"Web 2.0" still alive in Asia - why?

TechCrunch has a post on The Death Of "Web 2.0" and it talks about how, in the US and many parts of the world, people just do not search for the term "web 2.0" any more. It is just passé. "web 2.0" is disappearing off of our vocabulary - as "dotcom" has already done. The only people still using the phrase "dotcom" these days are nostalgic old farts like Andy, Kevin and me.

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“Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term... startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either.
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To get more quantitative data, they turned to Google Trends to look at trends in searches for this *Web 2.0* phrase. (Those asterisks are for those of you who have had dealing with SQL databases).


So this shows that the term peaked in 2007 and then started it's decline in 2008. Anecdotal evidence from Kevin and others who deal with digital people in the States, people just don't use the term "web 2.0" anymore. "social network" and "widgets" are still holding up, along with "Twitter", "Facebook", and "myspace" who have become the standard to compare start ups to.

Now what is interesting is the fact that Asia is where most of this "Web 2.0" search traffic comes from!
Say what?... yeah.. India is the first - followed by... SINGAPORE. (Click to see a better picture.)

So how about it Singapore Web Wednesday Friends? Shall we - as a group drop - "web 2.0" from our collective vocabularies? Did we really know what it meant in the first place?

By the way, let's not start using "Web 3.0" in its place either - the verdict is still up for that.

P.S. I am fully cognizant of the fact that, by posting this post on "Web 2.0" and repeating the phrase so many times, I am actually increasing its usage - if only temporarily.

comScore at Web Wednesday Singapore 12.0

Will Hodgman, EVP - International for comScore, gave us a great presentation on the state of Asian internet today as well as some interesting trends. I am disappointed that I could not make it to see it - as well as see all of you who did make it. I heard it was more packed than usual, and there were many new faces. Big thanks to Andy who managed to control you all without the use of "Shut the #$^& up!" (I hope...)

Will has graciously sent over his deck so that I can upload below for you all. His email is on the last slide of the preso if you want to contact him for a demo (and maybe get some free data during the demo!). Also, you can follow Will on his blog here.

Comscore Asia Pacific @ Web Wednesday Singapore

View more presentations from Joe Nguyen. (tags: web wednesday)

Web Wednesday 12.0 - This WED, Feb 25th - Web and Mobile Metrics

Dear Digerati,

Welcome to the first month of the year of the OX! A time for new beginnings for strength and optimism and above all a time for insights into the year.

With this in mind, we warmly welcome Internet measurement guru Will Hodgman from the USA. Will is currently the Executive Vice President for International and M:Metrics for ComScore.

For those of you who look at online advertising, Will was the founder of AdRelevance - the online advertising measurement tool and he was also the founder of the mobile measurement firm, M:Metrics. Will sold M:Metrics to comScore last year and now runs their mobile measurement business as well as comScore's international business.

Will will (here we go with the alliterations....) will give us a scintillating look at some interesting digital measurement data and insights, hopefully both for mobile and the web.

Web Wednesday Singapore will be held again at the Geek Terminal (55 Market Street, behind Raffles Place) THIS Wednesday, February 25th from 6:30pm till 8:30pm (although you are always welcome to stay...).

Hope to see you there!

If China switched to CPM model for online advertising...

After the last post on China's Cost-per-Day advertising model, I started to imagine what it would be like if China switched to a CPM model.

This might be a typical conversation:

Advertiser: "Hey Mr. Publisher, what's your CPM rate?"

Publisher: "I will give you a good rate, Mr. Advertiser. RMB1600 (USD 200) cpm!"

Advertiser: "That's really expensive. That's 20 cents US per impression!"

Publisher:"Huh?... Oh... no no... in China, when we say CPM, we mean cost per MILLION... not thousand. So that is 0.02 US cents per impression - especially for for you."

Advertiser: "Ah.. Wow... I did not realize CPM meant MILLION. So I have a budget of USD 50 thousand. Let's see... that will mean 250million impressions. Very nice. I want to advertise on your home page to every visitor. That should be enough for a three-month campaign."

Publisher: "Umm.. actually, 250million impressions is only 1 week..."

Advertiser: [Speechless. Mouth gapping open.]

Publisher: [Absentmindly thinking out loud] "Yeah... we are thinking of changing to CPB pricing. You know cost-per-BILLION. It's less confusing than the CPM thing..."

China's Cost-Per-Day (CPD) Online Advertising

Asia Media Journal put this article out end of last year. It talks about the fact that in China (and Korea and Japan), pricing for an online ad is based on how long it stays on a page or site and not how many impressions or how many clicks.

I have to admit that I have never bought online advertising in those markets so this is news to me. Or rather the concept of "cost-per-day" is new to me. In Asia, many website publishers are still selling - and advertisers are buying - based on cpm (umm.. that's "cost per thousand" - don't get me started on this one). But at the same time, the buy/sell is "run of site" for a month. Because of the time period component rather than a "I will buy 2 million impressions", it is essentially "cost per day". Just another way of looking at it.

Of course, not everyone works this way. Any site selling their inventory (or part of their inventory) through an ad network will sell based on impressions. They may also sell "sponsorships" in other parts of the page - which effectively is a CPD model. Right?

Other interesting tidbits from the article:

"...The reason selling by time has flourished in China is because that’s the way most online advertisers, usually small and medium-sized companies with limited resources, like it... Cost-per-day (CPD) not only has the benefit of familiarity, but with credible data thin on the ground it also provides a relatively reliable way of gauging the reach of a digital campaign."

Change is bad.

"...Underlying trends, such as the country’s swelling internet population, are now encouraging brands to think harder about who they want to reach and be more selective in their online media plan... Increasingly noticeable over the last six months, improved search functionality is also driving traffic deeper into websites, away from the home page which tended to attract the majority of advertising, creating new opportunities for targeted buys."

Correction: Change for the sake of change is bad. Evolution is inevitable... as is extinction. Hahahha.

"A hybrid model is emerging, where premium slots will still be sold on cost-per-day, but torso positions will increasingly be sold by CPM, says Mathew McDougall, CEO of digital advertising company SinoTech Group. Lower-level inventory will eventually be sold entirely by performance-based measures such as cost-per-action, something some large verticals are already trialing. “That’s a momentous mind shift from six months to a year ago,” McDougall says."

Another thing driving the change is paid search advertising, which is impression based!

"Increased investment in paid search should drive a greater awareness of alternatives to a CPD buy, as it has done in the US, where paid search accounts for over half of internet advertising. In China however, paid search is still some way from overtaking display, according to the latest estimates from Media Partners Asia."

But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"The CPD model however, as one that everyone understands, will stay in place. 'What we are not doing is changing the paying-by-day model,' Lau [Tencent's EVP] says. 'We are saying we have found a way, a filtering tool, to ensure that your buying-per-day concept will deliver you even more appropriate sets of audience.'"

Web Wednesday Singapore 12.0 - February 25th - Mobile and Web Metrics

Dear Digerati,

Welcome to the first month of the year of the OX BULL! A time for new beginnings for strength and optimism and above all a time for insights into the year.

With this in mind, we warmly welcome Internet measurement guru Will Hodgman from the USA. Will is currently the Executive Vice President for International and M:Metrics for ComScore.

For those of you who look at online advertising, Will was the founder of AdRelevance - the online advertising measurement tool and he was also the founder of the mobile measurement firm, M:Metrics. Will sold M:Metrics to comScore last year and now runs their mobile measurement business as well as comScore's international business.

Will will (here we go with the alliterations....) will give us a scintillating look at some interesting digital measurement data and insights, hopefully both for mobile and the web.

Web Wednesday Singapore will be held again at the Geek Terminal (55 Market Street, behind Raffles Place) NEXT Wednesday, February 25th from 6:30pm till 8:30pm (although you are always welcome to stay...).

Hope to see you there!

iLife's Face Recognition

You must have heard about how good iLife 2009's Faces & Places upgrade to OS X. See here and here. Well it looks like the folks at Joy of Tech thinks it's going to ruin superhero secret identities:

iMEDIA ASIA Weekly: Luxury Email Tactics, Chinese IWOM, Mobile ME & Searching In-House

This week iMedia Asia takes a look at:

• Email marketing for luxury (I don't mean the soap)
• The IWOM Summit in China (Internet Word-of-Mouth, not a new worm virus)
• Mobile Marketing in the Middle East (Not a new mobile operating system)
• Search Marketing done In-House (see my last post here)

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iMEDIA ASIA

Published: February 17, 2009

5 email tactics for luxury brands

By Francis Kwok

Luxury brands should not overlook email marketing as an effective way to connect with their loyal customers.

IWOM takeaways from client-side marketers in China

By Sam Flemming

At a recent summit on internet word-of-mouth (IWOM), core topics were brought up which will shape brands' strategies for years to come. Here are some key takeaways.

Mobile marketing in the Middle East

By Elizabeth Lloyd

The Middle Eastern mobile market has one of the most progressive penetration and growth rates in the world, and advertisers should start to view the mobile space as a promising marketing platform.

Why in-house search marketing works

By Marcel Lee Pereira

We speak with online accommodation seller Wotif.com about its in-house search marketing strategy and why it works.

SEO experts say Large Enterprises are bad at SEO

TechCrunch interviewed a couple of experts on enterprise level SEO. The lead in says it all, "The very nature of SEO–unknown, constantly changing, and unethical spam tactics–seems diametrically opposed to enterprise culture."

Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts:

"When it comes to SEO, enterprise companies don’t seem to care or are clueless or both... It’s sites like Bizrate, eBay, and Nexttag that keep showing up in the top of Google when searching for Long Tail queries. These results suck. Where are the brands/enterprises that carry this merchandise? Where is JCPenney? Target? LL Bean? Lands End? They might be advertising through PPC, but 85% of consumers click on the natural listings. The problem is, these brands are not reaching us where we are at, or on our terms. They are failing to engage the masses of niche markets - at a time when they can hardly afford not to. Instead they’re spending ad dollars on intrusive or avoidable advertising media (PPC, display). The culprit here is difficulty of execution with traditional SEO."

A) Large enterprises don't know what to do.

"There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs is a marketing driven initiative but entirely reliant on IT execution...

Lastly, websites are seldom built with SEO in mind; developers/programmers didn’t know what they didn’t know. It’s much like a house where the electrical wasn’t thought about until years later–a major mult-year project to redo it."

B) SEO involves cross department/cross business unit cooperation. Something not easy for large corporates.

"Part of the problem lies in that the Fortune 500 enterprises rely on their ad agencies for the 'interactive' stuff but the agencies don’t know how to integrate SEO requirements with branding."

C) Large enterprises are depending on ad agencies for SEO strategy and implementation, but large agencies do not have SEO expertise.

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So what about in house SEO? Advice from Jessica Bowman.

"In-house SEO is undergoing many of the struggles usability went through several years ago. It took companies several years to learn how to integrate usability into their product development. That same maturing process is happening with in-house SEO."

SEO + Usability is a component of product development. SEO needs to be included earlier in product development and not later at .. say.. marketing.

"Companies fail in three areas:

1. Companies hire the wrong people. They try to save costs by hiring cheaply, but many of these novices struggle to pull off results and may not have managed large projects solo yet...

2. SEO person isn’t involved throughout the development process. There are many places in the development life cycle where things can go wrong, and SEO needs to be a stakeholder throughout the process to make sure that things go live search engine friendly...

3. There’s a human side of SEO. In house experts sometimes struggle to integrate their expertise into the enterprise workflow and secure long-term buy-in from everyone involved in the website. There is also a challenge that, in most companies, SEO sits in marketing–or occasionally in product management and these roles are not typically involved in development at the level that SEO needs to be integrated."

It sounds like much of the problem is point B) above: cross departmental/ cross business unit interactions (or lack thereof). Umm.. you know... a.k.a. internal politics!

Valentine's Day in a Recession

eMarketer reports that "Recession takes a bite out of love".

According to them, a survey done by the National Retail Federation of Americans found that they plan to spend an average of USD 102.50 per person on gifts and merchandise on Valentine's day. This is 20 bucks less than last year.

Being eMarketer, this article must relate to digital somehow, otherwise... why would it be an article on eMarketer:

“E-commerce will benefit from consumer spending for Valentine’s Day because much of that spending will be for discretionary goods, which is where the Internet channel excels,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer senior analyst. “The Internet is also the ideal place to find unusual and fashionable gifts that make for a memorable occasion.”

And being eMarketer, every article must have a good chart:


Looks like things are just getting back to normal according to this chart. The last two years have been flukes on Valentine's Days.

Hope you are all out supporting the economy yesterday. As for me, I did not spend a dime this year on Valentine's Day... My wife took me out to an expensive dinner.... HAHAHAHA!

TechCrunch: Online Ad Revenues Picked Up in 4Q08

TechCrunch has crunched some earnings numbers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. So the online advertising numbers for the fourth quarter from these four largest players shows an increase in spending.

"After a full year of slowing growth, their combined ad revenues actually picked up in the fourth quarter, showing a 3 percent rise compared to the third quarter. Combined revenues grew 8 percent on an annual basis."

Again, the point here is also that GROWTH has slow. Nothing has gone backwards! The chart above shows Quarter over Quarter changes, and there is nothing below the zero percentage line.

Another chart shows the absolute online ad revenue by these four big boys going back into 2007.

I like this chart because it shows the players relative to each other. Look at the Google share!!!

If you are the type that prefers spreadsheets and want to make your own presentation slides on your own company template, here are the numbers (I am assuming these figures are in millions of US Dollars):

"Yahoo Blows Another Huge Lead Over Google"

This article title from Alley Insider.

According to Alley Insider, who got it from AdAge, who reported based on a survey by Advertiser Perception (of 1,212 agency executives), Google is now becoming a major force in display digital ads as well - not just the search stuff.

Money quote: "Among the people who matter, Google now considered just as much of a display advertising option as Yahoo."

AdAge/Advertiser Perception has the following conclusions:
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• "Google bested Yahoo when it came to results advertisers felt they were getting from campaigns: Advertisers rated Yahoo 29% better than the average of the 150 online media companies in the survey, but Google rated 43% better."
• "In terms of audience, advertisers perceive virtually no difference between display ads on Google and display ads on Yahoo."
• "In customer service, Google is beating Yahoo handily: Google rates 19% above the industry average compared with 9% above average for Yahoo"

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I wonder if Google Display ads convert any better. Are they smarter at targeting their ad based on people's email content, cookie info, etc.? Anybody know?

Maybe I should put some Google AdSense ads on this blog. Make some money.

WSJ: "A Silver Lining in E-Commerce"

A few weeks back, the New York Times has an article called, "A Silver Lining for Holiday Online Sales" which I covered here. Now, the Wall Street Journal also has a piece called, "A Silver Lining in E-Commerce".

I don't know about you, but with all the major currencies bouncing up and down recently, I would rather put my money down in GOLD rather than SILVER! Just check out the charts for gold and silver prices below.











All kidding aside, WSJ gives some stats from a Forrester report:
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• Ecommerce sales (beyond travel) are likely to grow 11% to $156 billion in 2009
• That marks a slowdown from 13% growth last year and 18% in 2007.
• The major factor contributing to the pace shift is, of course, declining consumer confidence.
• But ecommerce’s slowed pace is still far better than the National Retail Federation’s forecasted 0.5% drop in overall retail sales this year.
• That means ecommerce is stealing market share from traditional retail – and fast.

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OK the important thing is that ecommerce GROWTH IS SLOWING. It has not stopped. It has not gone backwards. It is just taking a breather. Whew!

Alley Insider who must have actually purchased the Forrester report, says:
"The group predicts a bump from 2009's 11% growth to 13% in 2010, but then trailing to 10% in 2010, 9% in 2011, and 8% in 2012."

iMEDIA ASIA Weekly: Email, Digital PR, In-Game Ads & Recession Marketing

iMEDIA ASIA

Published: February 10, 2009

How to get ISPs to trust your emails

By Tony Cheung

You can damage your reputation as an email sender by not following local regulations and email best practices. Here are some ways to build trust between your brand and the internet service provider.

Why 2009 is a watershed year for digital PR in China

By Scott Sykes

Without doing some form of digital PR, companies in China are sacrificing a huge marketing opportunity, and a chance to engage in meaningful conversations with people that care about their brand.

Cracking the mystery of measuring in-game ads

By Steven Lili Hu

There may not be an industry standard for measuring in-game advertising in China just yet, but we are already able to tell what certainly does NOT work.

A digital survival guide for the recession

By Chandler Nguyen

If you are thinking of shifting more of your marketing budget online, here's a guide on how to get started, and what pitfalls you should avoid.

eMarketer: Online Video Ad Spends Dips, but Still Popular

eMarketer summarizes results from AccuStream research (while I summarize eMarketer's summary ... I love blogging...):

• Online video ad spending reached $2.1 billion in 2008
• CPMs on premium preroll videos averaged $35 in 2008.
• Online video ad spending will still grow by a healthy 22.5% in 2009
• The growth rate in 2009 will actually fall from 2008’s level of 36%

eMarketer's own research sorta disputes these numbers but says that Accustream is more inclusive (see the small print under the image above). According to eMarketer:

• online video ad spending at $587 million in 2008
• online video ad spending growth would dip in 2009 - to 44.9%
• down from 81% growth in 2008, before rising again in 2010.

Anyhow... this is all great stuff, but how much online video ads are we doing in Asia? By AccuStream's definition, we are probably ok, but by eMarketer's definition, I would say pretty lacking. And if we look at ad spend rather than ad impressions (or video plays), then it would be even more dismal.

TechCrunch: Google share of search grows in 2008

TechCrunch posts data from comScore showing that, in December 2008, Google grabbed 63.8% of all searches in the US.
<< (that's the new Google Favicon. Did ya notice it?)

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And that market share has inched up steadily from 58.5 percent in January, 2008. But the market share numbers mask the absolute growth in searches and how Google has ben able to Gobble up all of that growth.
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Here a chart showing this:
They also report that:
"Of the 137 billion estimated total searches performed in the U.S. last year, 85 billion were done on Google... What’s even more impressive is that nearly 90 percent of all the growth in search volume was also captured by Google. Most of that growth came from increasing the number of searches per person, rather than bringing more people to Google."

Too bad that Yahoo! deal did not go through... The big G could have had another 5 points or so.

"Click Fraud at Record High"

According to ClickForensics, click fraud is at an all time high in 4Q2008. They have been tracking this metric on PPC ads for the last three years on the Click Fraud Index across "all the leading search engines... with data collected from the Click Fraud Network, the industry’s first independent third-party click fraud detection service". So in the last quarter:

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- The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008. That’s up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007. - The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2%. That’s up from the 27.1% rate reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from the 28.3% rate reported for Q4 2007. - Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4% of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That’s up from the 27.6% rate reported for Q3 2008 and the 22.0% rate reported for Q4 2007. - In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).
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Ok now some nice graphics:

Also reported was that the rate of botnet click fraud is increasing i.e. automated spiders that click on links. It would seem to me that the increase in overall click fraud is a direct result of increase in botnet activity. A quote from them: "Both the overall click fraud rate and the rate of click fraud originating from botnets were the highest ever in Q4 2008. In addition, we’ve started to see old schemes like click farms reemerge. Advertisers should pay close attention to these types of threats in their online campaigns throughout the year."

This is a map of where these fraudulent clicks are coming from. China, Russia and Easter Europe are all red. Mongolia and Myanmar are bright green since there is barely any internet access there to speak of. South East Asia and India are yellow. If most of these click are from non-botnets, does that mean that there are a bunch of people sitting in dingy houses (or internet cafes) all over the world clicking on PPC ads?

And who is paying them to do this? Not the advertisers. The "major" search engines? Not likely. The big media buying agencies? The small media buying agencies? The pureplay search agencies? The big media/website owners and publishers? None seem too likely. The only plausible group are the millions of small sites and blogs that live and breath on affiliate revenue or some other questionable revenue sharing models. The numbers still don't add up for me...

iMEDIA ASIA Weekly: Web development, Email Trends and China's Online Ad & eCommerce

iMEDIA ASIA

Published: February 03, 2009

10 steps to creating websites that generate business

By Stefan Pertz

A website may have become as essential as the business card, but many companies still do not have one. Here are some tips on creating sites that generate business for you.

Dramatic changes in store for Chinese internet advertising

By Dr. Mathew McDougall

China's digital marketing industry may be dulled by the global downturn, but it will experience one of the most industry-changing periods ever seen in the Chinese internet space.

Email marketing trends for 2009

By Jacco Bouw

What will the email marketing landscape look like this year? Here are 10 trends to watch out for.

Shaun Rein on the state of ecommerce and digital marketing in China

By Marcel Lee Pereira

We meet the founder of the China Market Research Group to get his take on what ecommerce and digital marketing practitioners need to do to survive in the Chinese economy.

Print Advertising is Hurting

Ran across this from Alley Insider: "Wired's February Issue Is 3 Millimeters Thin"

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More evidence of the abominable ad market: Wired's February issue is so thin, its binding is thicker than its actual pages. It feels startlingly flimsy to the touch. The issue numbers just 113 pages in total. Wired's January issue contained 128 pages; the December issue, 231 pages.
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As I have mentioned before, Wired Magazine is the only physical periodical I subscribe to. It gets sent to me from the States because they don't print it here, and I don't want to have to go to Borders Singapore every month and chase for one of the 10 copies they bring in.

And this post from Alley Insider got me because I was thinking the same thing when I was pulling the mag from my mailbox. It was so thin, I thought it was the Bishan-North Toa Payoh Monthly Neighborhood Newsletter. You know how wide 3 mm is? It is the width of a USB plug. See picture here.

Yeah, those are my fingers and my mane in the background.

Alley Insider goes on with an analytical dissection - like CSI.
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Of those 113 pages, only 31.5 are ad pages. That's miserable. The usual ratio between editorial and advertising hovers around 1:1.

31.5 ad pages is a 27% decline from the January 2009 issue, which itself was a 47% decline from January 2007.

By our back of the envelope math -- we've heard a full page Wired ad costs around $100,000 -- the February issue's 31.5 ad pages created about $3 million in revenue for Wired parent company Condé Nast. If that number doesn't increase soon, Wired could be in real trouble.
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This would be sad indeed. I am going to go away and mourn... CondeNast has already collected the subscription fee from me into mid 2010.