Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA by Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Amazon, watch out. Earlier today, Google launched an affiliate ad network. Or, rather, it rebranded Performics, the affiliate ad network that came along with its purchase of DoubleClick, as the “Google Affiliate Network.” As with other affiliate networks such as Amazon’s, participating Website publishers get paid a fee for each referral that results in a sale. Existing advertisers include Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Citi, Target, and Verizon. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/google-launches-affiliate-advertising-network-courtesy-of-doubleclick 6/30)

CBS announced the closing of its acquisition of CNET today. The deal, first announced last month, will bring CNET under the control of Quincy Smith’s CBS Interactive division, “the premier online content network for information and entertainment.” (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/cbs-finishes-acquisition-of-cnet-quincy-smith-addresses-the-troops 6/30)

Slide and Vh1 excel at making products geared towards America’s lowest common denominator. The first makes SuperPoke, a popular social network app that lets you send text messages saying you’ve done “stuff” to your friends. The latter produces reality show classics like “Flavor of Love”, “Rock of Love”, and “I Love New York”. And next week, their powers will combine to bring you VH1’s SuperPoke!Fest: a four day reality show marathon to promote a new show called “I Love Money” that will give users a chance to see their very own SuperPokes live, onscreen! (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/slide-and-vh1-team-up-to-annoy-the-hell-out-of-you 6/30)

Yahoo launched a suite of new Olympics-themed content including a new website from Yahoo Sports, a new mobile web site (m.yahoo.com/2008games) and a special search feature providing shortcuts to help users find Olympics schedules, news, metal tallies and scoring. (Cynopsis 7/2)

The luxury giant LVMH for the second time successfully challenged eBay in a French court, arguing that 90 percent of the Louis Vuitton bags and Dior perfumes sold on eBay are fakes. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/technology/01ebay.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin 7/1)

Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg News

Pierre Gode, an LVMH adviser, outside of court.

For most people on the Web, if Google or Yahoo cannot find something, it doesn’t exist. That has been one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a Website or application that displays itself as a Flash (SWF) file. Search engines could see the file, but they could not see what was in it. Until now. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/once-nearly-invisible-to-search-engines-flash-files-can-now-be-found-and-indexed 6/30)

Television viewers are turning to the internet for a variety of reasons – catching up on episodes they missed, reading up on their favorite personalities, even viewing a show’s bloopers or deleted scenes – according to a survey jointly conducted by Nielsen and CTAM. But both groups wanted the industry to know online viewing is no way replacing linear TV viewing; 94% of cable or satellite subscribers surveyed said they still prefer watching shows the old fashioned way. Here some likes and dislikes that came up in the study, along with some general trends:

• About 35% of adult broadband users surveyed have watched a full episode online
• Of those who went online looking for TV content, 87% turned to a network website
• The most popular forms were movie trailers (53%), UGV (45%), music videos & news (37%), comedy (31%) and sports clips (31%)
• A small but growing percentage of users are watching shows on their desktop PCs (14%), laptops (9%), video-enabled mobile phones (6%) and other portable devices (5%)

Online ad spending will continue to grow at double-digit rates through 2013 despite economic conditions, according to a new report from JupiterResearch cited in CNET. Online ad spending is expected to increase 19% this year in the U.S. to $23.8 billion with search continuing to be the dominant category. Video advertising is projected to quadruple to $5.1 billion by 2013. (Cynopsis 7/2)

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