On the plus side the purchaser has more confidence in submitting payment details through a trusted retailer, the retailer (merchant/advertiser call them what you will) would be seen as the point of contact for delivery and quality of service issues etc. There are to my mind then pros and cons to developing an on site payment solution.

To me though this is of secondary importance to why people have visited the site in the first place, and once again it comes back to down to the nature of the traffic viewing the site. To me completing the transaction on site will be a boon to shopping focused sites. How much better for an incentive or loyalty site to be able to process a transaction and then suggest other products that the visitor might be interested in, as someone who’s just purchased a hi fi, how about this speaker/headphone system. This would be much in the way that travel aggregators look to upsell you with insurance or car hire, hotel transfers etc.

For those sites whose traffic is there not with the intention of shopping in the first place though, personally I doubt that it would have much affect. The issue is not what the visitor does, but why they are there in the first place. Accepting on site transactions as part of a broader monetization strategy would make sense, but it’s a piece of the puzzle and not the whole of the solution.

Rob, MD, One

As previous blogs will attest to, one of the longest ongoing topics of discussion in UK online media monetziation circles is whether media owners should be erecting paywalls around their content. Looking today at the Guardian’s (free and open) digital media news section, there were examples of the two main competing philosophies.

On the side of the open web was Sly Bailey, chief executive of the Trinity Mirror group of newspapers, who was the opinion that it would be difficult to charge for news content when similar would remain available for free. Sitting behind the paywall is FT Chief Executive, John Ridding, pointing to a 43% increase in digital revenues from a 15% increase in digital subscribers, notice the discrepancy in those figures.

Ridding argues that by gaining digital subscribers, this doesn’t just point to an uplift in revenue, but also in the level of interaction between the user and the site. A subscriber will give more information back to the media owner as to therier profile and what they actually wish to use the site for, a level of detail and profiling that many open sites would kill for.

The FT has been partially subscription based for some time, and in their case it hasn’t so much been erecting a new fire wall as extending an existing one. The FT has to my mind advantages over more generalist titles such as The Mirror or The Daily Mail in that the audience is already more defined and self selecting, and faces less competition from alternative sources.

Indeed the FT could also be likened to a trade paper for chief executives, CFOs and bankers. That is of course not entirely true or fair, but this does make it easier for the FT to put pay barriers up, as the content has more chance of being unique and necessary for the readers to access.

Another major difference is that the FT audience is smaller than that for more mainstream titles and it is going to be far more likely to be able to write off an FT.com subscription as a business expense than it is to the Daily Mirror. The FT article is available here, whereas more from Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey can be seen here. And there’ll be more from me soon.

Rob, Founder, One

There has been speculation for some time that the European affiliate industry was due for some consolidation, and this could be seen as part of the move towards consolidation. How the market will take two of the larger players combining forces of course remains to be seen. To me this seems like it could go one of two ways, yes the economies of scale help increase the new organisation’s reach in the market and hold on the client base.

I think there is a danger if one major player is effectively removed from the market, it does open a lot of opportunities for those looking to enter into the market. Of course only time will tell, and whether epanding into the mature and crowded UK marketplace was a better option than buying into a less developed but smaller market was the correct choice.

I would of course be very keen to get anyone elses opinion on how this could affect the market and would love your comments.

Rob, MD, One

The exhibition, like many of its ilk, I found rather bitty as of course it is an incredibly broad subject. The presentations on the other hand, were much more interesting than I’ve generally come across.

Two of the key areas that are grabbing attention at the moment aren’t exactly new, and have had more days in the sun than Ashley and Cheryl’s matrimonial difficulties. Video and mobile (though not necessarily together,) are very much still at the top of the list of where most people expect to see significant developments. More on mobile at a later date, but having sat through rather an interesting presentation from YouTube (which can be found here,)I wanted to share some initial impressions with you.

Back in the days of yore, when you had to be an East coast preppie at an exclusive school to have even heard of Facebook, Google purchased video hosting/sharing service YouTube for $1.65 billion (this was November 2006, and therefore before the bailouts, and this then still sounded like a lot of money.) The reaction at the time, with commentators seemingly divided between whether this was smart (though many seemed unable to define why it was smart,) and those who thought it was a lot of money to pay for a site that seemed dedicated to hosting videos of monkeys doing the sorts of things that monkey’s do.

What a difference 3 and a bit years make. Though the jury might be out on Buzz (though it seems to voted on Wave,) most of us would now agree that Google’s purchase of YouTube was indeed a very smart move to make. For me the much heralded death of the mass market (don’t worry this is another death that has been exagerated,) has been over taken by the growth of what I see as the mass delivery platforms.

According to figures presented by YouTube, presently about a quarter of all web traffic is video, this will rise to 90% by 2015. One of things I should have done at the presentation was have this quantified, is this in terms of traffic or bandwidth used. Of course this being  a YouTube seminar we have to take these figures with a pinch of salt.

It is without doubt though significant growth, but is it perhaps indicative of another less expected change in terms of how we use the web. Video, even through the web still seems to be ineffective as a direct response medium, but can be seen to be a more effective branding mechanism in terms of subsequent advertiser uplift than comparable TV activity.

And so back to the title of this blog, will the rise of video mean that the web becomes more of a lean back than lean forward medium, or will the rise of video only mean  that content currently delivered via other means (through arials, cables and in LoveFilm’s case, the post) now comes courtesy of the web.

As always any comments welcome, and we’ll be back with more on the rise of the mobile and Facebook Vs Google soon.

Rob MD, One

In the time I worked with Andy I was always impressed by his knowledge and ability, and I think that he is a great hire for Quidco as they look to move from being the biggest player in a slightly obscure market to a household name. At present cashback and loyalty sites though huge don’t impact on the vast majority of the web shopping population, my own feelings are that it will be tricky (but of course not impossible,) to square the growth of what is in effect a discount service without alienating the brands and merchants that it relies on.

Having said that, I doubt whether Quidco has yet reached a ceiling, and I look forward to commenting on the next developments.

Rob, Founder, One

As noted previously, the sheer volume of Facebook interactions (page/ad impressions, clicks, length of engagement,) and the level of targeting on offer, has meant that the level of interest in Facebook has perhaps run ahead of it’s ability to deliver. The potential withion Facebook is huge, no it will never be as targeted as search, but it could be the way of generating genuine incremental sales, which search surely isn’t.

To me the interesting point is not only have Facebook taken the advertising in house, but that agencies such as TBG are now offer dedicated Facebook advertising optimisation services. To me it seems obvious that social media will become the new frontier for performance marketing, where more users might have to be targeted to get a conversion, but perhaps it’ll be from someone who wasn’t already searching for the product.

Rob, Founder, On-e.