MediaSavvy

An online survey of the brand preferences of readers of a branding site claims Google is the top global brand, beating out Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Nike, and Nokia. What was remarkable was how many references (CBS Marketwatch, Internetnews.com, Toronto Globe & Mail, UPI, The NYTimes’ Boston.com and Reuters) I keep seeing to this awful piece of fake research.

There’s a kernal of truth that makes this story popular. Google is an important brand (as are Yahoo, Amazon, and Starbucks) that achieved legendary status without advertising. Outside of the realm of consumer packaged goods, the role of advertising compared to actual product execution in building a brand is negligible. We forgot this important lesson during the Bubble.

On the other hand, this story, the forehead advertising story, and the success of Krispy Kreme demonstrate that a little clever hype is often an acceptable substitute for quality.

Fifteen percent of marketing emails don’t reach their destination.

This researcher is mum on the reasons, but you have to believe that spam filters play a role.

How many permission-based emails don’t get read because they’re mistaken for spam?

When will the direct marketing industry realize that it is the biggest victim of spam?

Clay Shirky’s latest essay– Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality–has everyone talking. I think it’s brilliant, probably because it mathematically confirms my prejudices.

Clay says that the popularity of web sites is distributed according to a power low (see the charts on his site). You should also read Jason Kottke’s analysis of this. There are a lot of great comments attached to his analysis. What’s weird and important about this is that the resulting curve is self-similar: it’s true for a subset of sites or for the pages on a particular site.

I’ve been saying for a long time that there are two Webs: the big-money Web and the “some guy with a web site” Web. The future belongs to both. The sites in the middle who don’t have a clearly defined audience are…doomed. Their cost structure looks a lot like the big-money Web, but their audiences are smaller by orders of magnitude. The little guys publish for other reasons. With rare exceptions, they don’t plan to make money from their site. They publish online in support of their offline activities.

Clay goes on to use this analysis to argue that there is no blogocracy of top bloggers. The distribution is too even for there to be an exclusive club. There is some underlying law–although clearly the early bloggers and their friends have some help.

He doesn’t offer an explanation for the power law, and there seems to be signicant debate on the nature of the underlying mechanism. But its a very common phenomenon in a lot of human endeavor. I’ve been trying to reason out what this means for online publishers. Here are some ideas:

• Success on the Web depends on ruthless focus on a target market.
• If you’re going after a much-larger competitor, you must have a well-defined market segment where you know you can beat the.
• You can’t survive as a mid-sized player.
• Don’t try to broaden your market just to get someone else’s low-hanging fruit. You also broaden your competition.

What I’m still puzzling over is whether this implies that it’s simply impossible for middle-market information sites to make money, either on advertising or subscriptions.

The real problem with the ad market right now is uncertainty. No one wants to be the first to bet that the economy is going to recover this year. Until there is a clear signal that the economy is on the mend, the advertising market will be weak and unpredictable.

I strongly recommend getting Emarketer’s free study and forecast of online and offline ad spending. Emarketer does a great job of pulling together estimates and forecasts of advertising from lots of different sources. I spent a lot of time recently looking for ad forecasts and I wish I had known about this study then.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable about the economy and the ad market if we could point to a single reason for optimism other than Bush’s so-called recovery plan or the statement “surely we’ve hit bottom by now.”

Online publishers have discovered that the Internet is the best advertising medium for reaching customers during the day, and they’re spreading the news. Both the Newspaper Association of America and the Online Publishers Association have released studies promoting the advantages of buying online advertising by dayparts.

The NY Times charges a 25% premium for daypart-triggered ads, according to the Internet Advertising Report. And Sun bought 100% of Forbes.com ad space between 9 am and 1 pm.

It’s refreshing to see online advertising sold on value and being differentiated more creatively from traditional ad media.

Here are some findings from the OPA report:

• There are five distinct Internet dayparts characterized by differing usage levels, demographics and type of content accessed: Early morning (M-F 6am – 8am), Daytime (M-F, 8am – 5pm), Evening (M-F, 5pm – 11pm), Late night (M-F, 11pm – 6am), Weekends (Sat-Sun, all day).
• Daytime is the largest daypart (measured in terms of both total audience and total usage minutes), followed by Evening and Weekends;
• Affluent, working people between the ages of 25-54 make up a larger share of the Daytime audience than any other daypart;
• Children under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be reached during the Evening and Weekend dayparts;
• Internet utilities such as search engines, e-mail and chat show little variation in usage by daypart; online content sites, in contrast, exhibit distinct differences in usage by time of day;
• Use of News and Information sites is concentrated in the Early Morning and Daytime dayparts;
• Entertainment/Sports site usage increases dramatically during Evening and Weekend dayparts compared to Daytime;
• On average, eCommerce activity accounts for only 5.3% of time spent online; a considerably larger share occurs on Evenings and Weekends than during the Daytime.

The NAA report is only available to members. I don’t understand why they’d want to keep this to themselves.

It’s important to remember that although each daypart has distinct demographics, that daypart advertising is no substitute for demographic targeting.

“If many people could redo history they would prefer that the everything-is-free Internet model had never gained ascendancy.” says David Hiller, president of Tribune Interactive, in Columbia Journalism Review. That pretty much sums up the spirit of denial that is gripping more and more newspaper industry executives.

Meanwhile, Newsday reports:

Only 33 percent of U.S. families led by someone age 25 to 34 bought a daily newspaper in 2001 compared with 63 percent in 1985, according to surveys of consumer spending by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This decline in newspaper purchases is accelerating with a drop of 21 percentage points in the five years ended in 2000, or triple the rate seen during 1985-1995.

They go on to report that 80% of 18 to 34 year olds in the NY metro area get their news from the Internet and only 55% get it from the web.

Meanwhile Steve Outing at Poynter shares the story of an online news editor who lost his job because he opposed charging for the newspaper’s web site.

Some people get it. In a comment on Steve Outing’s posting, Henry Copeland tells us the NY Times has sold 160,000 subscriptions from its web site. Neil Budde, the former publisher and founder of the Wall Street Journal Online, and hero of fee-loving newspaper publishers everywhere, tells PAID, “Too many people are making a rush towards the subscription model because everybody says now is the time they should go for that.”

I’m stunned that this debate is still going on. What’s clear is that, as monopolists accustomed to 25% profit margins, newspaper publishers are intellectually ill-equipped to publish on the Internet.

Twenty-five percent of people with Internet access say they or or a family member have their own Web site. Thirteen percent say they or a family member has their own domain name. This, according to the University of Maryland.

This is an odd statistic, because it doesn’t look at individuals, or even at households, but at families. I did some work to make this more useful. According to the Statistical Abstract of the US, there are about 2.7 people per household. For the moment let’s assume one household per family (it’s somewhat higher than that) and assume one person in each family holds the web site and the domain (it’s probably a little higher than that).

I estimate that 9% of people with Internet access have a web site. Keep in mind that the study’s margin of error was 4% and that is compounded by my assumptions. Five years ago, at IDC, we determined that about 10% of Internet users had Web sites.

The share of Internet users with Web sites has not changed significantly in the last five years. [Thanks, eMarketer!]