Long-tail websites deliver better clickthrough rates

Advertisers who concentrate all their advertising dollars on a handful of the top-trafficked sites could be missing out on great long-tail opportunities, according to a recent study by ContextWeb.

Long-tail theory says that when it comes to the internet, there is still money to be made by offering content – and therefore advertising – to niche markets.

Social Media Yearbook

A big thank you to BusinessGrow.com for this one.  Graduating from high school is oftentimes a major life milestone, but this hilarious infographic by Flowtown, entitled Social Media High School Class of 2011, takes that iconic landmark and hurls it into the bizarre, crowded and highly competitive realm of Web 2.0 networking platforms.

From Digg (the ex-best friend) to LinkedIn (the class president), this thoroughly amusing satire of web 2.0 platforms couldn’t be more spot-on. Well played Flowtown, well played.

Ah, databases!  Thanks to computers, the internet, and a whole lot of post-secondary degrees, these days ‘great marketing’ is more about how well you collect, parse, and use data than it is about Big Idea creative.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not one of those old-fashioned creative director types who’s always mourning the loss of ‘The Big Idea’ and pontificating about how the only really great advertising happened in the 1980s when ad agencies employed real artists, and that the kids today don’t know jack because real creativity isn’t shackled to 50-page analytic reports on demographic breakdowns.  All things considered, it’s great to be able to use super-precise targeting to reach my stakeholders.

However.

When was the last time you clicked the little RSS button on a blog you liked? If you’re like me, you probably can’t remember.

There are probably 3 reasons for this:

1. Your RSS notification window is already filled to bursting with updates from blogs you liked in, like, 2008, but don’t read any more
2. The 5 sites you do read on a regular basis are already bookmarked – you don’t need updates from them
3. Your smart Twitter management means that you’re reading about stuff as it gets posted by people you’re following on Twitter – you don’t have to wait til one of your favourites gets around to posting something

Kroc Camen thinks

I used to think “nexus” was a word I would only use in conversation with my Trekkie friends. But now, it seems we’re fast approaching a nexus point for online ad networks, and William Shatner is nowhere in sight.

Over the last four years, we have seen the birth and rapid assimilation of the advertising exchange across the industry. The ad exchange model, for those of you who are new to this, is a marriage of an ad serving solution for networks with a marketplace. This enables all advertisers and publishers connected to the marketplace to share both inventory and sales, thus increasing their reach and eliminating unsold impressions. The major players in this arena are Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Posted by Chris Patheiger

Anyone got a smoke?

There have been major changes, not only in behavior, but also in the level of public tolerance towards environmental tobacco smoke. This, of course, is a result of increased social awareness about the risks of smoking to our personal health. In North America, smoking rates have decreased by half since the mid-1960s, falling to 23% of adults by 1997. Meanwhile, in the developing world, where mass media is less prevalent, tobacco consumption is rising annually by 3.4%.