A couple of months ago I said Apple had to acquire some advertising DNA. Now they are, by buying Quattro Wireless. I’m not sure why Google, Apple and Microsoft all need to compete in all of each others’ lines of business. It seems to me that Apple’s incipient stranglehold on the mobile internet put Google […]
Open Source the Ad Exchange
My last post, long and long-winded and written when you should all have been out celebrating, sent more traffic my way than any other post in this sleepy blog’s history. I think the prospect of a new year and (in a sense) a new decade, makes us all a bit introspective and open to thinking […]
Musing on luck & Thank You
I was visiting a venture capitalist friend of mine a few months ago, talking about what we thought the future held and what kinds of companies intrigued us. He made a comment regarding a company I liked and he didn’t. He said “I only invest in companies I know will be successful.” On further questioning […]
Pinch and Flurry Merging
Pinch Media and Flurry, the two best providers of analysis services to mobile phone app developers, are merging. This is a huge step in enabling the better monetization of these apps, and I think Pinch/Flurry will be a key enabler in the growth of this market. A year and a half ago I sat on […]
Information and markets, 3
An anecdote. A few years ago a private equity firm asked me to help them look at some lead-gen companies. One of the target companies had a network of many thousands of small lead buyers and were known to produce high-quality leads. They had worked years to build this reputation. They got good prices for […]
Information and markets, 2
Those most familiar with the cattle trade agree that there often exist wide differences between the actual selling price of cattle in the market and the previous estimate by the feeders sending them forward as to the prices they should bring. The small feeder, who seldom follows his cattle to market, has a poor chance […]
Information and markets, 1
There are many markets in which buyers use some market statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In this case there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise, since the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller. As a […]
CPMs rising?
So, this has been bothering me for a couple of months. I figure it may well be a figment of the data, or I am abusing the data. But I don’t know, so I’ll put it up… comments welcome. This is a graph of Implied Average Online Display Ad CPM, 2006 through Q2 2009 (left […]
Ad impressions by month
More data. Nielsen Online’s ad impressions per month, via Clickz.com (paid CPM display ads only*.) First, the raw data. Broken out by category, sorted by change from August 08 to today: largest decline on top (software), largest increase on bottom (telecommunications.) Change in four largest categories, and total, since February 06 (Feb 06=100.) And percentage […]
Better than Panglossian
Andrew Goodman did not like my post Eliminate Advertising. He says “in an attention economy, can you logically even conceive of no advertising? Not even remotely.” He doesn’t say why not. But, to be fair, I also don’t believe there will be a time when there is no advertising. In fact, I fear quite the […]