The online ad recovery won't be evenly distributed

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The top ad-supported sites’ revenues are growing quickly and they are beginning to run out of space. Meanwhile, smaller sites can’t seem to unload their inventory.

This imbalance has existed since the earliest days of the web, but it is now clear that the recovery will not be evenly distributed.

There is an opportunity to arbitrage this gap in the price of exposures to the same people from different sites. Some of this will be resolved as advertisers get smarter about the way they buy online advertising. Also, a lot of the slack will be taken up by keyword-oriented advertising systems from Overture, Google, and a few late entrants.

Unfortunately,this still won’t solve the revenue gap for most mid-sized web sites.

UPDATE: Raging irony

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In the past 24 hours, the unnamed product that has “cluelessly’ tried to harness blogging for promotional purposes has moved from #19 to #5 on Popdex. No doubt this has been hastened by an item on Slashdot.

Steve Outing says, “Get to know the blog culture before trying to profit from it.” It looks to me that they’ve got us pretty well figured out.

I strongly recommend a long piece exploring the people, ideas, and dynamics of this phenomenon over at Chronotope. [Thanks, MarketingFix]

Prediction: When we look back on this history of weblogs, this incident will play a bigger role than Google’s purchase of Blogger.

Raging irony

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How’s this for an ironic sequence of events:

  • A big consumer products company announces they plan to market their latest concoction by using “blogs.”
  • Newsweek runs a story, quoting a top blogifier: “It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” says alpha blogger Doc Searls. “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.”
  • He blogs it at 4pm on Sunday, March 2.
  • More bloggers decry the cluelessness of said marketers. By 4pm on Monday, March 3, it’s number 19 on popdex. I’m already sick of hearing about it.

Boy, were they stupid to think they could manipulate us into promoting their stupid product.

Being realistic about content management software

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Gerry McGovern has some advice to the content management industry, in response to the recent Jupiter Research report on the failure of content management systems:

Content management software hasn’t worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn’t worked because organizations didn’t understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed.

He goes on to prescribe some changes for software companies (starting with telling the truth) and their customers (such as being realistic about what content management is going to do for you).

This is strong stuff and a good starting place for companies thinking about content management, or thinking about abandoning it.

New thinking about old phone lines

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Dim copper is a useful new meme from Bob Frankston.

He points out telephone calls use a lot less than one percent of the carrying capacity of the copper lines that already come into our homes. We’re nowhere near using them to the extent that we should. Why are we worrying about lighting dark fiber or deploying even more fiber?

Bob’s analysis sheds some light on why the telephone access monopolies are unhappy with the FCC’s decision to deregulate new lines, but insure competitive access to existing lines. In the two years since they last thought that was a good idea, they’ve probably realized that the future belongs to copper.

Broadband users adopt audio, orphan video

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The share of Americans who use Internet audio monthly has tracked closely the share who have broadband access, but the share using Internet video has not.

Here’s a chart I created from the data in the report. The blue line is broadband adoption, the red line is audio and the green line is broadband. Click the chart for a larger view.

This extraordinarily clear message can be found in the Arbitron/Edison survey released last week. It puts the lie to the idea coming from Los Angeles that potential broadband users are waiting around for copy-protected video content before they sign up.

FT.com is breaking even

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The web site of the Financial Times, FT.com is breaking even.

Of course, that’s an operating profit, not a net profit. Pearson has invested a staggering £200 million in this site. FT.com has struggled with changes in organization and business model since the beginning. It has evolved from a decentralized free site to an integrated paid site. Despite the subscription barrier on much of the site’s content, the number of people using the site has grown 30% to 3.5 million.

Meanwhile, the FT itself is losing money, which raises some question about whether the site, which gets its content free from its parent, can be said to be profitable.

Free research: University of Maryland NTRS

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Despite its intimidating name, the National Technology Readiness Survey isn’t very impressive. It has a small sample size and the questions seem either generic or poorly thought-out. I’m including this one mainly in the interest of completeness.

But it’s worth checking out. I used some of their data to calculate that the share of Internet users with personal Web sites hasn’t changed in the last five years.

Content management systems are not good at managing content

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Jupiter Research says “more than 60 percent of companies that have deployed Web content management solutions still find themselves manually updating their sites.”

This research confirms a study by the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture that found most users’ experience with content management software was unhappy.

Other findings:

  • “Overcomplicated, end-to-end packages can as much as quintuple site operational costs over human labor alternatives.”
  • Most companies felt they overspent on content management platforms.
  • Two thirds said they still rely on manual processes to update their Web sites.
  • Nearly half felt their deployment “barely scratched the surface of the functionality they originally licensed.”
  • Only a quarter planned to continue using their Web content management systems as they do now.
  • One quarter (27 percent) said they had so many problems they would build another system from scratch.

One media company spent over a year and $250,000 working its content management package into its site production process. “The company recently realized that its content had little structure to speak of, and that because it had not made a strict separation between content and presentation, the company’s broader needs for reusing content elsewhere were effectively blocked.”

One surprising conclusion: “(o)rganizations should not look to content management systems to publish pages.”