www.dpingram.com

“London-based OpenAds has supposedly raised $15.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, according to a now invisible report on Paid Content. Participation in this round also comes from existing backers Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. This would be the open-source ad server’s second round of funding, coming less than a year after raising $5 million from Index Ventures and the rest of the previously listed investors, excluding Accel.

… OpenAds lets website publishers inserts image, movie, Flash, popup and other ads, utilizing a targeted campaign method. OpenAds currently reports 30,000 web publishers across 100 countries. With this most recent round of funding, OpenAds is looking to bring on more staff, and will most likely further its move into the commercial realm. It was announced last year that the open-source software would be moving towards commercialization, which is the same route that Mozilla took a couple of years back.”

This and more at Mashable here

I just heard news of Proximic which has reportedly signed deals for ad inventory with both eBay’s shopping.com and Yahoo’s Shopping Network.

This is the first time that these two companies have licensed their inventory, and it gives Proximic an inventory of over 50million unique ads (compared with Googles 1million) - 20m from each of those mentioned above and 10m from another un-named source.

Proximic is said to deliver context sensitive ads in a novel mathematical way that is more effcicient and faster than Google’s current methods.

More info is here in Techcrunch

DailyMotion Offering New Video Advertising Methods

Dailymotion, one of the many YouTube-like embedded video websites, and one of the leaders of the pack in the second tier, announced today a number of video advertising options made available in addition to the companies existing ad formats.

Toaster Ads are the first of the three new formats. This particular format gives advertisers the the ability to inject an animated flash mini-commercial overlay into Dailymotion’s library of professional videos, similar to the popup advertisements on YouTube’s player.

They also introduced Home Theater ads, which are explained as being essentially a skin for the player that is hotlinked to the desired site of the advertiser. Finally, they now offer something called the ‘companion logo’ ad, which essentially creates a 3D logo that appears in the left corner for 10 seconds at the beginning of the video. Clicks to the logo will open in a new window, or they can be ignored.

None of the advertisements have been demonstrated or shown examples of yet, and they don’t sound particularly groundbreaking. They do, however, offer some easy ways to monetize embedded video that can more easily take advantage of existing advertising channels on the net, and are ad types that those currently involved in internet advertising can easily wrap their heads around.

Via Mashable - January 14, 2008 — 05:02 AM PST — by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

Figures released by eMarketer show that growth in online advertising will slow, but there’s no need to panic. According to the report, online advertising growth will slow in 2008 to…wait for it…only 29% and worse still by 2012 online advertising will only grow by 12% compared to 2010.

Now I’ve got the sarcasm out of the way the figures are quite remarkable, particularly at a time where many economists are predicting the United States may well slip into recession, unprecedented Government intervention aside.

The numbers look great for Google, with paid search advertising expected to hover at around 40% of the total online ad spend through to 2012, increasing as a whole from $8.6 billion in 2007 to $16.59 billion in 2012, a 92.9% increase over 5 years.

The are some lower figures, for example the two expected white knights in new media advertising won’t grow to levels many were hoping for, with advertising on social networking sites only expected to be 6% of the overall online ad spend in 2012, and rich media/ video rising to 13.1%; all in all it sounds like an internet in 5 years time that isn’t that much different to now, only with more money in the pot to go around.

According to the NY Times, online advertising will rise from 9.3% of the total ad spend in the United States now to 13.3 percent in 2011.

via Techcrunch here

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me an FT article about Facebook’s Beacon social advertising app/strategy. The feelings then were mixed: the promise to advertisers was great, but would users really be happy with the invasion of privacy.

Techcrunch explains it nicely

“Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.

This objection was doubly true when Beacon was being forced down every Facebook member’s throat whether they wanted to be tracked this way or not. And it was the main reason that MoveOn.org made killing Beacon its Cause Du Jour. Since then, Facebook has addressed most of the initial concerns by wisely forcing people to deliberately and repeatedly choose to participate. But there are still some serious issues with the way the whole system works technologically.

According to one security engineer’s analysis, Beacon partners transmit data to Facebook in bulk about members who visit their site. This is true even for those who opt out of Beacon by clicking on “No Thanks” when asked if the data can be shared with Facebook. The data is sent anyway.”

Here is a great article by Sam Sethi (Blognation) that just about sums it up from the users’ perspecive. Its all well and good having a great advertiser story, but if your users all dissappear your story counts for nowt.

A related article on Techcrunch is here

3rd Dec–> Its all kicking off!!! Here’s the latest from Mashable, more advertisers flee Facebook

4th Dec–> And more from Mashable here

From here

Appfuel’s Dynamic Facebook Ads Network
from Mashable! by Kristen Nicole

Appfuel is the latest to launch an ad network for Facebook apps. This one looks to be the system that most resembles your typical ad network for a website, and looks to provide more targeted ads. And fast. The goal is to offer relevant ads in less than a half second, creating highly targeted ads depending on the keywords.

On top of its marketplace for advertisers and web publishers, Appfuel also has a new self-serve campaign dashboard where anyone can advertise via Facebook apps for targeting their desired demographic. The company has also hinted that the ability to serve their own dynamic ads through the appfuel network is on its way. For publishers, it appealing to every level of their existence with the ability to promote applications through its appXchange and as an advertiser on its own network.

A great article here from Charlene Li at Forrester… I have reproduced it in its entirety…via her blog on Forrester

News from WSJ is that Microsoft is looking to take a 5% stake in Facebook for an investment rumored to be between $300-500 million. That would place Facebook’s between $6-10 billion.

It’s that last number that has people swooning — how could a business that didn’t exist just a few years ago be worth THAT much?!?!! Especially when a year ago, Yahoo! was rumored to be willing to pay $1 billion for Facebook.

Let’s break it down. First, Facebook has significantly changed its business from a year ago. It now is open to anyone, not just college students. Moreover, the advent of its open platform means that it any developer worth his or her salt is writing a Facebook app.

This is a crucial point — I wrote a year ago that “as Facebook opens up and grows beyond its core membership of college students, it will have to replace the context of the college campus with content and experiences that people share”. Today, I can find out where my friends have traveled, challenge them to a game of chess, or support them in their favorite causes. Facebook has created a platform and ecosystem that sustains and can grow the community that’s there.

And grown it has. This past August, Facebook had 19 million monthly visitors in the US according to Nielsen Netratings, compared to 9 million a year ago. Facebook says that it has 42 million active users worldwide. At a valuation of $6 billion, those 30 million visitors are worth $142 a piece, and at a $10 billion valuation they are worth $238 a piece. That’s lifetime value — over the course of that person’s relationship with Facebook, it’s the belief that a member will generate that much in advertising and commercial value for Facebook.

Ad spending is roughly $2500 per adult in the US (about $250 billion in US ad spending divided by 100 million US adults). $200-$333 represents between 6-10% of ad spend. If people spend as much time as they potentially could within Facebook, those numbers are feasible.

Why an investment at this time? Facebook’s ultimate goal appears to be an IPO, likely in 2009, because they want to solidify their business and advertising base. That means they’ll need to buy time and a large amount of cash from a strategic partner — or a large institutional round — will give them the leverage to also make strategic acquisitions ahead of an IPO.

Two thoughts about why Facebook would want an investment with Microsoft. First, they already are working together. Microsoft sells the display ads that are targeted against profile information, and will make up about half of the $150 million in revenues Facebook will generate this year. This is part of a multi-year agreement that will extend until 2011. And Facebook’s unique marketing value is that not only can the display ads be highly targeted at actual profile elements, but marketers can also develop a deeper relationship with Facebook members — marketer relationships that Microsoft has in spades.

Second, Facebook needs to scale up a business that’s both consumer-oriented and also developer friendly. Microsoft has excellent developer relationships and also knows a thing or two about how to build successful consumer (and business — watch this space carefully) applications.

Microsoft’s interest is obvious — it wants a stake in one of the hottest companies out there. If they couldn’t outright buy Facebook (they tried last year) they’ll settle for a piece and make sure that no one else — like Google or Yahoo! — can be a part of the party.

via Charlene Li’s blog on Forrester

SEATTLE (AP) — Microsoft Corp. is testing a way to present video advertising that’s less annoying to Web surfers.

Instead of forcing MSN Video visitors to watch an ad before every clip, Microsoft now shows one ad before their first video selection. The next ad appears after at least three minutes of viewing — and it won’t interrupt a video midstream.

The change is part of an MSN Video site redesign that went live in the U.S. Wednesday. In a statement, Microsoft said the new tactic lets people channel surf without being interrupted by a commercial every time.

Web media companies and advertising agencies are still looking for effective but unintrusive ways to present advertising with video. In August, Google Inc.’s popular video-sharing site, YouTube, added semitransparent “overlay” ads at the bottom of some video clips.

The Associated Press uses Microsoft’s MSN video player to distribute video to its newspaper and broadcast members’ Web sites, but MSN’s change does not affect the service.

Summarised from Mashable! by Kristen Nicole

Revver announced it’s pay out of $1 million over the past year, meeting a milestone for the amount of money drummed up and split with content owners that promote and leverage Revver’s video-sharing network.

As one of the first video-sharing networks to offer a rev-share model with content creators, many flocked to the site hoping to have more control over their content and, more importantly, earn extra cash.

As a standard in the rev-share video communities, Revver has also benefited from the popularity of videos like the infamous Pepsi and Mentos experiment, and several indie directors and film creators, including Hollywood notables, are promoting their series on Revver in order to take advantage of the ad-supported model that lets them reap the fruit of their labors.

While most content owners are not yet bringing in the big money from this model, there’s no doubt that content creators will only gain more control and financial rewards from their online content, and Revver will probably continue to position itself as an advantageous distribution platform for user-generated content. It’s already incorporated a new advertising option for pre-roll ads earlier this summer.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.