AdSense for games

Comscore reports that about 200 million people (25% of the Internet population) play games online, wether social or “serious” ones, and this number is growing quite nicely, faster than the growth of the internet population. With a such a dynamic and growing sector, it will come with no surprise that Google is announcing AdSense for Games, enrolling publishers like Konami and Mochi Media. The product...

2008, not the year of mobile (yet)

For something like the last 10 years, every year mobile advertising has been considered the next big thing, supposed to happen in the following two years. Shall we renew the tradition this year too? Definitely, 2008 hasn’t been the year of mobile advertising going mainstream. Despite a substantial growth of mobile ad revenues, it is still far away from being mainstream, and is more relegated to an...

Sponsored search and economic crisis

What we have seen so far in online advertising is a shift from brand spend to direct response spend, i.e. from banner into sponsored search, affiliate marketing and the likes. It does make complete sense. Given the though economic environment, and the pressure in companies on controlling costs while maintaining revenues, a shift from brand spend (i.e. demand generation) toward direct response (i.e. demand...

Microsoft pays you to search: the war on margins has started

Recently Microsoft has announced the Live Search Cashback initiative. An interesting product that, if successful, can have far reaching consequences. And I am eager to see how it does. Live Cashback gives you money back for shopping with selected merchants. Easy: make a search for a product (try here), select the appropriate result (or refine search by category) and you are presented with a nice page with the...

Procter & Gamble cutting adspend and moving it online?

It was on the WSJ a couple of days ago. P&G, a big fish in the advertising market, is rumored considering cutting ad spend this year by as much as 10%. No surprise here, considering real estate and finance are having what could be defined as a “soft” year to say the least. Apparently, retails and pharma are joining them in terms of “soft market”. More interesting, it seems that P&G is...