Rob, On-e.

Over the years it added a search business (web gravity) and an ad network, and clients have included Vodiafone, MSN and the AA. DGM was the first affiliate network that saw fit to employ me, despite yours truly mistakingly refering to affiliate marketing as affinity marketing throughout the entire interview.

DGM was a fun place to work, and I hope that a route is found through the present troubles. It should also act as a wake up call to the rest of the industry, performance marketing is becoming an increasingly harder place in which to make a return.

Rob, On-e.

Well content and data is available the world over, but it appears that not all audiences are viewed equally in how they can contribute to a sites success. Today many of the leading content sites have significant audiences in countries other than that in which they originate. This appears to be particularly true for English language sites, which of course can be read the world over. With the huge disparity in populations though it is perhaps no surprise that many leading British (and Irish) newspapers find so much of their web traffic originating in North America and particularly the US.

For sites like the Telegraph and The Daily Mail, I don’t think that it would be unexpected if nearly 50% of their inventory was generated internationally. This though is a problem if your traffic is global, but your advertising local. Despite the much touted march of globalization, most advertising, even web advertising is bought and expected to be delivered locally. Seemingly understanding this, according to the NMA it looks like the Mail at least is going to be looking to make the most of its American footprint by putting people on the ground to sell locally, see the NMA article here.

Presently most international inventory if it is handled at all is handled by specialist agencies. The problem is that then this will be a network sale or buy, leaving little chance for negotiation for premium rates. It can also be argued that whilst content can be of interest across borders, advertising has a much greater need to reflect local brands and preferences. International inventory as many publishers have found has been a double edged sword, a larger audience, but not much in the way of enhanced kudos with the advertisers and agencies. It appears that for the time being, a low tech solution still potentially offers the highest returns.

Rob…

Blogger/Founder On-e.

Personally I was impressed with the range of content available, and the choice between micropayments for certain shows and the free content made available. You can of course access all this and more through file sharing services, but I would argue that for many the simplicity, legality and comprehensiveness of the video on demand (VoD) platforms means that they are more than just an attractive alternative, but will I think become the service provider of choice for the majority of consumers.

As with any online content though, the question is though who pays for it. At the moment monetizing video content has a plethora of options available, and of course there is a great variety of the sort of content available. Will the same monetization method be as appropriate to 30 second clip as it would be for a 30 minute comedy show…probably not.

In some respects the way we monetize video appears presently to be similar to how we looked to monetize all web content a few years back, by putting barriers in the way of way of the audience which they had to look at first. To me the pre roll advert, those ads that you have to watch before getting to the one and half minute interview or 30 second clip of a cat dancing to Grease have much in common with the old fashioned pop overs or interstitial. They seem more likely to dent a users experience or encourange them to bounce off the site completely.

Of course the level of interruption that a user is willing to tolerate will probably vary proportionally according to the length of the piece of content being accessed. I’m sure, that for anything over about 10 minutes, a pre roll ad will seem like a price worth paying for free content.

For shorter snippets however and for a less intrusive experience overall, perhaps we should be looking at overlay advertising, or other ways in which we can engage the audience without putting them off. As video becomes an ever more important component of the average users digital experience, how this content is paid for is a topic that will be discussed with increasing frequenceny. As always comments more than welcome.

Rob, On-e blogger

Regular readers of this blog if there are any, will have noticed that activity has dropped off of late. What’s that you say, it’s been ages since you wrote anything and back then the internet was only available in black and white and was powered by steam.

Well I have some news, I shall be taking up another full time position shortly, as Publishing Director at Magnetise Media. I have know Magnetise for some time and have always though highly of them, and look forward to starting with them full time on July the 5th. It is a wrench though giving up on an idea that I’ve spent so much time and energy on. I have decided though to keep this website up and running and to look to regularly up it, perhaps even with video blogs.

Even though I am not going to disappear, I would like to take this opportunity to thank a few people who have helped along the way. Simon Packer and Sarah De Haas at Fold7, Matt and Andrew at Aroxo, James Little at Affiliate Future, Peter Berry at Affilinet and Sanjit Atwal at TradeDoubler. Thanks for the support, setting up the meetings and I’m sorry that things haven’t progress that far, but rest assured even without me projects such as BrandBuddy will be continuing. A special thank you as well to Tasnia Wahid, who did the camera work on our Emmy award winning (given to us by a lady called Emmy) blogs.

Anyway I look forward to continuing to comment on the fascinating world of digital and online monetization, though from now on as someone who has a regular job.

Rob, On-e’s blgging department

Much of my spare time seems to be comprised of hanging around with other people who work within digital & online, where we spend many happy hours discussing how things are developing and probably sounding like complete nerds to those around us. Such was the situation last Friday when me and an old colleague found ourselves drinking past the point when our more sensible companions had called it a night and gone home.

It turned out that both of us were getting concerned about the funnel trickledown effect as we termed it, and how this was skewing how things were viewed in online monetization. Performance marketing concentrates at the sharp end of the funnel as it were, the area within which audience and traffic has reached a point where a purchase action is likely. So much focus has been put on this part of the funnel and it’s almost mythic properties of ROI that it’s become easy to forget that other less immediately measurable bits of it exist.

This is a problem which I feel afflicts not only performance marketing, but all forms of promotion, and it stems from a desire to make each individual element accountable and measurable. This was evident at the recent social media conference I attended and is probably extant everywhere from merchandisers trying to measure the effectiveness of in store promotions, through to direct mail.

The process and amount of touch points and influence that it takes to drive a purchase is of course extremely difficult to measure. It is after all much, much easier to measure part of the process. Part of this would be the measurement of paid of search effectiveness within Google, where it is relatively easy to calculate the ROI of spend. This though necessarily assumes that this part of the process happens in isolation from anything else, and that the profit relating to it should solely be associated with that activity.

To me this is flawed reasoning, but difficult to argue against, since the correlations between activity at the top of the funnel (branding activity, brand perception, strength etc,) can take to filter down and that it would be impossible to measure everything that can effect a decision. So far, so what? Well what I am talking about here is that by measuring success and determining strategy solely around performance marketing, is like determining everything around the success or not of a point of sale promotion.

I work in performance marketing, and I believe in it. We should however look at it more as part of the overall marketing and perception strategy, and how successful it is for a particular product or brand can be seen as reflection on how the rest of process through the funnel is working. Again comments welcome, and apologies for the delay between the last blog and this.

Rob

On-e