Don’t you love a catfight? Apple famously attacked Windows and Microsoft with their ‘I’m a Mac’ ads. Microsoft responded with their ‘laptop hunters’ series and now Apple responds with a ‘I’m a Mac’ ad featuring a Lauren type girl similar to the girl from the first ‘Laptop Hunters’ episode.
Still following me?
Check it out:
The original Microsoft ad featuring ‘Lauren’:
The new Apple Ad featuring a ‘Lauren’ type:
Can’t wait for the “Microsoft answering Apple’s ad which reacted to Microsofts’ ad which commented on Apple’s ad” soon to be released…
Oprah Winfrey once said “You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, even if you weren’t being paid for it.”
If this is true then there must be millions of bloggers on the road to success right now!
Surely we love our job and would do it even if we weren’t paid but it is still extremely satisfying to make some money of off the work we do here. To that end we have professionalized a few things in the past few weeks.
We now have an Ad Management system that works very well, gives us lots of options to customize everything and which makes it very easy for advertisers to get your advertisements on our blog.
Since yesterday we also started selling simple text links. We received some requests from readers to introduce this format and because it is a cheap and simple way to attract visitors and easier to set-up than designing a Button we decided to start offering it.
So, if you have a site which you want to promote you can now order a 30 day link to your site for just EUR 50-.
It is displayed in the right sidebar on the bottom and I put up a few examples in there to show you how it works. The first paying user is Best Web Hosting.
We, the geeks, know about Photoshop. We realize there’s an army of marketing folks brushing up the supermodels of the world. Sure, a few million people have seen the infamous Dove ad, but that probably doesn’t stick for too long.
Every girl with a low self-esteem caused by the Photoshop filters, masks, and stamps should follow blogs like Photoshop Disasters on a daily basis. Oops, somebody did lose 2 inches of their waist line, but where’s her second leg? That kind of stuff.
Berliner girls will probably get aware of this soon, since a rather professional ad buster has made some incredibly good stickers depicting the Photoshop interface. Like Gizmodo says, this is “pitch-perfect adbusting right here”.
All you have to do is fill out a simple, one page, form and upload your button. Payment goes through Paypal and the whole thing can take less than a minute.
In less than 100 days we are hosting The Next Web Conference 2009. The months leading up to the conference generally bring a lot of extra traffic to our blog so this is an excelent time to show yourself here.
The new rates:
125 x 125 button
placed in sidebar
7 days
40.000 pageviews
€ 99 Order it now!
125 x 43 button
placed in sidebar (a little lower)
30 days
160.000 pageviews
€ 99 Order it now!
If you have any suggestions or special requests (Price for tattoo of your logo on Patrick’s ass available on request) don’t hesitate to contact us.
Google’s new Browser Chrome hasn’t been making much of a dent in the browser markets yet. And they don’t have to to. Google seems patient and will slowly but decidedly keep working on their product until it starts gaining momentum. This is a market they want, and should, be in. Read this great background article at Wired for some insights into their plans and history.
a few months ago we visited an Internet start-up where the CEO told us a funny story of how one of his developers used an Ad Blocker. He took the developer aside and explained to him that their whole business, his company and his salary depended on income on ads. He explained to the developer that if he wanted to work in this business it would be odd to fight the economic systems that pay for your food. The developer ended up removing the ad blocker.
The reason I’m telling you now is that Google, a company that depends on ads for 95% of its revenue, is now inviting developers to come up with an ad blocker for Chrome. Really.
Listed in the Chromium Developer Documentation are several references to an ‘AdBlocker’. Is is part of “some types of extensions that we’d like to eventually support” in Chrome, according to the document. Now I know the principles behind innovation and cannibalizing your assets but I’m still surprised that Google would invite people to build one for Chrome.
What happens if the feature becomes the number one Chrome add-on, and Chrome becomes the number one browser on the web? A web without ads? Does Google secretly think that ads are just a temporary way to make money until they can start charging for their products? Or is this just a product of a developer who wrote a technical document and published it without checking with PR or Management?
What did you expect? Did you think that Apple would back off Microsoft after their Seinfeld fiasco? Nah, not Apple. They are back with a vengeance! The new ads are aggressive, below the belt, dark and funny. Check em out:
Here it is, the first episode of the Seinfeld/ Gates commercial series. It’s part of a $300 million Microsoft ad campaign, led by famous ad-agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. It’s a product of Alex Bogusky’s extraordinary brain I can’t follow, ’cause the ad doesn’t get me excited yet. I realize that’s my own fault.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is famous for its innovative and controversial ad campaigns for the Mini Cooper, Burger King, Molson and a recent mock porn movie made for Virgin Atlantic’s business travelers. Most of those ideas weren’t welcomed with warm applause either. Maybe this dull episode is the start of a surprisingly good and sophisticated series. It’s genius, but we, dazed and confused early adopters, don’t see it yet.
Besides the slick and probably expensive editing designed to make Jerry Seinfeld look like the more awkward of the pair, there’s not a whole lot of special effects in this clip. In fact, there’s not really a whole lot of anything, including laughs, information or pimping of Vista.
Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. It was developed by…, us.
When we started this blog and sold the first few 125×125 buttons we immediately started wondering how to provide more value to our advertisers. We noticed how difficult it was for advertisers to tell their stories and pitch their companies in such a small area.
As you can imagine that small rectangle gives both readers and advertisers very little information. Right now the ‘click or don’t click’ decision is a very black and white situation. As a visitor you either click or you don’t and if you do you take a gamble with your time. What we wanted to do is provide more information to visitors before they click without making the ads bigger.
What we came up with is largely inspired by Flickr. As you can see in this screenshot, when you hover over a user favicon at Flickr a small gray border appears. If you then click on the border a small layer comes up with a few options.
This is exactly what we built with Intermediads. If you hover over the 125×125 ads in the sidebar here you will see a gray border with a small triangle appear. If you click the triangle you will see a screenshot, description and some other interesting data about the advertiser.
Our guess is that this service will both increase clickthroughs and provide higher quality traffic for advertisers. Users will be better educated about what the advertisers have to offer. What it comes down to is that we offer advertisers something between a view and a clickthrough. You could call it a ‘Half A Click’. We now monitor every normal ‘Clickthrough’, ‘Hover’, ‘Half A Click’ and every click to every link in the information layer. This educates both the advertiser and the visitor.
The service is currently in closed beta and running on a few selected high traffic blogs. We want to test our assumptions and see how the Intermediads layer improves clickthroughs. In about a month or so we will open the service up for other blogs. If you are interested in using the service (it works WITH your current Ad service) fill out the form at the Intermediads site.
Triggit, launched during the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco offers extremely simple to use ad management for user blogs. Instead of signing up at all the different ad programs you simply install one JavaScript code snippet which will enable drag & drop advertisements (and other content) into your blog or webpage.
The technology looks very cool and needs to be seen to realize how simple it actually is. Check the video for a demo. In short it means that you install some JavaScript which will enable you to drag and drop ads directly into your sites, WYSIWYG style.
You can actually move Adsense Ads around the page, pick a different background color and resize the ads. Then when you save the ad it’s variables are saved on the Triggit website and the Javascript dynamically inserts the ads in your site when it is reloaded. Very intuitive and easy.
The company presentation was very funny and vibrant and they rightly won the audience vote for most exiting presentation and start-up.
I can easily see this being adopted by both smaller and bigger ads. Quickly inserting an ad somewhere is something we would all be interested in. The prospect of just moving ads around without worrying that you break HTML code sounds great.
Today the Twitter founders and the Twitter team from Digital Garage announced via a live streamed press conference that it is launching its Japanese language version of Twitter. Digital Garage have been working on the Japanese market introduction of Twitter to develop a Japanese language version of the popular microblogging platform. This is the first time that Twitter will be available in a language other than English.
Japan has taken to Twitter at a ferocious rate, with Tokyo being the largest origin city for Tweets in the world (twice that of second placed San Fransisco and New York) using the previous English-only version. The number of Japanese users is growing at an accelerated rate already within the tech savvy community and it is expected that the Japanese version will give an additional boost as it can now support mainstream users. The local language distribution of online platforms has traditionally been a key point to growing larger sites in the Japanese market, with services such as Yahoo and Google blossoming only after they offered the Japanese verison.
The fear however is that Twitter is popular because it is foreign and users feel they are cutting edge because they are using a product that is cutting edge enough to not have been translated yet.
The Japanese Twitter will also have another first. It will be the first time that Twitter displays advertising within the Twitter page. When you switch to Japanese language, you will see an ad panel above your sidebar.
Initial reaction in the Japanese Twitter community is a lot of chatter but a lukewarm response to the advertising and a good dose of criticism about the quality of the translation.
This is a first release though, so I will reserve judgment. What will be telling is how fast the Japanese user base grows from here.
Written on 13th May 2009
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Since yesterday we also started selling simple text links. We received some requests from readers to introduce this format and because it is a cheap and simple way to attract visitors and easier to set-up than designing a Button we decided to start offering it.
Written on 16th January 2009
Written on 23rd April 2008
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
