Off to 90210 tomorrow for Paid Content’s Economics of Social Media Conference in LA.
The speakers list is simply incredible, as a writer, I hope to be able to talk to a few, I am sure each individual has plenty of good tidbits to offer… though I am sure they will cover aplenty in their presentations, speeches, discussions etc.
» Peter Adderton, Founder and CEO, Amp’d Mobile
» Simon Assaad, CEO, Heavy.com
» John Battelle, Chairman, Federated Media
» Barak Berkowitz, Chairman and CEO, Six Apart
» Michael Birch, CEO, Bebo
» Marco Boerries, Senior Vice President, Connected Life, Yahoo
» Ilene Chaiken, Executive Producer, The L Word/CEO, OurChart.com
» Alan Citron, GM, TMZ.com
» Shawn Conahan, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Intercasting Corp
» Toby Coppel, SVP, Corporate Development, Yahoo
» Carson Daly, host, Last Call With Carson Daly
» Josh Deutsch, CEO, Downtown Records
» Esther Dyson, EDventure
» David Eun, VP, Content Partnerships, Google
» Shawn Gold, SVP, MySpace
» Jason Hirschhorn, President, Entertainment Group, Sling Media
» Courtney Holt, EVP, Digital Music and Media, MTV Networks Music, Logo and Films Group
» George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer, NBC Universal
» Tariq Krim, Founder and CEO, Netvibes
» Ross Levinsohn, former President of Fox Interactive Media
» Hadi Partovi, President and COO, iLike
» Richard Rosenblatt, Chairman and CEO, Demand Media
» Herb Scannell, CEO, Next New Networks
» Vivian Schiller, SVP and GM, NYTimes.com
» Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President, Walt Disney Internet Group
» Tina Sharkey, Chairman, BabyCenter
» Rich Skrenta, Founder and CEO, Topix.net
» Quincy Smith, President, CBS Interactive
» Tad Smith, CEO, Reed Business Information
» Ken Stern, CEO, NPR
» Kara Swisher, Wall Street Journal
» Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo/CIO, Publicis Media Group
» Tim Westergren, Founder, Pandora
Of course, I’d be lying if I said the businessman in me wasn’t salivating at the networking and business development discussions to be had.
Will be reporting from the scene over the next couple of days.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterIt’s time to call time out, folks, and call a penalty on the play. Someone’s got to.
Yesterday, MySpace issued a report pushing social networking’s benefits to advertisers. It was, as Rafat Ali of Paid Content stated, “a study about MySpace, touting MySpace as an AdSpace…so take it with a grain of salt.” The findings were interesting, no doubt, but seeing MySpace push its agenda in conjunction with Isobar and Carat USA is somewhat eyebrow-raising. MySpace is a great company, and advertisers can yield a lot of benefit by working with it, but come on, today mainstream and new media sources are running with this story without questioning the evident bias in the study of, hmm… 3,000 US Internet Users.
Don’t get me wrong, MySpace is so large, and demand for its inventory relatively small, that basic algebra suggests that indeed, the ROI could be high, if you can overlook the headache-inducing layouts, occasional child predator and what not.
That, apparently, is the theme behind today’s latest “study,” this time conducted by another company I respect, Blue Lithium, that states that “User-Generated Content Delivers More Bang for Your Online Marketing Buck According to Study From BlueLithium Labs.”
All righty then. Again, I am sure this is all true, because social networking generates more pages online than porn and offers much more supply of real estate than demand thereof (implying low costs and potentially higher ROI).
But, what is nonsense about this and MySpace’s study is the evident bias: Blue Lithium is an ad network that
a) probably sells advertising on a lot of these social networking pages and would like to stoke advertisers’ demand for such content and
b) just launched Mingle Now, a social network, that it pushes via its network using house ads, making it a double no-no, in my humble opinion.
It would not be such a big deal, if at least Blue Lithium disclosed how much exposure its core network business has to social networks, or that it now launches its own social network. After all, everyone knows and recognizes MySpace’s bias…
Are advertisers that gullible?
Or do folks at Blue Lithium and MySpace - powerful and fantastic businesses that don’t need to rely on such smoke and mirror tactics to generate business - think that marketers are so gullible that they won’t notice this evident and flagrant conflict of interest?
Folks, just a bit of disclosure goes a long way, the story is interesting, but the delivery thereof could be a tad less biased, no?
Focus is everything, so last year I pretty much decided to focus 80% of our energy into WatchMojo.com, because I knew that we could become a leader in the production of video programming for broadband platforms. And, I guess, we were right in that.
But of the remaining 20%,
- we spend 5% of our time on vertical search,
- 5% on our blog network (of which HipMojo.com is a part of),
- 5% on StreetMojo.com, the matching application connecting consumers looking for contests with marketers looking to promote their sweepstakes to users.
- The remaining 5%? Last year we decided to build a video meta search. It’s still very raw, but since we’re building a growing user base of video watching users on WatchMojo.com, and have developed some search expertise, it was a natural extension to have some kind of foothold in video search. Having worked in the metasearch field in 2000, I saw a lot of similarities between where text-based content search was then and where video is now.
The big idea was that there would be a lot of smart people with a lot more money than I had developing new tools, and then you had Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TW/AOL and IAC/Ask be able at any moment to flex its muscle and gain a leadership position… but, I figured, each player would develop an interesting strategy, and if we had a meta search, we could showcase them all, and since with video you send traffic out to the video search site, it would be a cleaner relationship than in text-based content meta search, where the meta search engine technically “bypasses” the underlying search engine and sends traffic directly to the end site…
Here’s Cast TV’s MO:
CastTV’s video search technology has been developed over the last few years to address the challenges particular to online video search, which are twofold:
Our video search site currently indexes a dozen of sources, here are the results for Seung-hui Cho (the Virginia shooter) for example. When we relaunch our network of sites soon, we’ll add more and make it look pretty (finally).
I look forward to checking out Cast TV, a new player that today raised $3.1M from Draper. It was announced on their site, with additional sites picking up the story.
:: See my interview with Podzinger’s CEO Alex Laats here: in “Powerset and Podzinger: Match Made in Search Heaven?”
