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Posts Tagged ‘MySpace’

Twitter buzz in pictures Monday, March 9th, 2009

Aden Hepburn from Ideaworks has just published a couple of charts on the Digital Buzz blog showing how interest in Twitter has mushroomed in the past few weeks - but also keeping it in perspective comparing actual site traffic to the Facebook behemoth:

As Aden writes, “Just in the last 2 weeks (in Aus particularly) it feels like everyone is talking about Twitter like never before - and here is the proof. This chart shows the relative change in daily attention a website receives and you can actually see that it’s even out performing Facebook at almost 2:1, yet unfortunately it doesn’t hide the downward spiral of MySpace! But just to keep everyone in their chairs… the relative comparison on unique visits to show you Twitter doesn’t rule the universe, well, not just yet anyway…!”


‘Glimmer of hope’ for online ads in recession Monday, December 1st, 2008

Everyone agrees advertising overall is tanking as a result of the ‘GFC’ (global financial crisis), but how online advertising will be affected is a matter of intense debate. The online industry, naturally, is bullish on the prospects for online ad spend growth, but what do the battered finance and political media think? The Economist entered the debate last week, saying that although online ad spending in the US fell by 27% during the dotcom recession, ”the web has changed a lot since 2002. Back then, gaudy display “banners” on web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN were the preferred technology. These still exist, but they now account for less than 20% of online ad spending.”

As they pointed out, more than 50% of online ad spend now goes to search advertising, while in brand advertising, rich media ads are taking over from banners. Because these forms of advertising are easily tracked, spending on online advertising is now “much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts.”

This still leaves the problem of how advertising spend is transferred from traditional advertising to online. As the Economist points out, “At the beginning of the year Jeff Zucker, the boss of NBC Universal, a big television and film company, told an audience of TV executives that their biggest challenge was to ensure ‘that we do not end up trading analogue dollars for digital pennies’. He meant that audiences were moving online faster than advertisers, thus leaving media companies short-changed. Now, near the end of the year, the situation looks even worse, as the recession threatens to turn even the analogue dollars into pennies.”

The Economist points out that online traffic is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective - such as user-generated content havens like YouTube and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook - “and is therefore cheap. This, says Mary Meeker (an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley), presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.”


Social networking a plus for business Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

I had to check the date - was it April Fools Day? Nope, Melbourne Cup Day. So it must be true - a just-published study has recommended that bosses allow their employees to use their Facebook and MySpace accounts at work because it helps them build relationships with customers and colleagues.

According to Reuters, the study’s author said that, “while companies were using specific systems to share information, online social networking sites could also play a role, helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.”

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional ‘command and control’ techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity,” he said.

 ”Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counterintuitive, but it appears to create business more capable of maintaining stability.”

 Robert Ainger, Corporate Director of Orange Business which co-produced the report, said it would be wrong of businesses to ignore the importance of networking in the current economic climate.

 ”The report points out that the value of networking within an economic downturn is perhaps more important than ever and I believe it could mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalizing on the tricky conditions,” he said.