Green: it's the little things

Sometimes the little things can speak louder. Here's some support for www.blackle.com one man's quest to make us a tad greener. Cheaper than LiveEarth, and substantially less compromised.

All things being equal, Online Advertising isn't

Yahoo, ComScore, Nielsen and many industry pundits are questioning the digital advertising industry's currency.

Page Impressions are outdated - they aren't a true measure of a users interaction or use of a site. Monthly Unique users are overly flattering given that they measure reach over a month, rather than a day, hour (like Newspaper, Radio, TV).

More worrying for industry beheamouths, Google and MSN (even Yahoo), between 4-6 percent of a users time is spent on Search. But search accounts for over 40% of internet ad revenue, so something is out of sink.

So advertisers and agencies need to work on new metrics to measure the value of their campaign? Perhaps.

Could this be a threat to searches dominance? Unlikely. You can't really argue with the results from a search marketing campaign and this is what has driven the industry. The fact people spend less time on search versus destination sites may actually favour the advertiser - since they less engaged and more likely to be pulled away.

If advertisers do follow time-spent or another metric, the big guns will want to have a hold on the market if it moves...and this could be what's behind their acquisitions of DoubleClick (Google), Aquantive (Microsoft) and Right Media (Yahoo).

Land of the Rising Sun

For the last year, I've been working with the team at The Sun on their digital strategy and marketing activity. The Sun's digital product(s) have been a dark horse which are only now getting real traction with both consumers and the industry. It is truly unique and edgy, it appeals to the mass market (but may not be to everyone's taste) and has a wide portfolio of digital products, from editorial to commerce to pay to play.


The result of huge effort in the last year from editorial, tech, marketing has ramped up audience, making thesun.co.uk the most read newspaper site on a daily unique user basis. 'Newspaper site' is a strange measure, what's more important is the site is also in the top 15 of the fastest growing sites in the UK, alongside illustrious names like Facebook, Myspace and YouTube.

Sure, other sites are much bigger on a Global traffic basis, but head to head in the UK, theSun.co.uk is outgrowing the others hands down.

The results are a huge credit to the digital team. As for 'old media' going digital, I'll be hugely biased and say The Sun is one to watch over the next year. I just cant tell you why or how:-)

Sun wins Best Media award at the NMA's

ABCe: Sun overtakes Times as second-largest newspaper website