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2009.07.10

OhmyNews appeals to readers for cash

The founder of the South Korean citizen journalism site, OhmyNews, has appealed to readers for financial contributions to keep the business afloat in the global economic downturn. In an open letter published on the OhmyNews site Wednesday, Oh Yeon-ho disclosed that the site lost KRW 50,000,000 (EUR 28,209) this year amid fears of heavier losses as advertisers keep slashing their marketing budgets. "For a news media to remain healthy, it will have to earn at least 50 percent of its income from the sales of content or paid subscriptions. Despite our best effort, OhmyNews still relies on advertisers for more than 70 percent of its revenue," Oh said. He added that if 100,000 readers joined the venture contributing KRW 10,000 a month, OhmyNews would be able to survive without relying on advertising revenues. Founded in 2000, OhmyNews proclaimed a new model of journalism with the motto "every citizen is a reporter". Most of the content for OhmyNews comes from ordinary citizens and only about a third comes from the 55-person staff.

http://www.ejc.net/media_news/ohmynews_appeals_to_readers_for_cash/

2009.07.09

Andreessen: Facebook revenue to top $500 million in '09

by Caroline McCarthy

Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, who just launched a new venture fund, said in an interview with Reuters (published Monday) that he expects the company's revenue to be in excess of $500 million in 2009, and that in five years it'll be well into the billions.

"Generally speaking, people who are selling their stock in Facebook now are making a mistake," he told Reuters regarding the fact that since an initial public offering is still a ways off, Facebook is permitting some employee stock sales to Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian firm that invested $200 million in the site in May. Andreessen himself is not a personal investor in Facebook, and said that "I probably could have if I had tried hard but I didn't."

If Facebook worked the ad-sales front a bit harder, Andreessen added in the interview, revenue could already be over a billion.

But Facebook has never taken kindly to traditional display advertisements, choosing instead to experiment with "engagement ads" integrated into the social-networking experience--a product it may potentially extend into Facebook Connect's participating sites, which now number over 10,000.

Additionally, Facebook has been working toward an alternative revenue stream with its "credits" system, a virtual currency that for now is restricted to the company's in-house "Gifts" application. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, the Facebook currency system will be made available to developers using the social network's API, which could produce a significant new source of revenue for Facebook as it takes a cut of transactions.

Andreessen--the Netscape founder and Silicon Valley mainstay whose current projects include social-network builder Ning--has been on Facebook's board for just over a year. He joined at the personal request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said at the time that "Marc is an industry leader, and we're fortunate to have him join our board."

http://ow.ly/gDxr

2009.07.08

Nielsen: Kids spending more time online

Young kids are getting online at a faster rate than their parents and older siblings. A new study from Nielsen Online found that nearly 16 million U.S. children ages 2 to 11 were online in May. They made up about 9.5 percent of Internet users. The youngest of the set — 2, 3, and 4-year-olds — probably aren't yet updating their Twitter accounts with 140-character messages, or posting quiz results to Facebook. Rather, they are sitting in a parent's lap in front of a computer, being exposed to the Internet that way, said Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates LLC, which specializes in researching kids and technology. In the past five years, Nielsen said, the number of kids online has grown by 18 percent, compared with just a 10 percent growth among all Internet users. And this growth comes as the total number of U.S. kids under 14 is declining. In all, the time children spend online grew 63 percent in the past five years, from nearly 7 hours in May 2004 to more than 11 hours online this past May. Nielsen also found that boys spent 7 percent more time online than girls, but girls viewed 9 percent more Web pages than boys did in May 2009. Grunwald said kids are also beginning to produce their own content rather than use the Web as a passive viewer.

http://www.ejc.net/media_news/nielsen_kids_spending_more_time_online/

2009.07.06

300,000 .MX Domain Name Registrations As Registrations Grow Rapidly

NIC México has announced the .MX ccTLD reached 300,000 registered domain names recently, with the number of registrations today standing at 309,112. Of these, 58,000 domain names registered in 2009 alone showing a rapid growth for the ccTLD.

http://www.domainpulse.com/2009/06/30/300000-mx-domain-name-registrations-as-registrations-grow-rapidly/

US - Online ad groups release new behavioral ad principles

Online consumers should get more information about what information is being tracked and collected for the purposes of behavioral advertising, and they should have more control over what data is being collected, according to new privacy principles released by four advertising trade groups. Online advertising networks should also "maintain appropriate physical, electronic, and administrative safeguards" to protect data collected, and they should retain the data "only as long as necessary to fulfill a legitimate business need, or as required by law," the principles said. see also Self-regulatory principles for behavioral advertising (Google Polciy Blog) by Pablo Chavez. Of course, for any self-regulatory effort to be effective, there has to be some kind of enforcement process.

http://www.qlinks.net/items/qlitem23047.htm

2009.06.26

'.eu' internet domain to be available also in Cyrillic and Greek alphabets

Speakers of Bulgarian and Greek will soon be able to have .eu websites in their own languages. The European Commission today adopted new EU rules to make it possible for internet users and businesses to register domain names under .eu using the characters of all the 23 official languages of the European Union, now including Cyrillic and Greek scripts. This means that later this year .eu will also be available in the alphabets used by Bulgarians, Greeks and Cypriots and special characters used in other languages. Until now, Czechs could only use 27 of 42 characters, and Lithuanians 23 of 32. A new report of the Commission on the development of Europe's top level domain, published today, shows that the number of .eu domain names registered (currently at around 3 million) grew by 11 % in both 2007 and 2008.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1044&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

2009.06.18

Netcraft May 2009 Web Server Survey

In the May 2009 survey we received responses from 235,890,526 sites, an increase of 4.3 million on last month.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/05/27/may_2009_web_server_survey.html

2009.06.17

US: Streaming media a growing cash cow

By Mike Robuck

Streaming video and music will generate more than $78 billion in network-derived and content-derived revenue over the next six years in the United States.

According to a recent study by The Insight Research Corp., streaming media includes content that is delivered across the Internet, IPTV network or mobile handset. Streaming media refers to the transmission of digital audio and video files over an IP network or wireless network in real time or on-demand, while prohibiting users from storing the files locally.

The study also estimated the revenue from the various types of content-derived revenues, along with associated advertising revenue. The streaming market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 27 percent over the next five years, driven by on-demand audio, on-demand video and the accompanying advertising revenue.

"Over the past seven years, as we've tracked the developments in streaming it has evolved from an esoteric niche to a mainstream market," said Robert Rosenberg, Insight Research president. "What we predicted way back when is coming to fruition. The advertising revenue that long supported traditional TV is gravitating to this new medium, putting downward pressure on traditional TV distribution schemes.”

http://www.cedmagazine.com/News-Streaming-media-cash-cow-061609.aspx

Advertising's Digital Divide

By Enid Burns, ClickZ,

A majority of marketers run cross-channel campaigns, but most fail to integrate performance data, according to a study conducted by TNS Media Intelligence and sponsored by Eyeblaster.

In a survey of 400 senior marketing executives, 67 percent said they have run cross-channel campaigns, but only 12 percent integrate information about how those campaigns perform across two or more channels.

Research suggests marketers encounter frustration when carrying out campaigns, particularly digital. Limitations to cross-channel include:

* 44 percent of marketers who blame a lack of suitable metrics to measure impact.

* 37 percent of marketers who say there's lack of case studies showing cross channel effectiveness.

* 34 percent of marketers say they lack of technology.

"It seems like it's an early market, but people understand the benefits," said Don Ryan, VP of technology and media at TNS. "The industry has done a relatively good job educating people learning what the benefits are, people want to take this to the next level, but it's not quite there yet."

While nearly seven in 10 marketers marketers are running cross-channel campaigns, Eyeblaster's digital experience strategist Dean Donaldson points out silos continue to be a problem. "We're not making it easier, we're making it more complicated. There's a whole percentage of people that say this can change, within those people who are doing it, there's a whole nervousness there in the industry to get those campaigns out the door."

The nervousness points to a percentage of marketers who are still anxious for data. "These may tend to be solutions that have been coming onto the market in the last one or two years, they might not be as fully integrated as they need to be," said Ryan. "The difficulty is in having to piece these things together themselves, or lack of knowledge of what's available, or [marketers] know part of the solution or don't know the whole picture."

Beyond metrics, when actually running campaigns marketers are starting to think about cross-channel in their advertising plans.

* 22 percent of respondents already run cross-channel campaigns.

* 45 percent run an increasing number of cross-channel campaigns.

* 18 percent don't currently run ad campaigns cross-channel, but see the benefit.

* 7 percent run campaigns on each channel independently from each other.

* 8 percent aren't sure what sort of campaigns they run.

Ryan said there are early adopters already doing cross-channel, and a large number of marketers who want to, and a similar trend in rich media adoption. "Display capability is equally important whether you use it in online or offline media at this point," he said.

The data were compiled by a survey of 400 senior marketers with agencies, brands, and publishers in March 2009 across the three geographic regions of North America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Asia Pacific (APAC).

http://www.clickz.com/3634103

2009.06.16

Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent

“Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere” uses a unique methodology that blends link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs to investigate the online discussions taking place across the Middle East and North Africa. Internet & Democracy project director Bruce Etling and his team, with Morningside Analytics founder and Berkman affiliate John Kelly, and co-authors Robert Faris and John Palfrey, identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs (about half as many as found in their previous study of the Persian blogosphere), created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a group of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. Congratulations and thanks to all who collaborated on this significant work!

The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs. Whereas the previous study of the Persian blogosphere revealed a network organized primarily around political ideologies and topical issues, such as reformist and conservative politics, religion, and poetry, the Arabic blogosphere is organized primarily around countries. Moreover, personal life and local issues are the most important topics of discussion: most bloggers write mainly personal, diary-style observations, but when writing about politics, bloggers tend to focus on issues within their own country. Bloggers link to Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Wikipedia (English and Arabic versions) more than other sources of information and news available on the Internet. The overall picture is one of country-based groupings of blogs focused on domestic issues.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2009/Mapping_the_Arabic_Blogosphere