Power politics
Any political scientist will tell you: where a single player looks to
be in a position to impose their will on the rest, the other players have a clear incentive to redress the balance of power [define].
On Friday Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! Without ever using the G- word, Microsoft have made little bones of their rationale: to create a more effective competitor to Google and thereby grab a (much) bigger slice of the growing digital advertising pie.
The overall growth in digital is such that it can be easy to overlook just how dominant Google is: in the UK the total online advertising market in 2007 was worth around £2.7bn; Google’s share of this was 43%.
And yet it is Google who argue that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo juggernaut would be anti-competitive and stifle innovation.
Posted by: Sam at Lunch time on Wednesday, 6th February 2008
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The finest eloquence
I recently encountered the ad in the photo, nestled by Waterloo roundabout, and was struck by the shining brilliance of the copy.
1 million rooms for £26.
(Each).
Surprising but straight-as-a-dye, flippant and yet ultimately earnest, it does what all good ad copy does: says a lot in very few words.
Why do you never see copy of this quality in banner ads? We can make them expand, spin and wobble; you can play with them and write in them; they can be video or Flash (or Flash video).
In other words we have invented any number of ways of multiplying the minimal attention people pay to banners. Perhaps instead we should just focus on writing really top-notch copy.
End of rant.
(P.S. – I would happily be proved wrong on this: can anyone remember any outstanding banner copy?)
Posted by: Sam at pre-lunch on Friday, 9th November 2007
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The problem with giving something away
Skype announced this week that their network has supported 10m con
current users for the first time. As Techcrunch points out: if only users were pots of gold…
This follows close on their admission that revenue projections had been somewhat “front-loaded” (an adjective rivalled only by “pre-revenue”, which cropped up on this week’s Dragon’s Den, as a euphemism for “we’re not making as much money as we thought we would”).
Skype are beating a well-trodden path: build a user-base first, worry about monetization later. The problem for Skype is that they make no money from Skype to Skype calls, only Skype to non-Skype or vice versa. So as the network gets bigger, Skype's opportunities to make money, perversely, become smaller.
Kind of like more and more people coming to your party, but drinking the hooch without bringing a bottle. Something to think about.
Posted by: Sam at Lunch time on Thursday, 18th October 2007
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