For Sale By Publisher today launched a directory of web sites seeking to sell their own ads and bypass ad networks. Direct sales of ads is attractive to publishers because it allows them to keep 100% of their ad dollars, and attractive to advertisers because it lets them cut specific, long-term deals with site owners.
Many blogs and small site owners go this route, often by selling monthly sponsorships. These ads can be very lucrative, especially for web sites that operate in a hard to reach niche, but they are also a pain for web site owners to manage. Unless you have the luxury of hiring a sales staff, finding advertisers and managing the sale of ads can be a tiresome chore that distracts from other jobs that web publishers face (like site management and content creation).
There's no denying that amateur music is hot right now, especially in the United States. Both NBC and Fox have competing television shows based around amateur karaoke (The Singing Bee and Don't Forget the Lyrics, respectively), not to mention Fox's yearly amateur music hit, American Idol. Last year Yahoo! bought karaoke site Bix and often the most popular videos on YouTube are covers of pop music.
So it's no wonder that a site like FanCovers has launched to be a central location for videos of amateur artists belting out their favorite hit songs.
Our poll this week asks: What is your favorite online music streaming service? So far, last.fm and Pandora have been engaged in an epic struggle - both have led the poll at various times during the week. As of now, last.fm has gone back into the lead. Here's the top 5 so far:
last.fm 32% (207 votes)
Pandora 30% (197 votes)
Yahoo Music 9% (61 votes)
iTunes Music Service 8% (52 votes)
Rhapsody 4% (27 votes)
Note that FineTune and Live365 were added late to the poll, but both have more votes currently than AOL, MSN and Zune. There's still time to cast your vote though, so please do so in the poll below:
M:Metrics has released some interesting data about mobile social networking. It states that MySpace has the largest mobile network in the United States and UK, while MSN/Windows Live Spaces is preferred in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Overall 12.3 million consumers in the United States and Western Europe reported accessing a social networking site with their mobile device in the month of June 2007. 7.5 million of those were from the US, perhaps surprising given that the US is not usually considered a leader in the mobile Web space - Europe and Asia is where mobile thrives. M:Metrics didn't measure Asia's activity (which would be fascinating), but in Europe Italy had 1.3 million mobile social networking users in June, then the UK with 1.1 million, Spain with 751,000, then Germany and France. College-aged users (18-24) are the most avid users in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Mobile social networking is defined by M:Metrics as "the ability to connect to these communities with a mobile phone, allowing people to access profiles and share content while they’re on the go."
PubMatic, which launched a limited alpha to the general public today, is a new service that helps web site publishers run the highest paying ads from top ad networks. Unlike ad auctions such as Right Media, in which ad networks bid against one another to fill inventory, PubMatic takes an algorithmic approach to determining which ads will pay publisher's the most.
For now, PubMatic works with Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, ValueClick, and Komli. The New York-based company will be adding more networks following their alpha launch, and is looking into adding generic support that would allow publishers to fill their inventory from ad networks that are not officially supported. The public alpha test is free to anyone, but will be limited to the first 100 publishers to sign up today on a first come, first served basis.
We just received a tipoff that Bolt.com, the online video site that settled a lawsuit with Universal in March, has ceased operations and closed its website. More on this as it develops, but for now this is the message on Bolt's website:
"Please be advised that the operations of Bolt, Inc. and Bolt.com have ceased. Net Revolution, Inc. and Bolt, Inc. have executed an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors effective as of August 14, 2007. Please direct any creditor related questions or comments to the Assignee's office to the attention of:
Development Specialists, Inc.
345 California Street
Suite 1150
San Francisco, California 94104-2664
Att: George E. Shoup, III
Email: gshoup@dsi.bizThe Notice of Assignment will be mailed to all known creditors in the near future. If you are interested in acquiring this site or other assets of Bolt or Net Revolution please contact, gshoup@dsi.biz."
last100 has an interesting post on Microsoft Points, a kind of virtual currency for the Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace. In a lot of ways, Microsoft Points act just like real money and functions in a similar way to Paypal. Mack D. Male wrote that "if you see a movie you want to buy on Xbox Live, you just need to make sure you have enough points available in your account. The main difference, of course, is that you don’t “purchase” money, but you do purchase Microsoft Points."
Mack says that "Microsoft Points can be purchased online using a credit card, or from a participating retail location in the form of a Microsoft Points Card. As with airtime minutes on your mobile phone, you purchase allotments of points at once, ranging from 400 to 5000 points. The price varies all around the world, but in the United States 80 Microsoft Points is equal to $1. If you live in a country with government sales tax, you’ll pay that on top of the price of the points."
By Guest Author Steven Finch
Amie Street is an online music store that has two key features: their unique pricing model and DRM-free downloads.
The Amie Street pricing model is quite simple - all songs start free and rise in price the more they are purchased. So as the demand increass, the price goes up accordingly. At present there is a cap at which is the maximum price a track can sell for, which is $0.99.
The site overall is well designed and they highlight their key selling point nicely. However the online music store market is quite crowded. Similar competitors include Snocap, ReverbNation and BlastMyMusic. Snocap has focused on partnering with some of the biggest social networks on the web; and this is something that Amie Street should consider too. Currently Amie Street is mostly focused on selling through their store, instead of spreading throughout the web and selling via widgets and social networks. Currently the site has a recommendation service, but no sign of widgets or other distributed mechanisms.
Nugs.net is the biggest network of music sites you've probably never heard of. Created in 1993 as a place for founder and CEO Brad Serling to keep his growing collection of live Grateful Dead and Phish tapes, the site has since grown into a major force in online music sales, having sold over 50 million paid downloads of live music.
Nugs.net currently powers the online download stores for over 300 artists, including Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, the Grateful Dead, Widepread Panic and moe. The company also runs download stores for major US music festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. Via compilations (such as the environmental benefit album "Music for the Planet") and festivals, Nugs.net has provided live download services for over 400 bands.
RedHerring magazine relaunched its website yesterday on top of the Blogtronix social networking platform. According to Blogtronix this is version 2.0, but given the magazine's checkered past it might be better to consider this version four or five.
RedHerring launched in 1993 and during the dot-com boom of the late 90s became the quintessential Silicon Valley news rag. But as the Internet sector cooled off, so did the magazine, which stopped producing issues in 2003. It relaunched as an online publication later that year, and came back to the print world in late 2004, but earlier this year it looked like things at RedHerring were taking a familiar turn for the worse.
