Bloggasm

For my latest piece for Harvard’s Nieman Lab, I interviewed several big players in the display advertising industry about the obsession with click-through rates and what this means for AOL’s content strategy

According to several studies, click-through rates — the number of people who actually click on an ad — run well below 1 percent on most sites, and each year these rates get lower and lower. Some industry analysts have said this is a result of “banner blindness,” the idea that we inadvertently train our eyes to ignore certain parts of a web page, including sidebar and banner ads.

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on, these metrics are either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the Internet allows us to measure ad success like never before. In the past, advertising agencies would have to employ arcane formulas using Nielsen or circulation numbers to guess how many eyeballs saw a 30-second spot on television or a full-page ad in The New York Times. Now, we can open up Google Analytics or click-tracking software to determine exactly how many users engaged with an ad. We can even in some cases determine conversion rates, measuring not only how many people clicked on an ad, but also how many actually purchased a product after making the click. These metrics are a welcome relief to the client who famously said, “I know I am wasting half my advertising budget; I just don’t know which half.”

But many publishers and advertising agencies have expressed frustration that their industry is beholden to such confined measurement. By focusing so much on direct response, they argue, advertisers are missing out on the larger branding opportunities afforded by creative advertising. The Geico Gecko is not successful because he inspires people to jump up from their couches and purchase car insurance; he’s successful because when a person decides months later to shop around for car insurance, his image springs to mind.

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1. The New York Times profiles a Russian blogger who smokes out corruption

2. Snagging Robert Gibbs could pump up Facebook’s D.C. credentials

3. Obama a Socialist? Fox News Exec Said So, but Didn’t Believe It

4. N.Y. film institute giving out $50,000 – $100,000 grants to fund interactive storytelling

5. Former TBDer Jim Brady to join Journal Register Company

6. How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?

7. Amanda Hocking explains why she decided to go with a traditional publisher, says she knows she could lose money

8. Interesting April Fools project from Reddit

9. Twitter Account of the Day

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1. Why I’ve been really enjoying the Breitbart and Huffington shit show

2. What do social media platforms owe to foreign political activists?

3. An infographic on how people Tweet

4. Mashable has a fascinating look into how much traffic Facebook and Twitter sends to its articles

5. Another interesting look into Mashable’s success on Twitter

6. An idea for how the New York Times should revamp its op ed pages

7. Was NPR’s Wait, Wait acting in bad taste for making jokes about Michelle Malkin?

8. The power of…listicles? Yahoo Research tackles distribution and longevity data for Twitter

10. The Groupon Backlash: It’s the Business Model, Stupid

11. Kindle readers of The New York Times to get free access to the newspaper’s Web site

12. Washington Post hiring a VP of technology

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In a recent piece for The Next Web, I detailed how Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress aided Nadine Wahab in protecting the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page. “Because Facebook does not allow anonymous users, there was fear that Mubarak’s supporters could use this rule to either oust the page’s creator or get the page shut down completely,” I wrote. “Rosenblatt has connections with Facebook employees and after introducing Wahab to them they were able to secure the page while also protecting her identity.”

This incident highlights the problems American social media sites face in countries that have strict restrictions on free speech. As the New York Times reports in a recent article, activists in these countries are having a hard time navigating around rules that were put in place to guarantee authenticity; when using your real name can mean imprisonment and even death, it’s easy to see why activists would be hesitant to use their real names.

Part of the problem not mentioned in the piece is that these major social media sites are not in the customer service business. Their success is based on their ability to scale, to gather a large number of users per employee. It’s very rare that the average Facebook or YouTube user can get an employee on the phone to help him with his individual problems. To avoid this, these sites must create strict rules and guidelines in order to quickly dispense judgement on what’s kosher and what’s not. The Times article mentions an incident in which Facebook doesn’t want to wade into the Israel/Palestine conflict, but it doesn’t mention what’s possibly a major reason for why it wants to steer clear of moderating Palestinian and Israeli activist pages: the human resources it would take to do so.

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News outlets have had over a year now to figure out that Andrew Breitbart is a toxic asset. ABC decided to invite the discredited activist onto its election night coverage and the incident blew up in ABC’s face. NPR failed to correct much of its reporting (or show much skepticism) on Breitbart protege James O’Keefe’s misleadingly edited ACORN “pimp videos,” only to get later burned by an O’Keefe hack job. CNN decided it wanted to do a puff piece on O’Keefe to promote him, only to barely sidestep his plot to sexually harass one of its reporters. Dozens of news outlets ended up with egg on their faces when they trumpeted Breitbart’s video on Shirley Sherrod without any skepticism.

So forgive me if I find it a little humorous at this point to watch Breitbart reach into his underwear and fling shit at the Huffington Post after it decided that Breitbart deserved promotion on its coveted front page. At some point you just have to accept the media isn’t going to do its job by shunning those who spread misinformation and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

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Today I read an interesting article in the Financial Times about a paper that found blocking your employees from internet sites like Facebook can actually be counter-productive. I went to my bitly account to tweet a link to the article, and copy and pasted a single line from the piece as my teaser for the link. When I did this, here’s the text that appeared in my bitly box:

Can you imagine anything more obnoxious? The Financial Times has essentially embedded an html legal threat into all of its text, so that the thousands of bloggers, twitter users, and Facebook users who want to share its content have to go through the process of deleting all this extraneous text before they can send the paper readers. It’s like that annoying “Read More” html embed you’ll see but 10 times worse.

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For my latest article for The Next Web I interviewed several movie critics about whether industry blogs are too acquiescent to the major movie studios:

Abaius said that the way the studios treat you depends largely on the size of your audience. Sites like Deadline.com and The Wrap and trade publications like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter get fed much more access than smaller publications like Film School Rejects, which averages about 2 million uniques a month. Still, Abaius does get at least some access. “We’ve been on set visits, get press releases, get interviews and access to special events and that sort of thing, but I’ve never felt like I’ve had to ‘play a game’ or ‘play by the rules’ or anything like that. We’ve always shared an opinion, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, and the studios and smaller filmmaking outlets have always seized it to give a solid amount of access.”

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