Australian online news and views

Ridiculous as it may seem I am not a member or user of Facebook. Un llke most of my friends I am not spending hours and hours a week on my Facebook site trying to get as many fish in my aquarium or trying to update my emotions and telling people what i am up to right at this moment.

When myspace took the market i remember thinking to my self where would i advertise to reach the youth market. Not being a planner and not having access to research on this market or rather potential market i instantly thought of myspace. It must be cheap as there was hardly any advertising on the site at the time. Though purchasing advertising on a CPM basis would be expensive a little like advertising on TV.

Any way i digress as usual so adverting to a slightly different demographic on Facebook could it work?

I would have thought that the capture of all of that personal data would have made the targeted adverting a no brainer…..it seems amazing that more targetted advertising isn’t already in the market……or is it?

Here are a couple of articles about advertising on FACEbook ….first we have issue sleading to agencies banning the network, now we have them hitting back with targeted advertising…..mmmm…will this win them back……results are results….

Facebook banned within agencies

remember

Earlier this month, UK advertisers including Vodafone, First Direct and the Central Office of Information pulled their ads from Facebook after they were placed on the British National Party’s profile page.

Facebook plans to offer targeted advertising

These ads would appear on the “news feed” of each user’s page and not as on banner ads and boxed flyers that appear on the borders of the site at present.

Oh well time will tell if anyone has anything to add to this topic or if anyone has access to some data let me know i would be very interested to know how advertising on the re network works….i would have thought there would be a lot of wasted inventory….

Online retail almost doubles to hit record high
by Nikki Sandison Brand Republic 20-Aug-07, 11:50

LONDON - Online shopping sales have exceeded £4bn a month for the first time, up 80% on last year, with sales for last month up £1.86bn on July 2006.

The highest sales growth was in electrical goods, with sales 102% higher than the previous year, according to the IMRG Index, which records UK online retail sales.
July’s 80% year-on-year growth is in stark contrast with the average of the preceding 12 months, of just 36%.

Ulric Jerome, Pixmania’s managing director for France & Northern Europe, said: “June and July are key months for sales of electrical products on the internet, as people buy electrical goods for their summer holidays: digital cameras, MP3s, laptops.
“Since the beginning of the year we have seen that confidence in internet shopping has reached a very high level in the mindset of consumers.”
Online clothing sales were 56% higher than a year earlier, reaching a record high, with growth of 1,587% from February 2001 to July 2007.
Factors contributing to July’s strong growth included the wet weather encouraging people to shop online, many new-season catalogues being published, and new or updated websites with greatly expanded product ranges.
James Roper, IMRG’s chief executive, said: “July’s extraordinarily strong market growth spotlights the high level of consumer demand, and yet we are really only just beginning to see basic facilities arriving, and still have nowhere near enough capacity to meet shoppers’ appetite for e-retail.”

and another text version

I have never actually tested any online stors such as this one…but it seems to me that we are still a while away from users watching and paying for TV /
video content online.

Especially in Australia but i may be wrong…………I am sure some adult orientated content has been paid for over the years hmmmmm

Does that mena that certian material in niche areas would work?

I wonder what happens if i stick an adsense ad in here

This is an example of the text version

This is test post using the free video content from thenewsroom.com

Step one before using this service you have to register.

Registration was simple and easy and you need to supply the usual details and payment details. I have not exactly read the fine print properly but there could be an issue with the payments being made from the US to other countries. Payments may be taxed before you receive them apparently it depends on your tax assessment situation or something. Either way if they tax you in the states this is probably a good thing lower rates for me and also you are not avoiding any payable tax thus all monies you make you can spend.

Any way the registration process was neat and tidy not problems took around 3 minutes to complete. I then received an prompt email from thenewsroom in my inbox.

This is how the service works

“TheNewsRoom is the premier news site of Voxant, the Viral Syndication Network™ (VSN). Voxant is dedicated to creating an open, global syndication network for rich media news content on the internet. For news organizations, Voxant opens new markets, getting their content found, played, and paid for on the web. For advertisers, the Viral Syndication Network™ creates new inventory and a targeted way to reach consumers throughout the “long tail” of the web. Website publishers and bloggers benefit from having access to thousands of fully licensed news stories that can be published on their site, as well as earning money through sharing advertising revenue.”

Its a CPM payment system so you need a lot of traffic to make any money the top rate for video content is $4US CPM so that means since you are reading this i just made like .25 cents….woo hoooooo.

Who ever said making money out of the net was going to be easy

Here is my first posting about David Beckam

Is David Beckam really worth all the hype?

WAthc the video and let me have my .25 cents

I haven’t been to this site for a while…..it is now worth checking out again.

If you live in Australia and work in the online industry you could be worse off by not visiting

The digitalministry.com.au

The site has grown somewhat an even has a jobs section now.

I use to use this siye when i was in the UK….jeepers it has grown….

Article from Brand republic starts here=

Gumtree.com, the free local classifieds site, is launching in the US to target the 2m British, Polish and Antipodean ex-pats.

Gumtree US will initially be rolled out in Boston, New York City and Chicago, with plans to expand elsewhere in the country, should the site prove popular. The launch is being supported by local media and search engine optimisation, with a strong emphasis on word of mouth marketing.

Martin Tschopp, general manager of Gumtree International said: “Offering free classifieds to local communities is what we are all about and this is what our existing users and the ex-pat communities across Chicago, NYC and Boston have asked us for.”As with other countries, our success in the US will depend on attracting great community-generated content.”
Gumtree hopes that the site will provide strong competition to the US classified sites Craigslist, which has shaken up the world of classified advertising since its launch; and Kijiji, which is an offshoot of eBay.
Gumtree now covers 70 international cities, and the US launch follows a July roll out in Hong Kong and Singapore.
The site was created in London in March 2000, and currently boasts 3m visitors a month in the UK, with 1m live ads at any one time.

Article from Brand republic ends here=

Amazing what you can do if you try! 1 Million live ads at anyone time and over #million visitors every month in the UK alone….. I can only dream

Ninemsn launch YouTube rival

…….. ninemsn through its site http://www.yourcut.com.au will allow people to put videos online, with the added bonus of 50% of ad revenue being given to the video poster, if ads that are automatically tagged with each video, are clicked on by the user.

Tony Thomas, ninemsn director of marketing, said: “yourCut is Australia’s first free online video-sharing and revenue-generating service. We chose to work with Yooster to get a more detailed understanding of consumers’ response to this new offering, particularly to see how they’d react to the opportunity of making money from sharing their videos online.

“We often ask our audience for feedback, and working with Yooster on this advanced word-of-mouth marketing campaign allowed us to get as many of their opinion leaders as possible using and sharing the yourCut product.”

Piers Hogarth-Scott, co-founder and CEO of Yooster in Australia, added: “The yourCut campaign not only generated positive word of mouth about the new service, but it also had thousands of opinion leaders involved in beta testing it and providing their feedback through our research system, ultimately to help ninemsn gain an understanding of how their target market would respond to yourCut prior to the official launch”.

The original article is at B and T………..

So what are you waiting for start uploading your videos…..

The never ending quest.

The best way will always end up being “Hard Work!”

But here are a few sites i have found that will give you a helping hand….. I am going to try and find a better longer list of these sites….

bla.st/
The Free International Web Directory

adgridwork.com/
adgridwork is a free advertising network and text link exchange.

Its all hotting up in the UK…..

Article from Brand Republic begins here =

LONDON - Guardian Unlimited has relaunched the website for the Guardian Weekly, the international news weekly as the Guardian Weekly Global Network, featuring first-person user generated news and social networking.

The Guardianweekly.co.uk site aims to build an international community of users who can register a profile, submit articles and communicate with other like-minded people around the world. The site is now split into two distinct sections — blue and orange. The blue section contains the first-person user generated content or eyewitness reports commissioned from various sources including Guardian and Observer foreign correspondents, and the content is structured around ten editorial subject areas, including politics, health, human rights and development.

Articles in the blue section include reports written by the team leader of the current Nasa space mission to Mars, an American soldier in Iraq, an Afghan father and son who have lived through decades of conflict and Hiroshima survivors.
The orange section is the social networking zone, giving users the opportunity to interact with each other and the site. Users can submit their own articles, video and images, comment on articles, rate and respond to other users comments and store their favourite articles.
Mark King, editor of the online Guardian Weekly Global Network, said: “We are making the focus of our reporting about how individuals are affected by global events.
“We also want to connect our readers, giving them the opportunity to truly effect change and providing a platform for voices that are often overlooked.”
The site now takes a similar format found on the recently relaunched Guardian Unlimited home page and its travel and science websites, with a wider grid and emphasis on photography, video, blogs and podcasts.

Article from Brand republic ends here =

I was wondering what they would measure success. Now that they are moving away from broadcast news and more into a broadcast / interactive site?
I also wonder how they are going to moderate all of there users entries, assuming they get thousands of post on any particular topic it will be hard to maintain.

Its interesting to see where the “News” sites go in the future.