Gearing up for Twitter’s self-serve advertising launch — currently in beta stage with only a small selection of advertisers — the company announced its acquisition of spam and malware protection service Dasient on Monday. Dasient will be integrated into Twitter’s “revenue engineering team because they have a deep understanding of advertising-platform security issues,” says Rachael Horwitz, a spokesperson for Twitter. The team will be very valuable as Twitter continues to expand its ad products. Twitter introduced its new ad service in November 2011 to a “handful” of advertisers. The self-serve platform lets advertisers purchase ads without going through a sales representative. Anyone with a credit card and the desire to utilize “Promoted Products” to boost their brand recognition can get on-board with this service. However, the service is not yet available to the public. Twitter has moved slowly into paid advertising, starting with “Promoted Tweets” in 2010. Self-serve ads could [...]
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YouTube streams 4 billion online videos each day, more than one for every other person on Earth and a 25% jump over eight months ago. YouTube, a unit of Google, attributed the growth to iterations of the website on smartphones and TVs that have encouraged more use, according to Reuters. The number of uploads on the platform is also staggering: about 60 hours of video is now added to the site every minute, compared to 48 hours a minute in May. It’s unclear how much Google is benefiting by such growth. In its fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts last week, Google didn’t break out revenue figures for YouTube. However, the company disclosed that its display ads are generating $5 billion in revenue on an annualized run rate basis. Despite that encouraging sign of growth for Google — such advertising was only a $2.5 billion business in October 2010 — Google’s [...]
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Want to capture customer attention with online video ads? They’d better not be more than 15 seconds long, a new poll suggests. According to a survey by Poll Position, about 54% of Americans think 15 seconds is the acceptable time to view an online video ad before seeing free content, from YouTube clips to streaming TV episodes. The poll — conducted among 1,179 registered voters via a telephone survey — found that patience is low when it comes to sitting through a lengthy commercial before gaining access to the content they want to watch. Only 12% of consumers believe 30 seconds is an appropriate length. Meanwhile, 4% of respondents said a 45-second ad is acceptable and 3% said the same thing about a minute-long ad. About 27% expressed no opinion on the matter. The news comes on the heels of a study released last week by eMarkerter that revealed marketers [...]
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For the first time in U.S. history, marketers are projected to spend more on online advertising than on advertising in print magazines and newspapers. According to a study released Thursday by eMarketer, online advertising is expected to generate $39.5 billion in sales this year — a 23.3% increase from 2011 — compared to a spend of $33.8 billion on print. That’s impressive growth, especially since 2011 also witnessed a 23% jump in online ad spending, according to eMarketer’s calculations. Online ad revenues should continue to grow over the next half-decade, albeit at a more modest rate, as shown in the chart below. Total online ad investment is projected to hit $62 billion by that time. The forecast for print is foreboding. Marketers are expected to continue cutting their print advertising budgets for the next half-decade, spending $32.3 billion in 2016, 10% less than what they invested in print ads in [...]
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Generate ‘organic’ traffic as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. First, you have to know and plan your keywords. Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine to find something on the internet. A keyword can consist of a single word, such as “cars” or a phrase, like “fuel efficient cars”. Second, is your keyword placement. Make sure your ‘title tags’ (the words you see in your browser window) have your keywords in them. This is what search engines use for the title display in their search results. Search engines like new content so you have to keep your website regularly updated. Don’t create a website and just let it sit there forever. Think about generating backlinks. This is where other internet sites link to your website. They are important because search engines look at the number and the level of quality of websites that [...]
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