AdViking

AdViking is having a month of zooming down on various verticals* and naturally a side effect has been the tracking of relevant items. Which is why AdViking just came across the news that another ad network has been launched.

BBN (Business-to-Business Network) is going to be run by WPP’s 24/7 Real Media on behalf of traditional B2B publishers: Cygnus Business Media, Nielsen Business Media, Reed Business Information and McGraw-Hill. Only numbers being touted is the network will have a reach of 10 million unique visitors a month.

Why it’s interesting:

• It’s now safe to say that the indy ad network is the new black has jumped the shark but AdViking still believes there is more to come, e.g.: The major US leading verticals (i.e.: autotrader.com, careerbuilder.com and move.com) should band together to create something very powerful.
• Like, quadrantONE, the ad network created by newspaper co’s: Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., the New York Times Co. and Tribune Co, this is cool because we’re finally seeing traditional publishers start making some serious moves to protect their futures.

What doesn’t seem to be so great:

It appears that the network will only be for display advertising, which doesn’t really lend itself to a typical B2B advertiser. It is stated though that the hope with the network is to grow B2B spend, not just move it around. This might be possible but as the network will really be about bulking out the inventory to provide appealing packages to Agencies, the real opportunity is going for a 3rd party to be to come along and optimise the distressed inventory.

*Vertical Zoom

AdViking gets to have the unique opportunity of being able to focus on different verticals through participation in various events:

• B2B - Speaking on Vertical Search at Magazine 2008
• Classifieds - Facilitation of a workshop on Monetising Search at the ICMA General Meeting in Brussels
• Local - Participation in the Local Search Summit in Oslo

With the launch of Google’s Second Search Box are Publishers under a serious threat to their digital revenue streams? AdViking believes this is the case for two primary reasons:

• Lost Revenue
• Loss of User Control

Lost Revenue

Based on the recent crunching of revenue numbers, the general trend seems to be that Google’s revenue growth is at the cost of traditional media owners. Meaning that if any Publisher doesn’t see this as an additional direct and competitive threat to their business, then they really need to wake up and smell the coffee.

From early feedback AdViking has received, Publishers are giving mixed reviews to the Second Search Box. The more forward thinking and strategic are aghast and the less aggressive aren’t too worried and are saying that increased traffic will make up for the lost revenue of that initial hit. This is erroneous thinking for a few reasons:

In the short term, the loss of traffic will lead directly to lost revenue.

In the medium term, by counting on this additional boost in traffic, Publishers will become even more indebted to Google for driving traffic.

In the long term, as Publisher metrics worsen (eCPM, traffic, etc.) then this will lose to the further loss of advertisers as they spend more and more money with Google.

Loss of User Experience Control

Publishers have spent a lot of time and money working on the User Experience, especially as Search as moved to the primary method of finding content, the relevancy models for their search results.

By allowing Google to apply a one-size-fits all model, then all of the benefits of knowing your content, knowing your users, etc. is thrown out the window.

Below are two different examples that show the negative impact of the Google’s Second Search Box on User Experience.

Bear Stearns on New York Times

Laptop on BestBuy

Postscript:

• Official Google post about Second Site Search
• The cynic in AdViking questions, will these feature go away after the end of Q1?

Eric Schmidt is singing a different tune from his troops this week in an attempt to calm down a storm brewing with the World Association of Newspapers, the defacto global organisation for newspaper publishers, about WAN’s attempt to level/organise the playing field around the way content is distributed across the Web.

Last week, at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit Rob Jonas, Google’s head of media and publishing partnerships in Europe, said in his keynote that the current standard (robots.txt) “provides everything that most publishers need to do”. In response, Gavin O’Reilly, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers and COO, questioned this stance as from his view Publishers strongly disagree.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt changed the tune and told ITWire actually the problem is not that Google doesn’t want to implement it, it’s just that they are having problems implementing it.

• Current standard, Robots.txt is limited to telling crawlers that you can or can’t crawl the content
• New proposed standard, Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) provides Publisher with much more control, such as putting a time stamp on how long content can be used.

It’s probably too obvious a point to make and maybe AdViking is getting too jaded here. But it seems to be that isn’t in Google’s self-interest to solve the tech issues to implement this new standard that gives Publishers much more control over how their content is used. If I was working at Microsoft Live Search, ASK even Yahoo! in the crawler team, I would be looking to pony up to WAN and the other publisher groups to get ACAP supported and get a quick PR win.