The Apple PC guy/ Mac guy ads are well known. The series with Justin Long and John Hodgman has become a cultural phenomenon, being parodied and copied wide and far. Apple has taken the ads online with a new campaign that combines the fun of the original TV ads with a creative use of site ad space. Instead of simply using a video ad, the campaign utilizes a right hand box and a top leaderboard with both characters appearing to look at the leaderboard as the message there fails, presenting a negative message on Vista.
The campaign has been spotted on sites including Engadget, PCMag and News.com, where on the later it was also displayed on a page reviewing Vista. Clever stuff from Apple. Ad video below via Mac Rumors:
Newspaper ad sales continue their long, sad decline, down 7.4 percent in the third quarter. The shift to online is not going to save the industry. (And neither is the Kindle).
While online ads keep growing at a healthy clip, up 21 percent to $773 million industrywide, it is not enough to make up for the decline in print ads. Print ads in the third quarter were $10.1 billion. That is $1 billion less than they were in the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, online newspaper ad sales rose only by $135 million. After six straight quarters of decline, print ad sales are at 1997 levels—lower if you adjust for inflation.
(Photo via Appleheartz. Chart via Reflections of a Newsosaur)
Duncan Riley said “BrightSpot.tv on the other hand comes with some interesting backers that might just make it a breakout in the space.”
He was wrong. It’s now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.
One of the hardest to get beta accounts right now is Seesmic, Loic Le Meur’s new startup that went into private beta in early October.
The service, which can most easily be described as a video Twitter, is popular with the 300 people who are beta testing it so far. Le Meur says that more than half of them are extremely active, and 200 videos are being posted daily.
There are over 5,000 people on the beta invite wait list. But if you’ve gotten to this post quickly enough, you can get in immediately. The first 100 people to send an email to techcrunch@seesmic.com will be given beta accounts. Everyone after the first 100 will be added to the beta list.
At some point, Le Meur says, existing beta holders will be able to invite others to join as well. As soon as that functionality goes live we’ll add Seesmic to InviteShare.
Disclosure: I have also become an investor in Seesmic and have updated my disclosures on our about page.
Casual gaming is a big business. A video games analyst at IDC, Schelley Olhava, estimated 2.6 million casual games were purchased ($52.7 million) last year. But in game advertising firm NeoEdge says they can triple the revenue of these games by serving ads instead of charging. Their rich media ads are served as pre-roll, post-roll, or interstitial advertisements in games. Today they’ve taken the system, Neo ARM, out of private beta and opened it to all developers.
MochiAds is another casual gaming advertising system we’ve covered in the past. Unlike MochiAds, NeoEdge doesn’t rely on developers to insert ads through a self-serve toolkit, but instead adds the advertising code to a developer’s game themselves (a potential bottleneck). Revenue from the ads are split about 50-50. NeoEdge says they can integrate with more formats than just flash games (i.e. download games), although flash appears to be format affecting most developers. Their system delivers the ads dynamically from their servers over the internet, making it possible to target ads based on demographic info provided by publishers.
But 100% free doesn’t seem to be the whole story. Long before social networks casual gaming sites discovered the value of micro-transactions. King.com collected $27 million from gaming micro-transactions last year. Nexon made $250 million in revenue in 2005, mostly through micro-transaction game upgrades. Kongregate is launching their own micro transaction system for game developers as well. A blended monetization model between ads and micro-transactions seems the best strategy for getting the most money out of visitors.
