $2 to $5 extra for targeting costs was leaked to industry blog Valleywag. Facebook refused to authenticate its details.
WebTrends Adds Engagement Score To Analytics - Analytics firm WebTrends has a new patented add-on that lets marketers set specific values for each of their Web pages and then calculate an on-the-fly engagement score for each specific visitor.
WPP’s Safecount Makes Cookie Collection Transparent - Digital data collection, tracking and research firm Safecount–a proprietary division of WPP’s Kantar Group–unveiled two free services today. One is geared toward making cookies transparent to consumers and the other will manage live survey participation for publishers.
New Crawling Tool From Avenue A|Razorfish Yields Results - U.S. News & World Report enjoyed a traffic increase of more than 500% after a site overhaul guided by a new tool from Avenue A|Razorfish that automates the hunt for errors.
IAC Posts Weak Second Quarter; Media, Ads Strongest - In the face of poor second-quarter results, IAC/InterActiveCorp’s media and ad segment–including Ask.com, Citysearch, and Evite–saw revenue grow 33% to $174 million from $131.3 million year-over-year.
CondeNet Continues Online Video Expansion - In its latest video expansion, CondeNet has partnered with TurnHere to add video tours to its upscale travel site Concierge.com.
Future US Rolls Out Online Video Aggregator - Future US, publisher of special interest magazines and Web sites like gamesradar.com and PSM: Independent PlayStation Magazine, has launched Gloob.tv, an online video aggregation community
College Students Head to Internet U. - Of the 18 million US college students heading back to campus this fall, 17.1 million, or 95% of them, use the Internet at least once a month. Students report spending a significant amount of time online each week. In a 2007 survey by Youth Trends, full-time students at four-year colleges said they spent an average of 19.2 hours online per week, one hour more than in the previous year. “On many campuses, upward of 80% of students use social networking sites on a regular basis,” says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer Senior Analyst and the author of the new report, College Students Online: A Parallel Life on Social Networks. “Social networking is an essential part of campus life — so much so that even parents, professors and future employers are signing up.”
Official: Google Uninterested in Behavior Targeting - Contrary to popular belief, Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management for advertising, said the company is not interested in so-called behavioral targeting, in which a network operator tracks a user’s various online actions and dumps them into a single profile. Rather,the company seeks to understand user behavior through the keywords entered during a given search session.
Facebook Pulls Music Sharing App - Facebook, wanting to steer clear of the legal wrath of the Viacoms and News Corps. of the music world, shut down a program called Facebook Audio, which enabled members to trade music files. Audio allowed users to upload music playlists that friends could listen to on a streaming basis, but not download. The free product was not licensed from music labels and publishers. Analysts said it was only a matter of time before Audio lead to more litigation headaches for Facebook.
AOL Under-Performs - Time Warner’s second quarter earnings received a neutral reaction from Wall Street, despite AOL’s failure to deliver. The Internet division reported a revenue loss of 38% to $1.25 billion–mostly due to the company ditching its dial-up subscription business last year. Ad revenue grew a tepid 16%. Most analysts expected growth to be twice that; the rise was far less than the company reported in recent quarters. Earnings increased 9.4%.
