Digital Marketing Remainders for May 31, 2007
EBay acquires StumbleUpon . No obvious ad implications, but like the CBS purchase of Last.fm, it's a validation of peer recommendation engines
EBay acquires StumbleUpon. No obvious ad implications, but like the CBS purchase of Last.fm, it’s a validation of peer recommendation engines. And peer recommendation engines, as all longtime Amazon customers know, began with shopping and online marketing.
eBay’s Adsdaq experiment gets a boost from Oxygen. (WSJ link) The advertiser- and agency-backed online media exchange, which has been presented as a potential future alternative to the upfront, has floundered of late. The involvement of women’s network Oxygen provides a needed shot in the arm.
More mash-ups for music labels. EMI Music, which recently became the first label to offer songs and albums for sale DRM-free through iTunes, will now offer its music and video catalog to YouTube users. In addition to watching the original videos, YouTube users will be able to use EMI material in their own creations, and EMI will get a share of ad revenue generated by those clips. YouTube has similar relationships with BMG Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group.
Calacanis unveils his people-powered search engine. Mahalo combines human-edited results pages for fat-head search queries with Google’s long-tail results and ads. Goal: to develop hand crafted results for the top 10,000 search terms. Drawback: the meaning of search terms changes over time.
Warner Music International is planning to roll-out a number of ad-supported music sites. Supported by partner Premium TV, WMI’s properties will be organized by artist, genre or label. Revenue will come from in-stream ads, paid downloads and syndication.
What’s the worst thing on television? How about ads for lawyers and legal services? Well get ready for more of them, as Spot Runner pairs up with LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, a provider of client development tools for law firms, to let the nation’s attorneys easily create and buy their own ultra low budget TV spots.
Google Checkout goes wireless. Mobile Web users can now buy things using a cell phone with any WAP–enabled Checkout merchant.
