A new forecast from ZenithOptimedia predicts that the ad spending will jump 6.7% globally to $486 billion. For online ad spending, the news is especially good. Zenith expects Internet ad sales to hit $44.6 billion in 2008, and increase its total share of the market to 9.4% (up from 8.1% this year). Zenith predicts that that Internet will overtake radio in percentage of total ad spend next year, and overtake magazines in 2010.
For other forms of media, the outlook is less rosy. Newspapers, magazines and radio are all expected to lose share, while outdoor ads, cinema advertising, and television will more or less stand firm with very modest increases predicted for each. TV will still be the dominant form of advertising in terms of percentage of total ad spend.
But even television faces and uncertain future, where the writers' strike could be very damaging to the industry as a whole if it drags. "In 1988, it lasted 22 weeks, which is clearly a long time," Zenith CEO Tim Jones told AdAge. "The three major networks lost 6% of their audience to cable. And that was never recaptured." Could the writers' strike bolster the Internet this time around?
The best news for the industry as a whole might be that it is a so-called "quadrennial kick" year, in which major events like the Olympics, Euro 2008 soccer tournament, and US presidential elections coincide. Those events are catalysts for big ad buys and could help drive growth in the industry in 2008.
A well linked to post over the weekend was Andrew Miller's notes on a Google Apps presentation. The main presenter was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot - one of my favorite Web Office apps that was acquired just over a year ago by Google, but has yet to be turned into a Google Apps product. Well apparently JotSpot is being integrated, according to Miller's notes.
JotSpot is/was a very flexible wiki-based product, which had spreadsheeting and other office functionality. Miller reported that it will spawn "Google Sites" in 2008, which "will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps." It will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and "any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration."
This sounds like an ambitious product and one that may potentially crack open a lucrative market in businesses: intranets and extranets.
Back in August, we noted that most of the very big Facebook apps seem to be owned by Slide or RockYou!. At that point Slide had the most popular Facebook app (in terms of users), with Top Friends. However now RockYou!'s Super Wall app has overtaken Slide's similar FunWall app for the #1 spot, with 3.1 million daily active users. RockYou! sent out a gleeful press release this evening about this news, with CEO Lance Tokuda calling it "a significant milestone for RockYou."
RockYou also claims leadership over "all other application developers, including Slide" on the following apps:
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
We have been hearing about an upcoming new way to discover content on
Digg for quite a while
now. The new Digg 'recommendation engine' will purportedly look
at your past submissions, Digging, and burying activity - and from all that recommend
other stories that you might like. This system won't be much different
from how Reddit's 'recommended' page works, or how StumbleUpon
generally functions. While we wait for the Digg recommendation engine,
which is perpetually 'coming soon', one enterprising Digg user has
taken the initiative and built one himself. After putting in 200 hours of his own time, Dmytro Mulyava has
come up with Digg Filter, an API based Digg story recommender.
We had the chance to talk to Dmytro and ask him some questions about Digg Filter.
Before we begin, can you tell our readers a little more about yourself. Who are you, what you do, and how you got involved with Digg?
Sure, I am student at a business school here in Toronto and I am really passionate about the Internet and the things that it allows people to do around the world. I first heard about Digg through an article in Business Week in August of 2006 and thought to myself “Hey, that’s a pretty neat idea!”. Since then I have found Digg to be a great source for things that wouldn’t be broadcasted by other media sources.
Thanks to our sponsors for supporting Read/WriteWeb. We have an amazing line-up of sponsors, all supporting RWW's mission to provide quality analysis about Web Technology.
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Eurekster is a search engine that learns from the community's search behavior, so it gets better the more you use it.
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Yesterday I attended a “Chalk talk on Global Innovation and Collaboration” in New York, hosted by BSG Alliance. I went because it was led by Don Tapscott who wrote one of my favorite business books - Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. That book ranks up in my Top 10 Business Books of all time (and with 30 years in business, I have read quite a few).
Dan Tapscott is an example of what in my last post I called “consultants in a knowledge intensive space” who write to build their consulting business. He is clearly in the very elite category that writes books and not just Blogs (you can see others here). Since 1992 he has run a “think tank and strategy consulting” business called New Paradigm. The books clearly help him to a) think through major trends and b) increase visibility/credibility. At his level the book sales are probably meaningful as well.
Yesterday’s event was to publicise the fact that New Paradigm had been acquired by BSG Alliance, a company that has recently raised $20m and is on an acquisition spree, buying consulting firms that help Fortune 500 behemoths deal with what they characterise as a “category 6 perfect storm” brought on by Web 2.0 mass collaboration, Net Generation employees and globalization.
I call this “the business of teaching elephants to dance” after another one of my Top 10 Business Books, the epic tale of how Lou Gerstner took an IBM that was on the ropes in 1992 (having failed to adapt to a PC centric world) and made it great again, which he called “Who says Elephants Can’t Dance?”
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
This week continued the recent theme of Google and Facebook dominating the news. Google did an experiment with digg-style voting, which predictably excited the tech blogosphere. However Marshall Kirkpatrick warned people to "keep your pants on", because there is no sign the voting will go live on Google's search. Also this week Google Reader launched a recommendations feature, in which it now recommends additional feeds to users based on their subscription lists, web browsing history and "more." Marshall was relatively impressed with it, saying that "simple recommendation is the low hanging fruit of data mining." He did note though that it appeared to be limited to 20 recommendations, so there is much room for improvement.
In this week's Facebook news, the social network company made changes to Beacon - the new advertising system in which some of your retail data is made available to other Facebook users. Josh Catone wrote that despite the changes, privacy issues still loom. According to Facebook, participation in Beacon, while still controlled site-to-site, is now explicitly opt-in -- ignoring a Beacon notification will no longer be taken as passive acceptance to publish stories to your news feed. Users will have to explicitly tell the system they are okay with the information being passed to their profile before any info is posted.
In other news this week:
Wael Abbas, an award winning journalist who has posted videos documenting police brutality and torture in Egypt over the last 3 years, had his shut-down YouTube account restored by Google last night after a week of international pressure. The restored account, though, no longer contains any of Abbas's more than 100 videos. YouTube told media tonight that Abbas can freely upload his videos again and if satisfactory explanation of the violence is included then they will be allowed to remain on the site.
Two weeks ago Wael Abbas traveled to Washington DC to be awarded the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award along with Burmese investigative reporter May Thingyan Hein and Founders Award winner Tom Brokaw. One week later, Abbas's YouTube account was shut down by the video hosting service, citing the prohibition against "gratuitous violence."
Earlier this month we wrote about the University of Oregon and Oregon Attorney General's resistance to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) legal demands for the names of students alleged to have illegally downloaded free music.
Now the Oregon AG has taken a step further, taking the offensive and filing legal papers demanding disclosure of the RIAA's investigative methods. The filing alleges that the RIAA may have spied on students and illegally obtained their Social Security numbers and other personal information.
An RIAA spokesperson responded with indignation, accusing the University of protecting a wave of piracy. The Association now says that student pirates need to be stopped for their own good, lest they accidentally put files like their bank records and tax info into the folders they share on P2P services.
It's good to know there's some one, the Oregon Attorney General, taking an aggressive stand against such stupidity. While some record companies are changing their tune about suing customers, it's hard to imagine what else the attack dogs at the RIAA would do if not things like this. I imagine they feel the same way when they show up for work each day. Readers interested in some smart discussion on the legal move should check out posts and their comments by Mike Masnick at TechDirt and New York City lawyers Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman at their blog Recording Industry vs. The People.
