Mad Men are watching you

Real-time bidding allows marketers to buy known audiences. The winner serves the advertisement, often customising it—so you may see more ads for convertible cars on a sunny day. The whole process generally takes some 150 milliseconds, or less than half the blink of an eye.

Real-time bidding makes it easy to aim ads at susceptible eyeballs. Firms such as John Lewis (a British department store), Zappos (an online shoe-seller) and Lenovo (a computer-maker) know that you have visited their websites because they dropped digital markers onto your computer. They then outbid others to reach you again. This is called “retargeting”.

Read more at The Economist

5 Major Life Lessons Journalism Taught Me

1. Prepare for a first date like you prepare for a big interview.

Dress nicely, but not nicer than they usually do. Begin by asking a question you know they’d love to answer, whether it’s important to you or not. Don’t be first to fill an awkward silence. Do your research in advance, but never let it show. Put your cell phone on vibrate and don’t look at it until you’re in the bathroom. If they insist on splitting the bill, insist on paying the tip – and let them see you do so generously. Always end with, “If I have any more questions, can I call you?”

Read the rest here.

What the Microsoft-Skype Deal Means

In a record acquisition for the company, Microsoft announced it’s buying Skype for $8.5 billion. Explains the release: Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices. There’s every reason to believe that Skype’s relationship with Facebook will expand.

For news organizations that increasingly use Skype for live interviews, the acquisition could be good news. Skype is still reeling a bit from its December outage, and Microsoft could beef up Skype’s dependability. For TV, that’s critical.

Read more here

Facebook now ‘critical’ to online news traffic, says Pew study

In the most recent sign that Facebook is encroaching on Google's heels, the 2011 study from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the social network is becoming an important traffic mover in the world of online news.

Google may still hold the top spot as the primary traffic driver to news websites, but according to a new study from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, social networking giant Facebook is emerging as a “critical player” in the Internet mechanisms that push readers to news stories.

“Google and Facebook are increasingly set up as competitors (for) sorting through the material on the Web,” said Pew in the report. “If searching for news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be among the most important of the next.”

While this may sound impressive, Facebook currently remains well behind the top three traffic drivers, which include Google, the Drudge Report and Yahoo. Despite positive numbers from Facebook’s corner, the study shows that Twitter is a terrible traffic driver: “Twitter appears at this point to play a relatively small role in sharing of links to news sources,

Read more here

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers. That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

Read more at the New York Times

Random acts of Journalism

There are countless people out there who use social media as part of their daily lives, and every so often some of them find themselves in the right place at the right time - or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on the situation. Given that they're already using social media to document their lives and the world around them, it's natural for them to capture a news event they're witnessing firsthand.

People find themselves caught in the middle of a newsworthy situation, and they try to capture it. While they're conducting random acts of journalism, we should try to guide them, as best we can, to be the best journalists they can be. Even if it's fleeting.

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Online Reps in the Dirt

Forrester, a research outfit, reckons that the global market for cloud services could grow from $41 billion last year to $241 billion by 2020. One reason for this is that the savings that can be won by shifting computing to the cloud remain compelling; another is that Amazon-style snafus have been rare.

Read more at The Economist

Break-ins and Breakdowns

Sony admitted this week that hackers had stolen personal information, possibly including credit-card details, of many of the 77m-plus users of its online-gaming and entertainment networks. Amazon, an American online retailer and provider of “cloud computing” services, has suffered a lengthy breakdown at one of the giant server farms whose storage and processing facilities it rents to other companies.

The two lapses, though unconnected and different in nature, have raised the question of whether customers can really trust the basic idea behind the cloud—that you can buy computing services from the internet, just like gas or water from a utility.

Read more at The Economist

Turning to Social Networks for News

Just as CNN once challenged newspapers and evening newscasts with a constant stream of images from the Persian Gulf war, Twitter and Facebook have become early warning systems for breaking news — albeit not always reliable ones.

Read more at the New York Times

Newspaper Circs Slip

Daily circulation at most American newspapers declined again between the six-month period ending March 2010 and the six-month period ending March 2011, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. A MediaPost analysis of 80 of the largest newspapers in the U.S. showed total daily circulation declining 2.6% from 19 million in 2010 to 18.5 million in 2011.

The number of newspapers posting gains in total circulation -- even including digital editions and branded editions under new ABC rules -- remained small, and the overall picture remained one of decline. The new ABC figures seem unlikely to do much for print ad revenues, which have declined precipitously over the last couple of years. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print ad revenues have fallen 52% from $47.8 billion in 2005 to $22.8 billion in 2010.

Read more here

Billboard Boom

MagnaGlobal, a media researcher, predicts that worldwide spending on out-of-home advertising will expand by 8.3% in 2011 to about $26.4 billion, faster growth than that seen for other non-internet forms of advertising (see chart). Spending on digital billboards and posters is expected to double in the next five years, to $5.2 billion.

Then there is “gladvertising” and “sadvertising”, a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.

Read more at The Economist

Trouble @Twitter

Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the site users visit to read and broadcast 140-character messages, has leveled off. Nearly half the people who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the network, according to an ExactTarget report from January 2011.

Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009.

Read more at Fortune Magazine.

Google's Video Chat Service

Google has launched its own video chat service for Android smartphones to compete with the Facetime application on the iPhone. And unlike the Apple software, the video chat update to Google Talk works over 3G as well as WiFi networks. It uses the front-mounted cameras on high-end Android handsets.

Read more here

Smartphone User Study

This video presents key findings from "The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Consumers," a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm.

Just Add Audio

According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s general manager of digital media (says) “We made a conscious decision to position our (written) news coverage prominently in our mobile applications because we wanted people to think of us as a comprehensive and up to the minute source of news, not simply a source of radio listening.”

Read more here.

Measuring and Improving Accuracy in Journalism

Professional journalism is supposed to be “factual,” “accurate,” or just plain true. Is it? The last big study of mainstream reporting accuracy found errors (defined below) in 59% of 4,800 stories across 14 metro newspapers. This level of inaccuracy — where about one in every two articles contains an error — has persisted for as long as news accuracy has been studied, over seven decades now.

Read more here (a post by Jonathan Stray ( interactive technology editor for the Associated Press)

Facebook Investors Look for Exits

A group of Facebook shareholders is seeking to offload $1 billion worth of shares on the secondary market, a sale that would value the company at more than $70 billion, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation. It would represent one of the largest transactions of Facebook shares to date and points to a growing wariness among early-stage investors and employees who fear Facebook's growth cannot keep pace with its market valuation.

Facebook, the world's No. 1 Internet social network, earned $355 million in net income in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $1.2 billion.

Read more here

Big Newspaper Chains Still Hurting

Newspapers are suffering continuing declines in the first quarter, scuttling any hopes that the medium might enjoy a comeback. While industry-wide figures aren't yet available, first quarter results from major publishers, including the New York Times Co., Gannett, and McClatchy, give little reason for optimism.

Read more at Media Daily News

Facial Recognition App

Google Debuts New Online Magazine

Google has quietly launched its own full-length online magazine, a quarterly publication whose aim is to create a “breathing space in a busy world.” The first edition of Think Quarterly, based out of the U.K., is a 68-page dive into the world of data and its impact on business.

Google says that Think Quarterly is designed as useful information for its business customers... "anyone who’s interested can visit the companion website at www.thinkquarterly.co.uk.”

Read more at Mashable