Marcel Reichart asks how big the german online advertising market will be in 2006, citing a post by John Battelle that talks about a 32% increase in the US.
Interesting question that is, but I think one thing is important to note in relation to where the growth will come from. Some part of it will obviously be from bigger companies, but a lot of that will go the route of performance marketing budgets, not standard CPM bookings. There will be more creative solutions and more measured ones as this is just what is possible on the internet. A good part of the growth will come from new entrants in the advertising space though, again enabled by the internet allowing for new markets to be built and allowing for syndication and aggregation. This is the game we are playing with Ormigo. Enabling new players to enter this market is also what fueled a lot of growth with Google and the like. Suddenly Joe from around the corner can advertise, and sometimes even profitably. All this space will become more professional, and there will be more competition and the local players will have to improve how they manage things. It’s an interesting time to be in advertising as things are changing rapidly and accountability is increasing. Online advertising is sales they say, and I’d extend that to internet connected advertising, or advertising with a live backchannel is sales.
Technorati Tags: Advertising, Google, Ormigo, Performance Marketing, Online Advertising
Monthly Archives: December 2005
Online Advertising in 2006
Reuters Lab brings us cool stuff
This labs thing is starting to become a common thing to do and now Heiko pointed me to Reuters Labs, which have some interesting little apps for you to try out. There is for example an Apple Widget to get quotes and news, or podcasts, or a system to integrate a video feed from them on your site. Building your news site gets easier and easier.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Widget, Labs, Podcasting, Reuters, Video Feed
Feed Icons are out
Nico pointed me to Feed Icons which is being established as the standard icon for feeds and it looks nice. I suggest everyone using it because this will start to get noticed and people will understand what to do with it.
Technorati Tags: Feed Icons, Atom, RSS, Syndication
DLD – Digital Lifestyle Day
Thanks to Heiko I now have a confirmed place at this years Digital Lifestyle Day 2006. The list of speakers is impressive and I am looking forward to some good discussions.
Technorati Tags: Digital Lifestyle Days, DLD, Burda
About Knowledge Universe
I just finished an article in the newest issue of Brand Eins and this one was about Mike Milken, the guy that quasi invented the junk bond and made billions in the process. The interesting thing is that after having been to prison for insider-trading, market manipulation and the like, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, given 18 months to live and survived. This seems to have changed his life and he has since started several foundations. As the article pointed out, he is currently revolutionizing the medical research market and really speeding things up. FasterCures is one of his ventures, and The Milken Family Foundation is focusing both on medicine and on the other part, education.
I can totally relate to his idea that education will gain evermore importance in the future, but I have to admit that he is thinking big. He has founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, together with his brother and Larry Ellison, with a total of $500 million it seems! Ellison is said to be a silent partner that just has access to Milken for an hour a week … including his rolodex which is impressive to say the least.
This company was a $1.75 billion empire in 2001 and had 14k employees. You can take a look at this Forbes article on KU, because as you will have seen if you clicked the link, Knowledge Universe’s website has nothing but a contact eMail. They don’t really like publicity. For some people they are even starting to be too big. A report from the Arizona State University from April 2004 entitled Knowledge Universe and Virtual Schools: Educational Breakthrough or Digital RAid on the Public Treasury? goes a bit deeper into finding out how the company is structured. What Milken seems to be banking on is that human capital is both untapped enough and not included enough in the balance sheets of company, something my knowledge management tutors would love to hear.
If you want to read a bit more about KU quasi from their web site, check out this page from Luna Design who seem to have done an earlier relaunch and still have that in their portfolio. 
All this gets really interesting if you take all the basic idea about web 2.0 into account, the basic idea that we have the internet now, that it can be used to connect things. KU is already using that via subsidiaries in tracking what children are learning and what their status is, updating the courses on a learning device on a regular basis with the most fitting learning material. This can be tracked through the lifetime of a person on this earth and learning will be a central part of life in the future. A billion and billion dollar industry. You can interconnect all those companies and really find out how people learn, how they improve, what they find, notice who the major intelligent ones are, even push them in the right direction if you are evil. But all in all knowledge about knowledge and knowledge creation is a very powerful knowledge.
It’s a business that is challenging enough for somebody who invented junk bonds and believes in technology. It should be something to take notice of.
Technorati Tags: Brand Eins, FasterCures, Forbes, Knowledge Universe, Milken, eLearning
What Blogs can do for you
Ralf Beuker, my tutor for my strategy course for the MBA, has written a wonderful post entitledThank You for 2005!. If you ever wondered what Blogs can do for you, I suggest reading that one. We actually need more examples like this because what Blogs can do for you is very hard to explain sometimes. One thing that might nicely sum it up that Ralf very effectively built his Me Brand. I am looking forward to reading Ralf’s post for 2006.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Design Managment
Google Employees Trusting
Checking out the GOOG insider transactions list gives you an interesting list of who is selling how much. Over 8% of the insider holding were sold in the last 6 months. Congratulations to all those selling. But look at who is selling (next to all the big guys who are selling in the millions.)
Building up trust funds seems to be the rave at Google at the moment.
Check this out:
- The Reyes, Nichole Elaine IRREV TR 9/03 G.P. TTEE, with a planned sales of over $3 million in shares.
- Vukovatz, Suzan TTEE, The Connor Christopher Reyes, with again over $3 million
- NVidia Corp is selling almost $2 million worth.
- The Shiriram, K. Ram 10B5-1 Sales Plan seems to ongoingly planning to sell 300k shares. I actually even presume they were sold and just not listed on that page? It’s too regular. Congratulations for over $250 million then
- The 10B5-1 S/P Janket Ventures L.P. sells $17 million worth
- Another Reyes, G & Vukovatz, S TTEES/R.V. REV TR 99 selling lots of different positions worth millions.
- The Rosenberg, Grace Trust Aggrement UAD 5/25/98 JR&BG current had planned over $40 million.
- The Drummmond Berk Living Fam Tr is well over $30 million
- In-Q-Tel has sold about $7 million worth. In-Q-Tel is the investment arm of the CIA it seems
- The Kordestani, Ornld & Daryabari, B. TR’01 (O&B) fund has lots of holding and seemingly a little error in the planned sales list too
- The we have the Kordestany Childrens IRREV TR’01 Milan M. (O&B) going close to $15 million.
- The Rosenberg/Grace Childrens Trust (GR) is doing ok too.
- The Eustace-Kwan Family Foundation is going well over $8 million
- Fund Fund Fund.com, LLC is going at over $17 million
- The Schmidt Investment LP is approaching the $100 million.
- The Schmidt Family LVNG TR UAD 1/30/97 (THE) is over $270 million worth now.
- The Eustace-Kwan Family 2005 Trust is doing well, same as the foundation.
Technorati Tags: GOOG, Google, Investment
Steve Balmer Remixed
We all remember his Developers, Developers, Developers speach, and now it has been remixed. To be expected
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Steve Balmer
StructuredBlogging and the Classifieds Market
When I was at Les Blogs this month I talked a bit with Salim Ismail from PubSub about the now launched StructuredBlogging initiative and mentioned to him that this would be playing really well with an idea we are currently following with Ormigo. Now I see Jeff Clavier (didn’t manage to talk to him at Les Blogs, damn) posted about StructuredBlogging. This in itself isn’t too interesting, as I already mentioned that I believe in the general idea in my predictions for 2006, but … Read this part:
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch fame, and also Edgeio – the stealth project he and Keith Teare have been working on – briefly mentioned that supporting a forthcoming Classifieds micro-format will be part of the roadmap of the company. I should use this occasion to disclose that I am also involved in Edgeio – more on all this later.
This seems to be very close to what I talked about with Salim Ismail. In general what StructuredBlogging already hints at, is the option to describe divers things in a standard way and this can be applied to the classifieds market. If you then add something like the corporate structure that VISA is using, being open about performance, letting everyone add stuff, everyone code how they get their stuff out (e.g. my stuff first) and handle the billing on a lead basis (to remove the click fraud problem), then this gets amazingly interesting. Henning and me did already set up a very big performance marketing system in Germany in our previous positions, outbidding Google in several places, so we know what the publishers really are looking for and it is not all about money. An open service will add a whole new competitive layer that Google can’t possibly match, meaning that you don’t even have to have the best performance, just one that is close enough. We know that lots of companies and publishers out there will be amazingly interested in something like this. They all want an AdSense but they all don’t quite know how to build it and it actually doesn’t make sense for them to build it.
Adam Trachtenberg gives a similar hint by just thinking out loud about web services for classifieds pricing structures. The entire system is to a large part a challenge in corporate structure, especially as you need something above and beyond a technological edge. VISA is in my mind a very good example of such a structure. In the end it is about being open and about not being seen as the one making all the profit. Just enable others to make a profit, and make a tiny amount in processing fees. It will create a real market where only those that pay well and perform well will be able to survive. Tough market, but fair market, and one we believe Ormigo can survive and prosper in, which is why am starting to think out loud about this. We named the system AdCloud for now.
My fellow Corante Web Hub member Alex Banrett has some more thoughts on StructuredBlogging tying it in with AttentionTrust. Pete adds more thoughts of his own.
Technorati Tags: AdCloud, Edgeio, Ormigo
Shipping real stuff
The stuff us software people do is really really simple if you look at it. I mean we are not shipping any physical stuff. Or build physical stuff. Just think about the people that build high speed trains, power stations, aircraft carriers, … . Ok, you get the idea. But this is all put in a totally new perspective when a software guy gets into the real world shipping business and cuts his packaging time down from 3 minutes to 35 seconds with fun software and hardware. Great stuff at How to Ship Anything by Joel on Software.
Technorati Tags: Joel, Shipping, FogShip
