Online Marketing and Media – Owner of Cursor Marketing, AdBull and CouponsiWant

I found this article on http://www.pcworld.com/article/235468/20_million_google_users_may_exist_by_the_weekend.html and wanted to post it. This article show the incredible increase in users for the new social media service, Google+. So they say, Google+ has had a 350% increase in users between July 4th to July10th, 1.7 million users to 7.3 million users. Google+, with their statistics, are going to hit 20 million users by this weekend. This article shows how social media is gradually increasing in interactivity world-wide.

Most critics believe Google+ is gaining popularity online, but at least one study figures Google’s latest social experiment is growing at rates that rival Facebook’s. The search giant’s two-week-old social network, currently in a limited field test, reportedly grew by 350 percent between July 4 and July 10 from 1.7 million users to 7.3 million. Google+ is also set to hit 10 million by Tuesday and 20 million by the weekend, according to one study.

Those growth numbers assume that Google won’t restrict users from inviting their friends this week, as Google did the week prior.

The Google+ population estimate comes from Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com, who posted his findings on (where else?) Google+. Allen based his work by counting surnames on Google+ and then comparing that count to Census Bureau data.

If he’s right, then Google+ is currently signing up an average of more than one million new people every day since its June 28 launch. By comparison, Facebook in 2009 — arguably the height of the social network’s rapid growth — was gaining nearly a million new users a day, according to The New York Times.

Google has yet to officially announce how many users are on Google+.

Allen’s key

Allen started his work by comparing Census Bureau data about surname popularity to US Google+ users with each surname. Then he took a sampling of 100 to 200 surnames on Google+ to estimate what percentage of the US population is on the new social network (he didn’t disclose that number). To get the international Google+ population, Allen assumed there were 2.12 non-US users for every American on Google+.

Allen maintains his model by tracking the growth rate of a smaller sampling of 100 unusual US surnames on Google+. He then assumes a similar growth rate for the rest of the surnames in the US on Google+ and then multiplies that estimate by 2.12 to get the international user count. Allen doesn’t claim his estimate is perfectly accurate, but believes his numbers are at least in the ballpark. It’s an interesting approach to estimating Google+ users and one you would expect from a person with such a deep interest in genealogy.

Whether you believe Allen’s approach is valid or not, Google+ does appear to be popular and is still at the height of its love affair with the tech press.

Related Slideshow: 10 Google+ Tips for Beginners

But even if Google+ is growing at an incredible rate right now, it’s not clear how many of those Google+ users are signing on to use the service regularly. Facebook says it has 750 million active users; however, the world’s largest social network doesn’t say how often someone has to interact with Facebook to be considered an “active user.”

The other question is whether Google will be able to sustain Facebook-like adoption numbers over the long term. Google+ may be gaining an incredible number of users every day, but will those people stay to use the site or just sign up, try it out and leave?

I found this article on http://www.dmnews.com/banner-ads-evolve-to-get-users-attention/article/205848/ and wanted to post it. This article talks about the new version of banner advertising that has been used by both AOL and Yahoo to improve interactivity with consumers and to get rid of competition such as Facebook.  The creator  of this new banner ad is the company Pictela, and this ad takes up 33% of the page so it’s more noticeable than it’s old version which wasn’t very noticeable at all. In fact, the old banner ad had a 0.1 click-through rate while the new version, and the ad budgets increased from 29% in 2009 to 33% now.

Display advertising leaders AOL and Yahoo are stepping up their banner ad innovation to improve interactivity with consumers and fend off competition from targeted ad solutions from companies such as Facebook.

Consumers have long been unwilling to disengage with their chosen content just to click on an ad, to the point that many users ignore the ads that frame a Web page, says Greg Rogers, cofounder and CEO of advertising platform Pictela, which was acquired by AOL last December. “This notion of asking someone to click on an ad to go somewhere else is very hard, and it’s very rare that somebody will click on an ad nowadays,” he says.

To improve interaction, Pictela developed the IAB Portrait ad unit, which streamlines Web pages from four or five ads to one supersized, feature-filled banner that runs to the right of sought-after content. Because Portrait ads occupy 33% of the page, they’re more noticeable and let brands serve up to three varieties of interactive content to consumers, including video, social network feeds, slideshows and store locators.

“We’ve seen engagement go up tremendously,” explains Laura Schooling, director of marketing services at Hearst Digital Media, which signed on as the first third-party publisher to run IAB Portrait ads on its sites. “It acts as another content experience on the page,” she says. “We’ve seen consumers spend an average of 47 additional seconds with the IAB Portrait ad [and] play 24 seconds more video.”

Getting consumers to interact with display ads is one of marketers’ top challenges, say industry experts. Market research firm IDC said in May that display’s share of overall ad budgets increased to 33% last year, from 29% in 2009. A July 2010 study from Google’s ad management service DoubleClick reported that US display ads generate only a 0.1% click-through rate.

Yahoo has also augmented its display offerings. A year after Facebook overtook it for the top share of online display ad impressions, the company expanded its Yahoo Smart Ads unit this May to include behaviorally targeted video ads.

Consumers can participate in surveys, join email lists and share content to their social networks through the ads, in addition to viewing branded videos. Although Facebook leads the other companies in share of impressions, industry experts say display 
ads are trending away from click-throughs to become destinations in and of themselves.

“In terms of the creative execution, on Facebook you’re really limited,” says Vik Kathuria, managing partner of corporate strategy and digital investment at MediaCom. “It’s a small box that you can’t do a whole lot with, versus on Yahoo, the canvas is much larger and you can actually do some really cool rich media creative executions, which is really important.”

Kathuria adds that Yahoo and AOL’s fortification of their display units may see them through the current shift in online advertising. “I don’t think at any point that folks like Yahoo need to be worried about Facebook cannibalizing them, because from our perspective, we’re using them for two very different strategies,” he says.

However, Tom Arrix, VP of US sales at Facebook, says that his company’s ad offerings provide ads in the context of their friends’ “likes” and dislikes. “We want the ads to be incredibly relevant. We want the ad experience to look more like content than to follow more of a disruptive track than you see out there,” he says. “I think Facebook’s approach is very consistent with how content is showcased on the site.”

Arrix adds that Facebook’s launch of Sponsored Stories, which pulls content from consumers’ posts for promotional purposes, lets advertisers have consumers work for them.

“Now it’s about people amplifying the message versus the brand amplifying the message,” he says. “I know that in the world of rich media, there are vendors like AOL where there’s activity across the page. We don’t do that. It’s the more engaging experiences that we would showcase in our ads.”

I found this article on http://paidcontent.org/article/419-ad-digital-agencies-will-keep-ma-activity-surging-through-end-of-11/ and wanted to post it. This article is showing the recent growth rates of M&A advertising over the past couple months and the differences from before.

The deals just kept coming in the first half of the year and thanks to increasing competition in the advertising agency and digital marketing businesses, the continued growth of social media and the need for analytics to make it all work, the next six months should resemble the previous ones, according to The Jordan, Edmiston Group, Inc.‘s tally of media M&A activity this year.

Highlights from the report:

— Buyers spent $23 billion in 1H 2011. That’s a 15 percent gain over the same period the year before, on a similar volume of M&A deals. The first half of 2010 produced a 61 percent surge in deal volume and a nearly four times increase in deal value over recession-weakened 2009 M&A activity.

—Interactive, marketing services and technology markets continue to account for the majority of deal activity and value. The B2B and B2C Online Media & Technology, Marketing & Interactive Services, and Mobile Media & Technology sectors made up 71 percent of total deals and 63 percent of deal value in the first half of 2011.

—Digital agencies ($806 million worth deals in aggregate) did 22 deals in the first half of the year—the most of any other category. Social marketing ($250 million) was next with 17, followed by 15 each for ad agencies ($827 million) and “data & analytics” ($473 million).

Despite the economic uncertainty, there are two reasons to expect more of the same for media M&A through 2012: major media companies, from ad agency holding companies like WPP Group and Publicis Groupe are constantly looking to expand their analytics and other digital capabilities, while extending their global reach as well.

Secondly, JEGI points out that private equity firms have over $400 billion in cash to put to work in the marketplace via the acquisition of both platform companies and add‐on acquisitions to existing platforms. In addition to providing the wherewithal to do more deals, the values of doing a transaction are likely to keep pace with demand of both PE firms and media companies to capture “the next big thing,” especially in social and mobile.