Yahoo! Entertainment and Lifestyle General Manager Karin Gilford will explain at Digital Media Summit on Monday how Yahoo! TV grabbed 3 million more unique visitors in April than arch rival AOL Television in April.

Gilford said in a brief chat that Yahoo! climbed to the top of the online television category by focusing on launches of original online shows and working closely with cable networks to promote their programs.

"We’re in a world where everybody has a library of movie trailers, TV shows and full-length movies online," Gilford said.  "How do you rise above the crowd?"

Gilford will give Yahoo’s answer to that question on Monday in a fireside chat with Hollywood Reporter Deputy Editor Andrew Wallenstein.

See Also

• Digital Media Summit

Posted under Uncategorized

While it’s easy to see what AOL gets out of a potential merger with Yahoo!, it’s harder to see what Yahoo! gets.

Digital Cities/AOL’s own former managing editor, after all, recently called the challenge of reviving AOL — 20 million of whose users have fled since 2002 — akin to "making a Marc Jacobs purse out of a sow’s ear."

AOL seems sadly lost in the broadband age. The very thing that powered its initial rise to prominence — its $9.99 dial-up service — has now become a liability in negotiations with potential suitors. Its own search capabilities are touted as "enhanced by Google".

Were Yahoo! to combine with AOL, it may choose to grab AOL’s remaining 10 million members and its workable sub-brands,

and, taking its cue from Time Warner’s Life Magazine, allow AOL to gently fade into the history books.

Posted under Uncategorized

I’m already confused

Okay, so let me get all of this straight. NBC pulled out of iTunes because it couldn’t make enough money over there. Bye, Bye "The Office" downloads. But now,the company announces it will try its own ad-supported download model, NBC Direct, where users can view recent episodes of prime time shows and even download them, and their advertisiong wrappers, to devices. Okay, but then they will still have their streaming shows at NBC.com. And then there is Hulu.com, the partnership with News Corp.com that will syndicate and stream episodes across multiple media companies.

Well, all except CBS, apparently, because that company has its own distribution strategy, which involes scattering its properties far and wide. It declined an early offer from NBC and News Corp. to join the Hulu.com project. And it doesn’t look as if Les Moonves is all too eager to put CBS properties into whatever Hulu is going to be. Meanwhile ABC/Disney, which has been a bit quiet in all of this, announced it would distribute ad-supported prime time episodes initially through AOL’s portal in order to preserve the quality experience.

Who’s on first? What’s on second? I don’t know is on third?

It is understodd that the befuddled networks need to experiment with different distribution paths in order to find when, where and how exactly this famously fragmenting American audience wants its media served to them. But consumers don’t distinguish anymore among the networks. They don’t identify shows with networks, except for highly targeted cable brands. So the consumer comes into this year wondering where are the shows I want? Some are on AOL, some on Hulu, some on this NBC Direct? And whatever happened to all that stuff I was used to getting at iTunes? Heroes is hared enough to follow when I do nail it down on a single screen. Don’t add to the pain by making me hunt for it.

The current state of TV distribution on is dizzyingly inconssitent and it may well leave the consumer and the market more confused than anything else in the short term. You don’t have to turn your TV on a different way to get CBS or NBC or ABC. And we shouldn’t have to unravel the business strategies of major media companies before figuring out how and where to donwload our favorite show.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Consolidation in the ad network space is a necessary next step

This has been a harrowing six months in the digitial ad space, with DoubleClick, aQuantive, Tacoda, RightMedia, 24/7, all getting gobbled. With today’s announcement that Yahoo! is buying behavioral targeting network BLueLithium for $300 million, it is clear that for now the big play online is to guarantee reach. Some have argued that the big players like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are buying up technology in these acquisitions and positioning themselves for a coming day when ad targeting, expecially behavioral targeting, really kicks in. But Yahoo already has a behavioral engine that is highly evolved, and AOL already has Ad.com. For the time being, what these companies are after is reach, being able to create massive audiences that for now attract big brand advertising from TV. In the future this scale will translate into more viable behavioral and other programs. My old friend Denise Garcia, analyst at A.G. Edwards, has an excellent post today on the state of online media that explores some of these issues. Also, Web advertising veteran Jay Sears at ContextWeb gives an extensive analysis of where this points the online ad business generally.

But I think this is about aggregating audiences right now. BlueLithium is one of the largest networks in the U.S. Yahoo, like AOL and Microsoft, need to reach out beyond the traffic they pull into their portals with content. They need to offer their clients campaigns with more direct response applications (i.e. BlueLithium) and with greater targeting capabilities. As major media bring more of their wares online (Hulu.com, MySpaceTV, etc.) they also will need online the kind of mass reach for their promotions they are used to on TV. These deals are designed to give such clients that kind of massive inventory.

But as the Web finally evolves towards more sophisticated targeting, the reach and technology that a BlueLithium or Tacoda bring to the table become more important. Targeting audiences according to their past online behaviors is very effective, but it does not scale well. As you parse audiences into behavioral segments like recent auto content viewers in the 34-45 demo the slice of addressable eyeballs plummets. Only massive reach can render enough scale in these targets to make campaigns worthwhile to media buyers. By 2010 and 2011 perhaps, this will start making a big difference. At that point, portals like AOL and Yahoo, perhaps even Google, will become profiling engines. As people peruse their content, the protals will record their behaviors and then apply those profiles to targeted advertising the companies servie out across the network as users go out onto the general Web. For now, however, the new game is very much like the old game… attracting the masses.   

See Also

• BlueLithium

Posted under Michael's Blog

Can The Internet really generate new entertainment properties?

The reported cancellation of the HBO/AOL online comedy venture “This Just In” demonstrates that an age-old (for this business) question about the entertainment possibilities of the Web still have not been resolved in the halls of major media. Launched loudly in early 2007 as a comedy destination for AOL and a potential incubator for new programming concepts, the site never got audience traction and recently suffered staffing changes. Both Hollywood Reporter and Variety are reporting the project will close in coming months, reflecting division in Time Warner about the best uses of the Internet in relation to the other businesses. Rather than generate new businesses and ancillary ad revenue online, HBO seems to be aiming towards leveraging existing brands with an on-demand portal, Variety reports. Apparently reacting to reports of its imminent demise, “This Just In” opens this morning with a YouTube clip of office workers singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Interestingly, the recently departed head of “This Just In,” Steve Sanford has already come this route before at his previous company, Icebox.com, which tried to incubate animation concepts. Anyone remember “Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln” and the racially charged “Mr. Wong” series? They live on at Icebox.com, by the way. The dream of using the Web as a breeding ground of new talent and programs that can port to offline platforms remains just that, a dream more than a reality. TheAlphaMarketer blogger Gary Bourgeault asks whether the online comedy market has just become too cluttered already. In fact, it has been hard enough just building a dedicated online audience around a serialized creative property of any kind. Bud.tv is the latest example of high profile Web-exclusives that fail to slip into people’s online rituals. Veterans of new media will remember the big crash–and-burns of the pre-bubble years like TheDen and PseudoTV as well.

Both scale and distribution seem to bedevil many of these projects (well, and there is talent and quality, too). But the big successes online have been smaller (“Ask a Ninja”, “RocketBoom”) and viral. Whether big-footed big media really can come into a grassroots medium like the Web and fabricate the kind of low-overhead economics and highly imaginative homegrown energy that fuels these small winners remains an open question. The cancellation of “This Just In” underscores how major media still haven’t gotten their heads around this medium yet.   

See Also

• HBO
• This Just In

Posted under Michael's Blog

In acquiring behavioral targeting newtork and technology Tacoda, AOL is vying to become a major player in ad sales across the Web

In purchasing one of the two biggest and oldest behavioral targeting providers online, Tacoda, AOL is increasing its reach into the general Web advertising world and rebuilding its crumbling fee-based empire on the ad model. Broken yesterday by The New York Post, whixh pegged the deal at between $200 and $300 million, the acquisition adds to AOL’s previous purchase of Advertising.com, another large ad network that serves behavioral ads. The blogs were abuzz with valuation speculation, but Reuters reports $275 million, accoridng to an insider. Tacoda’s network touches about 120 million users, and so AOL is demonstrating that it plans to re-build its lost empire of subscriber revenue on an ad model that reaches across the entire Web. Kate Kaye’s excellent analysis at ClickZ outlines how this follows AOL’s purchase of mobile ad network Third Screen Media and video ad technology Lightningcast.

AOL is positioning itself not only as a a big ad player but also one that like Yahoo could cater to the entertainment industry. Behavioral targeting currently occupies a small slice of the overall digital ad spend, but interest in it is growing and its use among entertainment marketers is strong. Behavioral targeting can tag visitors to a portal’s TV or film section as interested media consumers and then serve them relevant ads as they move “out of context” into other content areas. The Tacoda deal gives AOL even more reach out into the Web at large, so it can target ads at people even when they move off of the AOL.com property. For entertainment marketers, behavioral targeting could prove critical in finding enough ad inventory. As it is most TV and film areas at the major portals sell out far in advance and at high CPMs. At yesterday’s Behavioral Marketing Forum in New York, which I programmed (and blogged here), several ad executives mentioned the important of this platform for finding users when they are off the pricier entertainment portals. AOL is among the most important distribution hubs for movie trailers and TV clips and schedules. By tagging and following entertainment consumers here, AOL could be building a very Hollywood-friendly ad product.

See Also

• AOL
• Tacoda

Posted under Michael's Blog