It’s official: Communitainment is almost a real word

The Internet is now a mainstream medium, according to research company Piper Jaffray & Co., which recently released a comprehensive report under the catchy title, “The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and The Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.”

It doesn’t surprise me, because just a few years ago, the Internet was perceived as the medium of the moment. Now it’s the medium of record.

The study also found that the Internet is the leading medium at work and second at home, just behind TV. Internet reach continues to grow exponentially while the cost of both advertising and publishing decreases, making it more accessible to even the most casual entrepreneur. And with mobile and emerging platforms on the rise, greater reach is possible.

And that’s good news for you, dear Yahoo! Search Marketing advertiser. Instead of looking for customers—which is what advertisers and publishers of the past had to do—now they come and find you.

Search is the second most commonly used application on the Web, with nearly 600 million searches daily. Today, search marketing is a $15.8 billion annual global industry, and it is expected to grow to $44.5 billion annually in the next five years.

With our new advertising system, which you may know by its code name, “Project Panama,” we’re empowering our advertisers with greater control of their campaigns. That means more control over campaign budgeting, scheduling and geo-targeting, which could translate to a greater slice of that very large pie noted above.

Communitainment?
The report, a whopping 425-pager (I read most of it—honestly), has also come up with an enchanting new buzzword: communitainment.

The Internet, says the report, has become a principal medium for community, communication and entertainment. This new activity, communitainment, is taking time away from other, more traditional types of content consumption on the Internet. Piper Jaffray names Yahoo! Answers as an example of communitainment.

Search, therefore, becomes one of the leading actions for communitainment. The analysis found that there are more than 550 million searches performed daily on the Web from all over the world, and that—get this—35 percent of all Internet searches are commercial in nature.

The success of search marketing follows a very commonsensical observation: Customers tend to act on an offer when they are actively looking for a product or service.

Consumers are now in Control
“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” says Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray. “We believe this will cause a significant rise in prominence of the Internet as a major content consumption and marketing medium.”

In fact, the Piper Jaffray report placed Yahoo! as one of the top companies to watch in this arena: “The company is at the crossroads of changing its structure and embracing the User Revolution.”

Thanks for the kind mention, Piper Jaffray. But it’s our users who are the ones leading the charge. And as the new media landscape continues to develop, we’ll be working with you to be a part of it.

—Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Yahoo’s Ian Kennedy Keeps His Eye on the Surprise

Ian Kennedy, one of our resident eggheads and a senior project manager here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, cast his roving eye on the South by South West confab this week and lived to blog about it. Highlights from his stream-of-consciousness postings include:

• The future of online magazines (interesting lessons for the publisher here)
• Topix’s talk about moderating online communities
• A case study on Lonelygirl15 (the Milli Vanilli-esque faux reality show that debuted on YouTube)
• The panel featuring our own Cody Simms on online publishing and ad networks
• Bridging the online culture gap

Plus lots more detail you’re not likely to find anywhere else. View Ian’s SXSW report: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.

Also, check out Yahoo! Marc Levin’s SXSW 2007 photo album on Flickr.

—Michael Mattis

Charlene Li blogs about whether blogging’s worth it

Charlene Li, one of our favorite bloggers from Forrester Research, has posted about her recently-released Forrester Research report “The ROI of Blogging,” which she wrote with colleague, Chloe Stromberg.

The value of blogging to a brand has been one of those open questions ever since businesses and entrepreneurs began to put the form to use for marketing, PR and customer relations purposes. But should businesses bother to blog? Note Li and Stromberg:

While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.

Just how valuable can blogging be to a business? Is it worth the investment? Li and Stromberg say “yes.”

Among the corporate blogs that Li and Stromberg studied was General Motors’ FastLane Blog, the goal of which is “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers.” A key metric, they say, is comments (which not all corporate blogs allow):

FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila—there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white.

Although she admits their findings are somewhat subjective, Li believes that they have found “a starting point for an otherwise nebulous activity.”

We think blogging is definitely worth it, albeit with a few caveats.  Blogging represents a different kind of communication between businesses and their audiences—prospects, customers, the press and other interested parties—than traditional channels such as press releases or advertising. It requires a very different attitude, voice and tone in a networked community where the conversation is often two-way (and sometimes multi-way). A blog that sounds too much like a press release or looks like just another marketing vehicle is bound to fail. Striking a balance between getting your message across while serving the needs of your users and building community is critical.

For more, check out these posts on Charlene’s blog:

• New ROI of blogging report from Forrester
• Calculating the ROI of blogging
• Calculating the ROI of blogs – it’s not about the math

—Micheal Mattis, Blog Editor

What you told us about how you display ads on your sites

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is the second in a series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Following up on our previous post about optimization, below are the results from the questions we asked our readers. Our goal is to help you understand what your fellow publishers are doing, and get you thinking about how you can improve your own publishing experience.

Q: Where do you see the most successful ad placement?

Ads embedded in content is the clear leader, with almost half of you indicating that this is where you see the most successful ad placement, followed by leaderboard placement for about a quarter of responses.

These results were not surprising to the team here at Yahoo! Publisher Network, though we have found through our own data that the right rail also performs well. Check out this post from last May, where we discussed ad placement performance and eye-tracking studies. It does make sense that more visible ads—such as those at the top of a page or embedded within content—will perform better, though optimal ad placement will vary depending on individual sites and their user bases.

Here’s another question we asked you, this one about ad design:

Q: Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?

It’s overwhelmingly clear that you design ads to blend into your site, rather than to contrast. We expected that the response would be more evenly split between “Contrast” and “Blend in,” due to the fact that contrasting ads may work better to gain attention. 

Blend in or stand out?
To gain further insight, we again tapped into our experts here at Yahoo! Publisher Network to provide some helpful guidance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Up-and-coming age group tuned-in, turned on

Top Forrester analyst and blogger, Charlene Li, reports that 24 percent of “Generation Y” reads blogs. Writes Li:

Gen Yers—18- to 26-year-olds who came of age with broadband, cell phones and iPods, among other things—stand apart from older generations because of their hands-on approach to the Web. Marketers trying to anticipate future consumer trends should tune in to Gen Yers.

 

One key data point that stood out for me: 24% of Gen Yers read blogs, which is twice as often as the 12% of Gen Xers (ages 27-40) and three times the 7% of Young Boomers (ages 41-50) that read blogs. So skeptics of blogs should suspend their disbelief and look to at least one bellwether demographic to get an idea of how widespread blog readership can potentially grow in the future… More »

Advertisers exploring the potential value of the long tail, take heed: the Gen Y demographic accounts for 28 percent of the U.S. population alone. Likewise, bloggers and other small- and medium-sized publishers ought to consider taking this tech-smart and affluent group’s wants into account when developing content and community.

For me, personally, there’s good news and bad news in Charlene’s findings. The good news is I can say to the blog skeptics out there: “Take that!” The bad news is finding out that I’m a “Young Boomer.”

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

CentralPark.com among Time’s coolest sites of 2006

We love it when passionate publishers succeed.

Way back in April when the blog first launched, we ran a Publisher Spotlight featuring Aric Boyles and his already outstanding web site, CentralPark.com. Well, Aric continued to enhance his site, adding quality content, new features and functionality. At Yahoo!, we were pretty pleased to see Flickr and Yahoo! Answers interactivity badges among the many additions and refinements. “I’ve found that the addition of Yahoo! content really enhances the overall user experience on my site,” Aric told us over the phone from his home New York.

Now Aric’s inventiveness and attention to detail have won the site recognition. On August 8, Time magazine announced its 50 Coolest Web Sites of 2006 and CentralPark.com was one of them. Time’s Maryanne Murray Buencher enthuses:

This comprehensive, interactive guide to one of the world’s most famous public spaces offers up-to-date information on 43 different attractions, from the Carousel to the Conservatory Garden, Strawberry Fields to the Swedish Cottage. A model of organization and design, it’s a pleasure to navigate.

We think the award is well deserved. CentralPark.com is a living case study for good publishing practices—great, original content; clever use of interactive features; attractive design and crisp layout.

Congrats, Aric.

—Willan Johnson, Vice President & General Manager, and the Team

Nearly 50 million Americans have posted content online

According to a report released this week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization, 48 million Americans have posted content online. In addition, by March 2006, 42 percent of all Americans had broadband Internet access at home, up 12 percent from March of the previous year. The report’s author, John Horrigan, suggests that user-generated content is now at the leading edge of Internet usage. How does it feel to be in the vanguard?

In another recent study, the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 73 percent of American adults (over the age of 18) were online as of March 31, 2006.

Can you spell “opportunity?”

Daily NewsGrok

These days, Yahoo!’s got a bucket of blogs. There’s so many, in fact, it’s hard to keep up with all that’s going on. Fortunately, there’s a real grassroots effort inside Yahoo!, as well as by individual Yahoo!s themselves, to help you get the information you need.

Last week we introduced you to the Y! Cool Thing of the Day Blog. Today we bring you Planet Yahoo! Started by Carlo Zottmann, a 32-year-old local market engineer at Yahoo! in Munich, Germany, Planet Yahoo! aggregates all of Yahoo!’s blogs, official and unofficial, as well as other Yahoo!-related Web properties, via RSS.

“There’s a lot of great Yahoo! stuff out there,” says Carlo Zottmann, 32, publisher of this unofficial blog. “But sometimes we don’t do enough to get the word out. I started Planet Yahoo! to help do that.”

If you want to keep up with the latest, be sure to subscribe to Planet Yahoo!’s RSS feed.

Picture’s worth a thousand words

In case you missed our Intro Video the day we launched the blog, it now has a permanent home on our About page, along with audio files of some our key team members. Or see the Video now.

Help!

You sometimes need some. We all do. To help you get the Yahoo! Publisher Network help you need, we’ve added a permanent link to Customer Support in the right hand margin.

Daily NewsGrok 

Y! Cool Thing of the Day?
It’s true. At least one cool thing comes out of Yahoo! just about every day. To help you keep up on the latest, some of the louder yodelers at Yahoo! built, on their own time, the completely unofficial and irreverent Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day Blog.

Sweet Caroline
What do Yahoo! Publisher Network team members get up to after a long day of manning the booth at Webmaster World in Boston? One word: Sox! 

Daily NewsGrok 

Here’s a lively discussion on Publishing 2.0, where publisher Scott Karp, as well as Yahoo!’s Matt McAlister and Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine, talk about the impact of social media on advertising and the decreasing CPM that new technology offers. Go there >>