by Jason Wilk on March 22, 2009
This is my comment on TechCrunch today in response to a guest author’s article on the death of advertising. Who’s this guest author? He’s Eric K. Clemons, Professor of Operations at Information Management at Wharton.
Clemons, if you think that the internet is going to be some ad-free ecosytem in the near future, you’re completely wrong. You represent the type of liberal (not to say I am different), DIGG using type person (with Ad-Blocker) that is too smart for the advertising and thus can find many ways to pick apart why it’s not working. Well, don’t forget that the very content you just wrote is being monetized at this very second, whether you like it or not and the site that published it (TechCrunch), needs the money so it can continue to push quality content (unlike what you just wrote). You can’t just come out and trash every aspect of internet advertising and the freemium models that exist. I’ll give you 3 reasons why you are out of line. I can give you more at another time.
1. Don’t talk about Second Life as if it is a model to followed. Things like selling virtual goods is not a a direction everyone can follow, just as you said not everyone can buy their keywords on Google, so it is not a sustainable or scalable business model. Are you nuts? First of all, you openly admit you are not a part of a virtual community, so how do you know you would pay for goods and this is a model to be copied? SecondLife isn’t even doing well. You are a part of the content community, and seem to easily be able to bash the idea that you would ever interact with someone’s display ad. Get a life.
2. People do not trust advertising? Look at the ads surrounding your article. Is there one company or brand that you don’t recognize? No. So, what is so untrustworthy about any of these ads. And what kind of sites are these ads on that make people not want to trust them? Is it TechCrunch, is it Hulu, is it some random site no one has ever heard of? Such a general statement with little substance.
3. You would be equally happy to purchase a search service? What kind of Roger McNamee, acid-trip-palm-pre-will-succeed, type BS is this statement? It’s the same ingenious concept that if Facebook were to charge $1 a month, they would be making a killing. Not going to happen, not intelligent, and would certainly be a flop.
I just want to say that for a Wharton professor, you clearly don’t understand what monetization strategies are working on the Internet. I actually began to laugh when you started talking about mobile contextual advertising, as if you know what the future beholds for it. I don’t want to call you out any further. I’d love to make some sense for you over the phone though. Have a good one.
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by Jason Wilk on March 3, 2009
- AdMob is the company which stores and analyzes data from every ad request, impression, and click on the mobile web. Each month, they release an AdMob Mobile Metrics Report covering manufacturer, device and country-specific data on AdMob’s top six markets by impressions served: US, UK, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the Philippines.
- Mobile Connecting via WiFi: Measured in the United States by examining the geographic distribution of WiFi usage throughout the country. The West and Northeast experienced heavier WiFi usage by population than the South and Midwest in January 2009. California led the way with 18% of usage, followed by New York with 14% and Texas with 8%.
- Mobile Internet In Western Europe: Traffic from Western Europe increased 132% in the last 12 months to 550 million requests in January 2009. Growth was strong across the top countries with Spain and Italy increasing at the fastest clip.
- Worldwide requests from Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January. Building on its strong December, iPod Touch growth outpaced iPhone growth in top markets. The iPod Touch now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.
- The G1 (HTC Dream) was the number 18 device in the US with 0.9% share in December. Android has 3% Operating System Share in the US.
- Read The Whole Report Here, thanks to IntoMobile
by Jason Wilk on February 5, 2009
- In an effort to thwart off time-theft and loiterers, Apple has decided to add Facebook to the list of banned websites at retail locations nationwide. When I asked some of the genius’ today whether or not anyone noticed the change, they all said that Facebook stopped working sometime in the past week. One of the genius’ said “Apple Stores have become a regular Internet Cafe, so placing the most popular time-killer [Facebook] of them all on the banned-list will certainly help everyone get a chance to test out the computers”.
- As you may have heard, MySpace was banned in May of 2007 from all Apple Stores. When asked why, Apple said “Nearly 2 million people visit Apple Stores every week. We want to provide everyone a chance to test-drive a Mac, so we are no longer offering access to MySpace in our stores.” Apple Stores, which now total 251 worldwide, see an average of 15,744 visitors weekly per store (Q4, 2008). So, currently about 16 million people per month are now denied the right to jump on for a minute (or an hour) to update their status or do their daily stalking. It will be interesting if Facebook will see a slight dip in traffic this month due to the change.
Trying to stay up on Apple? Check out these recent articles:
Is Apple Secretly Working With Axiotron?
Video Conferencing Plans For The iPhone
Flash Coming To The iPhone: Says Adobe
iPhone 2 Rumors Get Some Hard Evidence
by Jason Wilk on January 30, 2009
- A new provision might give Verizon $1.6 billion in credits in the next two years to bring fast Internet connections to rural and low-income areas*. The House bill that passed Wednesday will provide $6 billion in grants to broadband projects. The latest Senate bill increases those grants to $9 billion says The WSJ.
- Here is the breakdown of tax cuts: Companies would get a 20% tax credit on investments made on broadband speeds of at least 5 megabits per second for unserved areas and a 10% cut for investment in low-income and rural areas.
- Providing unserved, rural, low-income areas with speeds of at least 100 megabits per second gets a 20 percent credit. Currently Verizon FiOS is one of the only ISP’s with speeds at or above 100 megabits per second, and here is why they will cash in. It’s all in the small print. The bill says “A qualified subscriber, with respect to next generation broadband services, means any nonresidential subscriber maintaining a permanent place of business in a rural, undeserved, or unserved area, or any residential subscriber.
- ”or any residential subscriber”–means that Verizon will get a tax cut for continuing to build out their FiOS network, which they are already currently doing. AT&T and the smaller phone companies don’t have technology that meets the 100 meg-bit-per-second threshold and Comcast is just beginning to roll out their new technology to meet the qualifications. According to analysts, Verizon is planning to spend $4 billion a year to continue building out FiOS, meaning they would get an annual tex credit of $800 million. The tax credits are in place to encourage the company to accelerate its plans and run FiOS past more homes over the next two years. How much did Verizon have to pay senator Rockefeller of West Virginia to include those last 4 words in the bill?
- What’s not included in the bill is that along with the tax credits to build the infrastructure, is an incentive to create more jobs with the additions or cut prices. Verizon, who cut 2700 jobs the day after Thanksgiving, and has cut 15,000 jobs since 2003 is receiving nothing but free money for this initiative. What’s worse is that the Senate proposal also would not require any recipients of the credits to abide by network neutrality. Verzion is already getting grants to help build out the 700 mhz wireless spectrum they won the auction for last year, and on top of that they had another record year, beating analysts projections by a landmark in the down economy. Remove the last 4 words from the bill, require them to create more jobs and lower prices, and then you have got yourself a potentially legitimate infrastructure grant. Other than that, this is ridiculous.
What Do You Think? Fill In The Blank In The Comments Section:
I Think This Deal Is (A) __________
by Jason Wilk on January 27, 2009
- Verizon posted Q4 revenue of $24.6 billion and profits of 61 cents a share, right in line with Wall St. predictions of $24.7 billion and 61 cents. Stock was down on the news as investors still bearish on the economy, increasing mobile competition for 2009, faulty RIM products and major infrastructure expenses about to be shelled out to build the new wireless spectrum.
- Stats: The company added 1.4 million net new wireless customers in the quarter, increasing the total to 72.1 million. That was up 9.9%, and does not include Alltel customers from the acquisition, which closed January 9.
- 303,000 new FiOS TV customers and 282,000 new FiOS Internet customers.
- Revenue was up 3.4% from a year ago, or 4.6% on an adjusted, non-GAAP basis.
- At least we’re getting a good idea of who to invest in the next time the economy crashes: Verizon, Google, Apple, very impressive earnings reports.
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Verizon Getting Government Help? Scam
by Jason Wilk on January 30, 2009
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I Think This Deal Is (A) __________
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