Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 2, 2008 – 1:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
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?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 5, 2008 – 1:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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.
For now though, I’d like to quote Gizmodo’s Jason Chen:
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.
Let’s see how we feel about this ad in a year.
Written on May 14, 2008 – 8:45 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
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.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
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.
Written on April 23, 2008 – 4:51 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
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 March 29, 2008 – 12:08 pm
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
I have written before about how QRcodes are a great way to access websites on mobile phones and how they are already commonplace in Japan. They are used in advertising and in everyday services that allow mobile access.
Cabal recently blogged about another method for locating websites in Japan. The method shows a search box with the search term inside that will help you locate the website in lieu of a URL. Of course this implies you should go home and type this term into your favorite search engine to locate the website.
This system only works if you have the top search result position or the top advertising position on that keyword, but I am guessing these companies have made sure at least that they bought the keyword out so they appear as the top paid search result on all the major search platforms. The thinking is that people can remember a keyword easier than a URL. From doing a quick ask-around of Japanese friends, it seems that most find this advertising annoying and unclear. I am not a fan of it either.
Another method that seems to have a quite high representation in Japan and hasn’t been talked about in western press that much is the menu navigation method.
The Menu Navigation Method
This method of getting people to your website is also aimed at mobile users. Entering URLs on a mobile phones can be time consuming and frustrating, so many advertisers are looking at ways to get users to their pages in simple ways that involve scrolling and clicking rather than typing.
This method is based around one of the sad realities of the Japanese mobile web. Most traffic on the mobile web is funneled through the landing pages of the major carriers (DoCoMo, AU and Softbank). It is changing slowly but it is still the case that most people use these pages just as many PC web users use Yahoo, Google or other portal pages to find their content.
This is an example from the ANA website showing the navigation paths from each of the three major carrier topages. NB. DoCoMo uses iMode, AU uses EZWeb and Softbank uses Yahoo Keitai.
Using this established familiarity with this portal page navigation, a lot of advertising replaces the URL with a path of navigation from the top portal page from the major carriers. The carriers are obviously happy because it keeps people in “their world” as long as possible.
More important though, they also charge money for portal listings. This process allows them to filter for “approved” content and control the economics which is fast moving towards free for connectivity on the mobile phone. As connectivity charges go down, total advertising and listing revenues are growing.
The main flaw to this method is the difficulty in remembering the navigation steps, sometimes there are up to 8 pages to click through before you get where you are going. The negative effects of this are limited by the usage case which usually has the advertising appearing in locations where you can refer to the navigation path while entering in your mobile phone. Places such as magazines, train platforms and PC sites are common locations to see them.
The Menu Navigation Method looks to be here for a while, but only as long as the carriers control the navigation pathways. Once people start to break out from the major portals, you may see the use of this technique drop, but if history is anything to go by, the Japanese people will keep to their safe portals for a while yet.
Written on February 13, 2008 – 12:23 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last week I had a video interview with Scott Rafer from Lookery.com. Unfortunately iChat screwed me again and this time recorded only 30 seconds of video for a 13 minute interview. Instead of having you stare at a black screen the rest of the time I filled it up with photos (zooming in and out) of Scott I found at Flickr. My advice: just listen to the interview. Scott is an inspiring and funny guy and he talks about a few interesting subjects such as why they decided to stop using OpenAds, how well Lookery is doing and even hints at how much they sold MyBlogLog for.
Lookery.com is a company serving ads to Facebook and other social networks. The team behind Lookery consists of Dave Cancel, Rex Dixon, Todd Sawicki and Scott Rafer. Scott is a Mashery.com co-founder, formely CEO of MyBlogLog.com (Sold to Yahoo) and chairman at winksite.com. Lookery just raised a $900,000 seed round of funding last week from Charles River Ventures, Reed Hundt and Vikas Taneja.
Check these excellent articles for more information about Lookery: Venturebeat review, Mashable review and Techcunch review.
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