Argument

Website usability testing identifies a precise methodology devoted to uncover specific bugs, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the way that website design impacts the effective use, legibility, navigation, and user experience of your website. In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find the best free website usability testing tools available out there.

Heat map of MasterNewMedia homepage created with Feng-GUI

Website usability testing is indeed a critical component of any effective online publishing strategy. When properly utilized, usability testing allows you to effectively scan and rapidly identify which are the critical issues to be addressed in your web publication that can improve legibility, the time visitors spend on your website or the ability to turn offers for products and services into actual conversions.

In fact, what’s the point of having valuable content under your hood if your readers cannot easily discover it, share it and put it to effective use?

To be of immediate “use“, let me share first with you a simple set of basic tasks you can follow to start testing and reviewing the usability of your own website:

1. Identify a critical goal: Likely, you have multiple goals for your website. The first step is to focus on the most critical. Is it sales? Is it traffic? Is it help people find something?
2. Use Personas: Create typical users profiles to best focus on potential needs and expectations of a fictional target group. Is your website addressed to experts in the filed or to a general audience? Do you want to attract loyal readers or occasional stumblers? Which age / sex / location are your users?
3. Carry on critical tasks: After identifying your goals and creating typical users profiles (Personas), you want some friends, readers or volunteers, to carry on critical tasks on your website to identify areas for improvement and weaknesses. Is the sale process straightforward? Can people download your content easily? Are your blog posts easily shareable on social media?
4. Collect the data: While your users go through a set of pre-determined tasks and perform specific actions on your website, you need to closely observe and report where they hesitate, step back, or remain confused by what they see on your site. Better yet, you can use a dedicated usability tool that collects absolute or relative data that can help you characterize the behavior of your testers.
5. Review your analysis: Once you gather this data, you need to group it in clear-labeled groups (i.e. navigation, layout, functional flow, error handling, etc.), so that you can easily review and analyze all of this information and then find the ideal strategy to make your improvements.

Now that you know what are the key steps needed to start a website usability test, what you really need is knowing which tools or services are available out there that you can immediately put to use to support, speed up and professionally organize those very tasks.

But how can you identify and select which is the most appropriate website usability testing tool for your specific needs, competence level and budget?

To help you get started right away, this guide provides you with a set of individual reviews, a comparative table and a comprehensive mindmap to help you select your ideal free website usability testing tool.

Please note that these free usability testing tools have a limited range of features. For example, they do not allow you to record the screen of your testers or engage them in screen-sharing sessions unlike professional usability testing solutions like TechSmith Morae, which will be covered in a separate upcoming MasterNewMedia guide.

Now that I have warned you about the limitations of these free website usability testing tools, here below are the specific selection criteria that I have used to compare these different services:

• Testing approach: a) Test the usability of your website by inviting specific users to share their feedback, b) analyze analytic and statistical data.
• Analytics: Generate automatic analytical data from each website usability testing tool to evaluate the the quality of your website design and user interface.
• Visualization of user behavior: Visualize the behavior of your visitors by analyzing where they click or look (via mouse tracking) on your website and which path they follow to carry on specific tasks.
• Usability report: Generate a comprehensive report that contains all the analytical data gathered by the usability test.

Free Website Usability Testing Tools – Comparative Tables

*Google Website Optimizer, Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics are not proper website usability testing tools. However, I decided to include also these tools in my comparison because you can use them for free and gather valuable insights on your user behavior.

Free Website Usability Testing Tools

1. Usabilla

   

   Usabilla is a free usability testing tool that helps you analyze and improve the design of your website, mockup, sketch or image. With Usabilla you can track and visualize users clicks and also perform qualitative analysis asking single users specific questions like: “Which element of this page attracts you the most?“. Throughout the whole process, your users can provide you written feedback on specific content components they find ambiguous or difficult to utilize. At the end of the test, you get a detailed report which collects all the data and insights gathered. Usabilla is available in 16 different languages.
   
   http://usabilla.com/

2. Loop11

   

   Loop11 is a usability testing tool that involves actual users to analyze and review your website. Loop11 is free for one website usability test; you just need to provide a simple task to a user and then let Loop11 start tracking and visualizing user interaction. At the end of the usability testing session, you can access comprehensive reports that show task completion rate, time spent on each task, common fail pages, paths and a detailed analysis displaying the path followed by the user.
   
   http://www.loop11.com/

3. Fivesecondstest

   

   Fivesecondstest is a free tool to run usability tests on your website so that you can identify design ambiguities or interface issues. You can upload a screenshot of your web pages and then ask users which part of your design they liked most or ask them to click on specific parts of your design and share their feedback. You can either rely on invited guests or make your design public for random user evaluation. Once you get you are finished with your usability test, you get a detailed report to review the results. No live annotation.
   
   http://fivesecondtest.com/

4. Google Analytics

   

   Google Analytics is a free web analytics solution that you can also use to test the usability of your website. By gaining automated insights and data about your users and their browsing behavior you can generate custom reports that will help you evaluate if your website is really useful and easy to navigate. You can even enhance all data charts and graphs on Google Analytics by using written notes that will help you focusing on specific items or sets of data. Google Analytics requires a Google account.
   
   http://www.google.com/analytics/

5. Google Website Optimizer

   

   Google Website Optimizer is a free website testing and optimization tool that can help you improve the design and usability of your site. Google Website Optimizer can help you compare and test different website layouts by showing each one to a separate group of visitors. This way, you can analyze which design and specific elements inside your pages lead to higher conversion rates and need to be improved. Google Website Optimizer requires you to sign-up for a Google account. No analytics.
   
   http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

6. Yahoo! Web Analytics

   

   Yahoo! Web Analytics is a free online analytics service that you can also use for website usability testing purposes. With Yahoo! Web Analytics you can gather insights on the demographics of your users and their interests, and then leverage this data to improve the design and interface of your website. You can also measure website conversions by visualizing users behavior on specific actions performed on your web pages and then generate custom reports to collect and review the data. Interactive notes can also be added to your graphs and statistics. The service requires a Yahoo! account.
   
   http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on March 8th, 2010 as “Website Usability Testing: Guide To The Best Free Tools And Services“.

Does your online business use a disruptive innovation approach? In other words: have you ever considered getting a huge advantage over your competition by developing a business strategy that is a completely different way from what everyone else in your field does?

Photo credit: Kheng Guan Toh

Disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Disruptive innovation happens when a breakthrough development opens new and unexpected scenarios for future development and / or improves an existing product.

Scott Anthony, author of the book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, points out that is not necessarily a new technology that drives disruptive innovation: “many times the technology is quite trivial. It is the business model, the way a company organizes and acts that drives disruption“.

To support this statement, Scott provides two examples. Walmart and the Nintendo Wii:

• When Walmart opened its first discount retailer in 1962, it was not doing something special by selling goods that were different than its competitors. What Walmart did instead, was to revolutionize its business policy by focusing on very low prices and on discount retailing.
• Instead of introducing games with better graphics, Nintendo has made it simpler and more accessible to play a videogame by introducing the Wiimote, an innovative game controller. Nintendo has consciously tried to target the non-gamers, and by doing so, it has greatly expanded the market for videogames and started to lead the future path of the gaming industry.

In both these examples, technology is either not relevant or very marginal to create disruption, whereas is the ability to solve real problems or to address new audiences the key to create effective disruptive innovation opportunities.

In fact, for Scott disruptive innovation generally occurs in those markets where some kind of constraints inhibit developments, and when specific needs of customers are not properly addressed. When such barriers to consumption are torn down, you are effectively creating space for disruption to take place.

If you want to know how you can facilitate, identify and enable disruptive innovation inside your organization, you will hear about some interesting and inspiring stories in this video interview with Scott Anthony himself.

Here is what he had to say (full video and transcription):

How To Spot Disruptive Innovation Opportunities

Duration: 8′ 32”

Full English Text Transcription

Paul Michelman: Hello I am Paul Michalman, director of content for HarvardBusiness.org and we are joined today by Scott Anthony.

Scott writes the innovations insights blog for HarvardBusiness.org and he is the lead author of the new book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth. Scott, thanks for joining the program.

Today Scott we are going to talk about disruptive innovation. What does it mean? Who is responsible for it? And how can you can identify disruptive opportunities for your organization?

First off: What is disruptive innovation?

Scott Anthony: Disruptive innovation is a particular type of innovation that occurs when an innovator brings to a market an innovation that is:

• Simple,
• convenient,
• accessible,
• affordable.

Changing the game. Contrast this to sustaining innovations. Innovations that take what exists and make it better.

A disruptive innovator transforms existing markets and creates new ones by playing the innovation game in a fundamentally different way.

Paul Michelman: Does disruptive innovation have to be big? Does it have to be a major change in the landscape?

Scott Anthony: Disruptive innovations will result in major changes, but they do not often rely on technological breakthroughs.

In fact, many times the technology is quite trivial. It is the business model, the way a company organizes and acts that drives disruption. Think about discount retailing for a minute.

When Walmart opens its first discount retailer in 1962, it is not selling goods that are different than its competitors. But what it has done is it has created a new way to organize an act, that allows to make money at low price points, drives change in that organization.

Oftentimes it is not the technology, it is the business model.

Paul Michelman: OK, can you give us another example that shows the difference between disruption and sustaining innovation?

Scott Anthony: There are dozens of examples throughout history of this pattern taking place. Whether it is the personal computer, Google’s auction model, eBay’s online model, what P&G has done with Swiffer and Febreze… but a real interesting recent one is from the videogame industry.

Contrast the Sony Playstation 3 to Nintendo’s Wii product.

The Playstation 3 is a technological marvel. The best gameplay you can find, great graphics, Blu-Ray disc in the player. It is aimed at the hardcore gamer, the most demanding consumer in the market.

Nintendo has innovated in a very different way. Instead of introducing games with better graphics, Nintendo has made it simpler, made it more accessible.

The big innovation is the controller. I actually happen to bring my Wii controller with me because I am a pretty big fan. This controller has an accelerometer in it, which allows it to measure motion along multiple dimensions. If you want to play baseball, you pick it up and you go like this. You want to bowl? you go like this.

Nintendo is consciously trying to target the non-gamers. And by doing so, it has greatly expanded the market for videogames, by reaching people that Sony would not even think about targeting.

Not winning by doing it better, but winning by doing it differently.

Paul Michelman: Who is responsible for coming up with disruptive innovation ideas and should companies have a disruptive innovations department?

Scott Anthony: We really think everyone within an organization has the ability to come up with disruptive ideas.

To work inside an organization, senior management does really have to lead and create appropriate organizational space for disruption to flourish, because if there is not that space, corporate antibodies will take even the best idea and force it to look like what has been done before.

You do need to have simulators to create space for disruption, but really any innovator inside the company and outside the company can come up with a spark that turns into a disruptive idea.

Paul Michelman: Help us get our minds really around the “how-tos” here. How does a manager starts thinking about disruptive innovation? What are the questions he or she should be asking?

Scott Anthony: There are a couple of questions that we found to be really helpful to begin to identify opportunities for disruptive innovation.

1. Look for markets where there is some kind of constrain that inhibits consumption. Where is there something that makes it difficult for people to solve problems in their lives? Sometimes they do not have skills, sometimes they do not have money, sometimes they cannot access the solution and sometimes it just takes too long. Find one of those barriers to consumption and see how you can obliterate it.
2. Try to identify where people have important unsatisfied jobs to be done. Where is there a problem that a costumer faces that they cannot adequately solve today? If you can find that frustrated costumer and ease their pain, you oftentimes have the tickets to disruptive innovation.
3. Then after you have looked for constrained consumption and targeted that job to be done, think about how you can play the innovation game differently.

Remember it is not about doing it better. It is about making it simpler, cheaper, more accessible, more affordable. That is what disruption is all about.

Paul Michelman: Do you always have to satisfy a need or can part of this be creating a need? Because I do not see the Wii satisfying a hole in the market.

Scott Anthony: It is a really good question.

You do not oftentimes have to be able to target something that a costumer tells you they want. In fact, the costumers can very rarely articulate these specific things they want or need.

What the Wii does is make it so much more accessible and so much more affordable for people to enjoy videogaming, that the market begins to expand.

Sometimes you cannot even talk to the customer. You have got to trust your intuition and judgement, put something in the marketplace and begin to see how it plays out. This can be a very scary concept for managers who are hone to rely on data.

Data unfortunately only exists about the past . Sometimes you need to use intuition to identify an opportunity and go create your own data.

Paul Michelman: OK, we have established the planes you should be thinking on. Now let’s look at how we, within our organizations, uncover these jobs that need to be done, these opportunities.

Can you walk us through some of the areas we should look at for the biggest opportunities?

Scott Anthony: There are a couple of tips that I can provide to help people get this right.

1. The first is to think about the markets that they are going to analyze.

   Looking not necessarily at the most demanding customer today, but thinking about people who are relatively undemanding, or people who are not consuming anything at all. Look to those markets to begin the exploration for disruption.

2. Then, as you begin that exploration, use a bunch of different techniques to understand those pinpoints in the market. Focused groups can be a simple way to begin a conversation with your customers.

Customer observation can be really powerful, because sometimes the customers simply cannot tell what they want.

Sometimes you have got to give customers something. A very early prototype and let them co-develop the product or service with you.

Sometimes you have got a more detailed, qualitative research to really pinpoint what are the points of frustration in the market and where there are opportunities to do things differently.

The key is always put in the customer and their problem at the center of the innovation equation.

Paul Michelman: Do you always have to be daring to be successful in disruptive innovation?

Scott Anthony: It is a really good question.

A lot of times organizations hesitate to push for disruptive innovation, because it sounds kind of scary. They think they have got to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. There is lots of risk. They might rip their organization apart.

But what we found is that the best way to get to a disruptive end point, is to get a simple small first step. Invest a little, learn a lot. Do not spend a huge amount of money upfront, because the only thing you can be sure, is that your first strategy is wrong.

If you invest too much too soon, you are locking into a path that is fatally flawed.

In fact you can move forward in ways that do not require huge amounts of money, that do not require huge amounts of risk, and then iterate your way toward success.

Paul Michelman: Scott Anthony. Thank you very much.

For more on Scott’s ideas on innovation visit his blog on innovation insights at HarvardBusiness.org.

Related Resources on Disruptive Innovation:

• Disruptive innovation
• Predicting the next disruptive innovation
• Disruptive innovation can lead to new ways of thinking
• Prof. Clayton M. Christensen interviewed by Howard Dresner

Original video interview by Paul Michelman for HarvardBusiness.org and first published on October 20th, 2008 as “How To Spot Disruptive Innovation Opportunities“.

About Scott Anthony

Scott Anthony is currently president of Innosight. In the past he has worked with Fortune 500 and is now a member of the board of directors of Media General. Scott is also the co-author (with Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen) of Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change and he is the lead author of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work.

About Paul Michelman

As director of content for HarvardBusiness.org, Paul Michelman manages the original content of the web site, including its blog network. He is the executive producer and host of the HarvardBusiness IdeaCast, and a frequent contributor to HarvardBusiness.org’s Conversation Starter blog. Paul was formerly director of programming and production for Captivate Network.

Web widgets are tiny applications that allow you to easily distribute your content across other blogs and web sites, free of charge. Web widgets work just like YouTube videos: you can place a widget on your web site and let readers grab the embed code and redistribute your content with a few clicks. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best tools and services to create a widget for the web, your desktop environment or specific platforms like WordPress, Blogger or Yahoo!.

Photo credit: Nagravision

Web widgets belong to two main categories:

a) Embeddable: You just grab the standard snippet of embed code of the widget and paste it onto the HTML code of your blog site. You can even add widgets to your favorite social media sites like Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, and others.

b) Not-embeddable: You need to run a widget platform on your computer. All recent Windows and Mac machines already have this feature built-in, while Linux users can install and use Screenlets. Windows XP and early Mac users can instead try a third-party widget platform like Yahoo! Widgets.

By creating a web widget you create small bits of information that virally spread across the web making your content more visible, interactive and usable. RSS feeds, image slideshows, videos, Flash applications… widgets can be used to package and deliver almost every type of digital information.

Let’s see some examples of how you can leverage the power of web widgets:

• By creating a widgets that displays a selection of RSS feeds you can create a niche-targeted newsradar which provides valuable and always-updated information on a topic that interests your audience.
• By building a widget that embeds a poll or a survey, you may collect useful data and insights into your audience. And because web widgets are so freely redistributable, you may also reach well beyond your circle of fans and supporters with no effort.
• By creating a compilations of your best blog posts, video, podcasts, you can distribute your top-notch content in a way that readers never miss the valuable information you share, even if it’s not freshly published.
• By building a Flash widget you can create a Google Maps that shares the location of your next conference or meeting so that your fans can join you and participate to your events.
• By creating a chat widget you can really establish a “conversation” with your readers and customers and also build your online persona.

These are just a few quick suggestions, but as you see, web widgets are really suitable for a number of different uses.

The next step you need to take now is: there are several widget creation tools available online, either free or for a reasonable fee, but how do you go about selecting your ideal one?

To help you identify a widget creation tool that really suits your needs, here below there is a set of comparative tables and individual reviews to help you choose your preferred solution.

Here are the specific selection criteria used to compare these different services

• Widget type: Technology or coding language used to build and distribute web widgets
• Pre-made templates: Readily-available templates that you can use to style your web widget.
• Social sharing: Built-in facility to re-distribute your web widget across web sites or social media services.
• Analytics: Real-time performance monitoring of your web widget (how many times your widget is shared, by whom, on which destinations, etc.)
• Registration-free: Non-mandatory registration to utilize the widget creation tool.
• Price: Cost of the widget creation tool / service.

Widgets Creation Tools – Comparative Tables

Widgets Creation Tools

1. Widgetbox

   

   Widgetbox is an online service to create several types of widgets to distribute your content over the web. You can build Flash or HTML widgets, Facebook Apps, Google Gadgets, Twitter widgets, and more. To create and customize your widget, you can use one of the readily-available templates on the web site. Each widget created with Widgetbox is fully redistributable on major social sharing sites, even from the widget itself. No analytics features are available at a free level, but if you want to track the performance of your widget (and also go ads-free), you can switch to one of the two premium plans starting at $3.99/month. Registration is mandatory.
   
   http://www.widgetbox.com/

2. KickApps

   

   KickApps is a free online service where you can create widgets to distribute your content or promote your brand on the web. KickApps allows you to generate either Flash or HTML widgets starting from scratch or by using one of the available templates. Once the widget is placed on your web site, your readers can re-distribute it using the social sharing feature. You can also create WidgeADs, which are a special type of widgets that work as an advertising banner that is freely redistributable and may help you drive traffic back to your web site. Registration is compulsory to utilize the service. No analytics.
   
   http://www.kickapps.com/widgets

3. SpinletsLab

   

   SpinletsLab is a free online service to help you create, distribute and monitor your widgets. You can create Flash widgets either from scratch or by using one of the templates available. Once your widget is created, you can distribute it on every social sharing site and even on mobile phones. Your readers can then spread your content using a dedicated sharing button sported by each widget. Last, you can track the performance of your widget in real-time using the analytics facility. Registration is mandatory to use the SpinletsLabs service.
   
   http://www.spinletslab.com/

4. Produle

   

   Produle is a widget creator service that allows you to generate three Flash-based widgets at no cost. You have several readily-available templates to style your widget and you also have a web-based studio to add multimedia content as videos, images or music to your widget in just a few clicks. You can freely use Produle widgets to distribute your content across social sharing sites and even let your readers spread your content virally on other web sites using the social sharing feature sported by each widget. Registration is needed to use the service. No analytics.
   
   http://www.produle.com/

5. Widgadget

   

   Widgadget is a free widget creator that you can use to generate widgets and distribute your content on web sites and social media. You can build either Flash or HTML widgets starting from one of the readily-available templates. These templates are organized to help you choose the best one to target the specific audience your widget wants to reach (bloggers, desktop users, etc.) No analytics, nor social sharing features are available. Widgadget requires registration to create your widget.
   
   http://en.widgadget.com/node/add/widget

6. Grazr

   

   Grazr is a free online service which you can use to generate widgets containing the output of RSS feeds. The RSS feed can either include text, images, music or videos. To upload multiple RSS feeds at once, OPML files importing is fully supported. You can choose among three pre-made templates to style your widget, but no analytics nor a social-sharing feature are available. Grazr is completely registration-free.
   
   http://www.grazr.com/

How To Create a Widget: The Best Tutorials

1. How To Create a WordPress Widget

   

   Since WordPress version 2.0, all plugins (small pieces of code that extend the functionality of the WordPress platform) have been made easy to implement inside your web site or blog using widgets, which seamlessly allow non-technical-savvy people to customize and tweak their web pages. In this tutorial you will learn all you need to create a WordPress widget.

2. How To Create Yahoo! Widgets

   

   Yahoo! has an entire section of his online portal devoted to widget creation and development. Inside Yahoo! Widget you will find software downloads, tutorials and other useful resources to design your widget or to convert and package your existing content to be distributed with Yahoo! Widgets.

3. How To Create Widgets For Blogger

   

   Blogger is the blogging platform run by Google. Every blog created with Blogger sports a sidebar where you can add widgets that will help others distribute your content on their own Blogger’s blog. The Help section of Blogger shares a simple example on how to create a widget.

4. How To Create Google Gadget

   

   Google Gadgets are HTML or JavaScript widgets that you can embed on web pages and other apps (like iGoogle) to distribute your content. Google Code has a dedicated section where you can find all the information needed to develop, create and implement a Gadget using the Google API.

5. How To Create Windows Sidebar Gadgets

   

   Starting with Vista, Windows operating systems have a sidebar displayed on the right side of the desktop which you can use to manage your Gadgets (widgets). By reading this tutorial, you will learn what is a Windows Gadget and how to develop one that can be used to distribute your content across Windows computers.

6. How To Create Apple Dashboard Widgets

   

   The Dashboard is a desktop layer where Mac users can display, add and remove widgets. Apple has an in-depth resource page where you can learn all about Apple widgets from a technical standpoint and how to develop your own widget to distribute your content across Apple computers.

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on March 1st, 2010 as “How To Create A Widget: Guide To The Best Web Widgets Creation Tools and Services“.

How do you build a personal brand around yourself? Can one really create a business online simply by sharing her knowledge online?

Photo credit: Robin Good

A couple months ago I was invited by Nokia to join, together with Teemu Arina, a discussion and review session with their online publishing and social media teams focusing on how to improve and steer the future strategy and direction of Nokia online communication strategy.

This one-day long event that took place at Nokia’s headquarters, just outside of Helsinki, remains a pretty memorable day for me, not only because it was my very first time in Finland and because of the prestige of the invitation received, but also because, it preceded another, even more remarkable day, in which I was invited to deliver an exclusive presentation to a unique audience of technologists, media scholars, artists and intellectuals within an exclusive party setting: Dicole OZ.

My good friend Teemu organizes periodically a knowledge-party in which the appetizer dish is some special guest (this time it was me) followed by more drinks and snacks and, hard to believe for Finland, but definitely true for that night, lots of music, dancing and fun games.

As a kind of eccentric proof of the fun level we reached, there are actually no records, pics, videos or anything to review and testify the overwhelming amount of fun we had that night… we were just too busy having fun… but I am sure that for everyone who was there that night (and I hope some will testify this in the comments at the end of this article), that will remain a pretty memorable event.

But back to my short speech.

Since Teemu had given me maximum freedom in the choice of the topics I could have covered, I decided to throw in everything that interests me the most:

Online communication strategy, personal growth, being independent, learning and education, entrepreneurship, scaling yourself… and a lot more.

Thanks to Teemu’s support I have now been able to edit and split this long and varied speech in a few short bursts of inspiration and personal story telling on a few themes, and in this first article I bring you a four-video set focusing only on my personal branding ideas.

• How to become a personal brand and be successful
  (that is: how to be independent using the online universe)
• How to brand and characterize yourself
• How to create a business online by sharing your knowledge
• How to get rid of the 9-to-5 working paradigm

Enjoy.

How To Become a Brand and Be Successful

Duration: 5′ 10″

Full English Text Transcription

Robin Good: The topic of my conversation with you – because it is not going to be a presentation… I have a computer here but I will throw it away in a few seconds, it is just because I have to read one number, and it’s difficult… I could have a calculator I guess – is to tell you about this formula which I made today in my hotel – is a fresh formula – about how can people attempt to follow the type of road that I think I have discovered.

I am not alone in this discovery and the discovery is that you can engage into a type of life that reflects more the type of interests and passions you have by using these new media technologies and by making a living out of it

Beyond the fears of the crisis, the economy, the recession, lay-offs for many of the companies and institutions we work for, I think there are alternative roads.

Maybe they are not for everyone.

You have got to have some courage to take these roads, because like everything that has value, they do include risks, working a lot, making mistakes and sometimes failing altogether. I did all those thing, but the end result is that I am here now telling you a story that has as a starting point, a number.

I have my assistant here, Richard, that I have hired just for this purpose.

The number you are going to read over there, the big number that is starting with a seven is the number of euros, not the total, but almost the total number of euros I have made by doing this new independent work that I invented myself for myself.

How many euros did I make until now?

RIchard: $733,397.03.

Robin Good: The dollar is at €14.50. What is that roughly?

Richard: A million dollar?

Robin Good: Yeah, a bit more.

I am a million dollar man – by the numbers – and it is not a title for a movie. I really am and I am very happy to be because you are going to be listening more closely now. That is the whole purpose of saying that number, really.

I am not a money man. I am not a business man in the traditional sense of the word and I really hate getting money from companies in general. In fact ,I was a happy guest of Nokia yesterday and I enjoyed myself quite a bit and offered them to invite me again to help them out, whether virtually or physically, at absolutely no cost, because my enjoyment and my benefit comes more from the exchange than from the money.

I actually learned something that many of you have already found out, which is that when you get paid the relationship changes a lot.

When you play together, it is all nice and relaxed and intellectually engaging, But when you are somebody who has paid to do something, it is all for yesterday and “I do not like it, then re-do it“.

You become a slave. You just prostitute your talent most of the time for somebody’s else ideas and I was pretty fed up with this, just like many of you probably have been in their lives.

How did I get… how did I jump into this Robin Good role with this crazy hat?

Can we show why do I wear such a stupid hat in this crazy way? If you give me my homepage, people will understand a little more.

I was wearing this hat like some ten years ago, while I was on a little tiny island in the gulf of Thailand.

I love to go in little tiny islands where there are as few tourist as possible, where maybe you can rent a little motorino and go around the jungle, explore and land in little fantastic beaches.

Thailand is a fantastic land for this, because the people are very quiet, you are not running into lions and the beaches are fantastic, the police is not there… so, what do I want more?

I was there doing this type of activity to relax myself and a friend of mine took a picture of me on the motorbike, and… there you see this guy it is me and this hat is this hat, and this is the part of the hat that is inside.

Why am I telling all these about the hat? Because this picture and that hat really helped me a great deal over the years, because people would go crazy asking me: “What is that snake you wear on your head? Why do you do that?”

They never got an answer because few of them got to meet me and to see the actual hat, but even getting something that is not a typical tie stuff, has worked fine for me, just because it characterized me.

Why I Called Myself Robin Good

Duration: 5′ 39″

Robin Good: …and then many of you want to know why Robin Good, since today I wad discovered officially that my real name is a difficult Italian one – that is Luigi Canali De Rossi – and wherever I go they always mix it up: Mr. De Rossi, Mr. Rossi, Mr. Loogy.

Once I realized that I could have put both of my feet in this independent boat, that is that I could really say: “Clients, go… to that place“, when I could say that to them, then I said:

“If I am going to play all my cards on my own, I would better have a name, since I am writing in English and sharing with an international audience.

A name that is going to be easy to remember and plus I want something that helps people understand what type of person I am.“

That is a challenging branding activity. They do this in advertising agencies when they have a new product. I have worked in agencies, in different type of situations similar to what happens in a creative situation like that – but it is just too challenging.

The very same friends that I sent my friend Teemu when he came to Rome – I gave him dinner for four hours and had a conversation with him without knowing that me and him have never met actually – those very friends one day told me: “Look, we all have some type of search ability – since then I call it my Internal Google – that helps, you if you want, to remember things, or find out things, because they are all there.”

Like when you meet a guy the day before, and then you meet your friend the day after and you say: “Do you remember the guy we saw last night? I cannot remember it.” How many times we fall in that situation?

The fact that we say “I cannot remember it“, Is a command to your Internal Google basically not to remember it.

If you just switch the type of commands and say: “I am going to remember it, it is going to come up“, you will notice that – maybe not in three seconds, maybe not in three minutes – but maybe in the next that name will come.

If you trust your memory to work and in giving it proper commands it will give you greater feedback. Since then I started to use this Internal Google for a purpose, and when it came the time of “how do I call myself?“, I said:

“Internal Google, this is a good occasion for you. Let’s put you to work.

I need a name that shows that I am a very independent guy, anti-authority, a little radical, I do not go really by the rules, I like to… What do I like to do?… I like to help the small guy, the underdog, those that think they cannot make it and then you tell them: “Look there” and they say “Whoa!”.“

That is what I like because having been born like a DJ, my first first passion… doing something that makes people feel good is a great feeling, possibly one of the best feelings you can have, along with dancing, singing and flying… I do not know, It is that good for me.

I said: “Internal Google go, get the name that has these characteristics and see what you can do.” But you know what? This time the Internal Google seemed not to work, because minutes, hours, days, weeks, months went by and I was with no answer.

But then one day I was in Via Gregorio VII – the street that is nearby my office in Rome – with my motorbike at the red light… vroom vroom vroom… waiting there… when all of a sudden… I hear this God-like voice coming from the sky: “Robin Good“.

I did not even know who they where calling, but since it was coming from inside the head I guess it was me. I said: “What is up?”

“This is Internal Google talking to you, man. We have got the word you been asking for: It is Robin Good.

But not only. Do you know your uncle Robin Hood? You know, Luigi, where that Robin Hood comes from?

He comes from a famous forest, the forest of Sherwood. Luigi, how do you spell that Sherwood?”

“I guess, what is it… S-H-E-R-W-O-O-D”

“Yes, you do not come from there. That was your uncle. You moved South.

There is another forest and is the forest of Sharewood, written with an “A“. S-H-A-R-E, the forest where you share.

Robin Good from Sharewood.“

You tell me to how many agencies you would have had to go to and how many creative brains and sessions you would have had to come up with such a great name.

I do not know how much it would had cost it, but I have an agency inside my had and I got the name that I really could not be happier, because it just fits me good, I feel good, I feel one thing with that name.

That is really the story, I am not inventing this in any way. That is how the name came to be and why so much my emphasis on sharing.

How To Create a Business By Sharing Your Knowledge

Duration: 1′ 35″

Robin Good: Giving out stuff, especially the stuff that normally you would have to ask people money for to tell you that thing that you know… If you give out those things consistently and repeatedly, you build such a reputation for yourself, such a credibility, that then you can do many things that are otherwise impossible.

The Internet is the ideal environment where to do this, because you can share a lot there. You just put stuff out there, and if you can turn on enough green lights so that people see that, it is a lot of sharing compared to what you do in physical life.

I realized that by sharing I could achieve the goals I wanted to reach, that are:

• Not to have to write invoices,
• not to have to go to the lawyer again to ask: “When the hell are they going to pay me?“,
• not to hear from the bank that your account is in red again and you have to come there and put some money on it… and now I have another installment to pay for the house or the car…

This is all part of the past.

I have not become Murdoch and I may be in a different situation anytime soon according to the numbers.

Maybe because I am the type of person I am I will not get there, because I have gotten so much self-confidence from seeing that if you put yourself into something, you can get really anywhere you want, that I don’t think that anything will really “defeat” me.

How To Get Rid of The 9-5 Working Paradigm

Duration: 3′ 27″

Robin Good: What I see as the limit of Teemu and his entourage right now – that is what it is the margin for improvement for Teemu in the future – is that he is not scaling himself.

He is doing this type of work that I was doing before becoming Robin Good. That is, he going out to big, prestigious, wonderful-sounding-name companies to get big, prestigious money… but every time is a new story.

Every time you have to make a lot of work to make them happy – they treat you like “I need this for Friday” “Friday?! Yesterday?!” “Yes, we needed it yesterday“, and they are a little hard maybe sometimes to get things working, they make it a little more difficult…

I wonder why somebody so intelligent is there,in this routine whereby maybe he is going to get 60 or 75 and still running after them.

What is the deal in having 150 clients that make you rich for the time of being rich – because then you have to spend it again to keep all these things going?

Then it gets to the question of life: Where are we here for? Working for some other company to get the money to pay the rent and the lease?

That is not the real story. There is another life. It does exist.

If you want to get to that other life but you are spending all your time in that business cycle, how can you get out of it? By scaling yourself – and that is what new media technologies allow you to do.

By using the Internet I write once. Tell me – I do not want to say numbers – how many people read it? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundred of thousands, millions.

I prepare a course or a video, I do it once and thousands of people watch it. Do I want to sell it? Why not? If they want to buy it, let’s sell it. I do one thing and I sell it many times – this is the age of this.

We do not want to go every time to the library to check the books. We want the library to come to our homes.

When people want to study today, they want the Teemus, the Negropontes, the Jay Crosses, the big thinkers, the Samis of the world to come to their screen at the time they want.

They want to make a click and hear them say the type of stuff they want to learn about. That is really the way it is. I think you all can identify into that. It is a normal, spontaneous, intuitive drive, but Teemu is not coming to me. I have to be a big company, I have to hire him.

In the recipe to get out of the system, the idea is to scaling yourself or building things that stay there and create some assets.

Still when I was pretty big guy, but still in school – I was not really this hard-working-study guy because I could easily go through the notions and get enough good rates to pass by – I was wondering “Am I going to be ever somebody significant in my life?” Because all the signals from the institution, my family, “you are a little bit too crazy“. You tend to… you hear it and hear it, you say…

Video clip originally recorded by Teemu Arina for Dicole and originally published as “Robin Good – The Sharewood Formula“.

What is real-time online ad bidding? Is this really an additional opportunity for web publishers to better monetize their ad inventory?

Photo credit: <a href="Cornishman and Ljupco Smokovski – Mashed-up by Robin Good

Real-time bidding is a new, emerging feature of online advertising optimization technologies aimed at increasing the value of ad impressions by targeting users dynamically and on an impression-by-impression basis.

Real-time bidding allows advertisers to reach the right user, at the right time and place inside a competitive bidding environment, where advertisers try to reach out to the same user in a real-time auction and assign an individual value to each specific ad impression.

This is a fundamental shift in the way that ad price prediction works today.

Currently, most digital media buying is done based on assumptions about certain audiences. Individual impressions are sold at a pre-negotiated price, which causes ad impressions to be often under-valued and to result in a low CPM (cost for thousands impressions) for publishers.

Real-time bidding inside online ad auctions wants to change the rules of the game by letting advertisers efficiently segment their audiences on the basis of their unique characteristics, instead of having those emerge from statistical averages across the segment.

What this means is that, when using real-time bidding web publishers may earn more for their ad inventory while also gaining useful insights into their audience that was previously available primarily to ad networks.

It is also true that real-time bidding for online ads is still in its infancy, but as the authors of this report predict, it may have a growth of 3-5% in 2010 which should seriously alert publishers to learn all about this new technology and get the most out of their ad inventory.

In this in-depth research report you will find comprehensive information on how real-time bidding works as well as clear indications of its pros and cons.

Disclosure: MasterNewMedia has no commercial partnership or co-interests with PubMatic and has been given permission from the publisher / author to present this report on the Web.

Here all the details:

Understanding Real-Time Bidding (RTB) From The Publisher Perspective

by PubMatic and Bennett Zucker

Real-Time Bidding, or RTB, is sure to be one of the most frequently used online advertising buzzwords of 2010.

Many advertising experts have argued that it is going to fundamentally change the course of online advertising as we know it. It has even been referred to as the next revolution in advertising for the benefits it will provide to all players in the ecosystem – the publisher, the user, and the advertiser.

Real-Time Bidding allows advertisers to reach the right user, in the right place, at the right time – and assign an individual value to a particular ad impression.

Leveraging advanced technology offered by a relatively small but quickly growing number of companies, advertisers place bids on reaching specific users dynamically, and on an impression-by-impression basis.

PubMatic has found that publishers monetizing ad inventory via RTB can receive an increased eCPM because of the improved campaign performance that RTB offers. In the case of one particular US Entertainment publisher, the publisher was able to achieve a 106% increase in eCPM over a six-month period.

Along with the clear benefits of RTB, publishers must be cognizant of the potential pitfalls associated with this emerging media buying trend.

RTB was originally conceived as an advertiser-focused solution, and publishers must take multiple issues into account in order to make their businesses successful in an RTB-enabled world.

PubMatic estimates that less than 1% of online advertising was purchased via RTB in 2009, and that will grow to 3-5% in 2010.

Because RTB is the fastest growing segment of US online advertising, it is imperative that publishers understand the RTB landscape and how to successfully harness RTB ad dollars to their benefit.

Unlocking The True Value of The Impression

Click to enlarge image

The most important promise that RTB holds for publishers is increasing the value of ad impressions.

With RTB, advertisers have the greatest level of transparency available on the individual user in real-time, which can significantly increase the value of each ad impression and the corresponding publisher CPM.

Having greater transparency about the user in real-time provides great insight to advertisers, but it is the difference in how media is bought and sold with Real-Time Bidding that is the true game changer.

Currently, most digital media buying is done based on assumptions about certain audiences.

For example, audiences bought through ad networks and ad exchanges are often purchased in buckets or by segment. How the audiences are categorized in certain segments depends on who is selling them. And while some audience sellers do a better job of segmenting users than others, so long as individual impressions are being grouped into a bucket and sold at a pre-negotiated price, they are not being fairly valued and are often sold at under-valued prices, as shown.

Example 1: Same User, Same Campaign (Purchased Differently)

Click to enlarge image

In Example 1, a luxury car advertiser is looking for a very specific audience type and is willing to pay a premium price to reach a specific user that is highly qualified.

The more qualified the use, the more the advertiser is willing to pay.

On the right side of the example below, the advertiser (or rather the technology company placing bids on behalf of the advertiser) can see unique characteristics about the user and therefore is willing to pay a $3.90 CPM to target that user.

On the left hand side, the same user would have been bucketed into an auto-buying segment and priced according to the segment price,which is far lower than what was paid via RTB for the individual.

Example 2: Segment Based Campaign Vs. Impression Level Campaign (RTB)

Click to enlarge image

Example 2 below shows the ongoing luxury car ad campaign on a larger scale.

Because RTB is conducted in real-time, advertisers,or their proxy vendor that facilitates their media buying, can buy impressions to reach specific users or reject them as the campaign is in progress.

Therefore, in a real-time situation the luxury car advertiser would likely choose to reach many of the same users that would have been segmented for them as auto buyers in a pre-negotiated bucket buy.

However, having more information about each individual user, the advertiser would also likely want to reach users that did not fall into the pre-defined auto buyer segment while also rejecting some of the impressions that would have made it into the segment.

More importantly, the pricing would be different based on the unique characteristics of each user as opposed to an average across the segment.

The Ecosystem Benefits of RTB

Click to enlarge image

In the long run, advertisers that have better performing campaigns can pay more to target the right users.

According to Turn, a company that facilitates RTB transactions for advertisers by leveraging inventory from sell-side platforms such as PubMatic, advertisers are seeing up to 135% improvement on click-through rates and 150% improvement on conversion rates.

Better performing campaigns have a positive impact on all parties involved, not just for the advertiser.

In the image above are a few key benefits that RTB brings to the publisher, the user, and the advertiser.

Understanding The RTB Ecosystem

Real-Time Bidding is very much still in its infancy, but the number of companies that help advertisers and publishers leverage RTB is growing rapidly.

In 2008, the number of companies talking about RTB could be counted on one hand. In 2009, the number of companies involved in real time bidding increased dramatically, but each category in the RTB ecosystem plays a significant role and it is important for publishers to understand those roles.

The Many Possible Flows of RTB

Click to enlarge image

Ensuring High Publisher eCPM With RTB

A truly competitive bidding environment is essential for ensuring consistent and continuous revenue growth.

PubMatic has seen significant eCPM improvements for its publishers that are participating in RTB campaigns, but because this is a bidding environment, a high price is not guaranteed.

RTB is still in its infancy, and the number of RTB advertisers is relatively small, so without enough advertisers competing to reach the same user, a lucky advertiser could get the ad space for below market value.

Increased Bidders Drives Value of Ad Space

In order to ensure there are enough bidders to keep the value of the publisher’s ad space high, PubMatic’s Ad Auction Engine™ brings the greatest number of bidders together in a real-time auction for every impression.

Three Categories of Buyers

When advertisers find the user they want to reach, they are willing to pay a high price to reach that user-but they still want to pay the least amount possible in order to reach that user.

PubMatic’s Ad Auction Engine™ does not allow any real-time bids to win an auction unless the bid is high enough, as shown in Example 3.

Example 3: The Ad Auction Engine™ Process Works For Every Impression

Click to enlarge image

An RTB bid only wins if it beats the pricing coming from PubMatic’s Ad Price Prediction™ and direct sold insertion orders that a publisher’s direct sales team entered into PubMatic’s system.

In this example above, the real-time bid of $3.05 bid did not win. Instead a non-RTB enabled ad network was willing to pay the most for the ad space.

Due to the fact that there are far fewer RTB enabled demand partners than non-RTB ad networks and exchanges, in most cases an RTB bidder is not selected to serve an advertisement.

In the cases where there are no RTB bidders competing for the publisher impression, PubMatic selects the highest paying ad network or exchange using the proprietary Ad Price Prediction™ process, or chooses to show an ad from a direct sold insertion order if it is the highest priced ad available.

The Ad Price Prediction™ process is powerful technology that was developed over the course of several years by PubMatic’s 40+ full time engineers.

The majority of RTB transactions that PubMatic facilitates on behalf of the publisher are received from companies that have their own campaign optimizing algorithms working the benefit of the advertiser.

For example, when a DSP is working on behalf of an advertiser, the DSP continually adjusts its pricing during the course of the campaign in order to reach the right audience at the lowest cost to the advertiser.

However, PubMatic’s Ad Auction Engine™ keeps ad prices high for the publisher by bringing together the greatest number of demand sources for each impression, and as a result, real-time bidders often have to increase their bids if they are to win the impressions they want.

Example 4: The Ad Auction Engine™ Competitive Environment Encourages Higher Bids From RTB Partners

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RTB enabled demand partners fine tune their bids during the course of a campaign. If they continually lose auctions due to low pricing, they will increase their bids.

In this example above, the real-time bid did win after increasing the bid price to reach a specific audience.

It could be several years or longer before there are enough real-time bidders to ensure high pricing for the publisher. However, PubMatic is connected to the greatest number of RTB demand partners of any sell side platform.

How The RTB Process Works For Each Impression

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It is critical to include as many RTB partners as possible in order to have the RTB partners increase the percentage of wins they have within the Ad Auction Engine™ process.

The number of demand partners that are plugged into PubMatic’s API for RTB is continuing to grow at a fast pace and is nearly four times what it was just six months ago.

The increase of RTB demand partners will help to increase bid prices, but the Ad Auction Engine™ remains a key part of the bidding process in order to get the most qualified advertisement at the highest price possible for the impression.

Filling Impressions By The Numbers

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The chart represents an actual PubMatic publisher in December 2009.

Every impression that PubMatic facilitates goes through The Ad Auction Engine™. The percentages represent where the highest paying ads are coming from.

RTB Targeting

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Ensuring RTB Data Safety and Brand Protection

Real-Time Bidding has the potential to bring significant revenue lift to publishers, but RTB is not without its own brand control and data safety risks.

Publishers need to understand that RTB was originally developed for the benefit of the advertiser, and therefore publishers should consider an RTB partner that is a strict publisher advocate and has the tools to protect the publisher.

There are five key considerations that publishers should be thinking about when selecting a partner for RTB:

1. Getting The Right Demand Partners From The Start Prevents Most Hassles

As most publishers know, not every ad network or advertiser is well intentioned. A strict RTB partner vetting process should be required based on the objectives of the publisher.

A publisher’s RTB sell side partner should enforce demand partners and advertisers to:

• Meet the minimum RTB technical requirements for ad speed and data safety so that latency and brand control is not a problem
• Actively bid on the RTB platform and meet a minimum number of bid wins each month to ensure that no “data squatters” on the platform
• Comply with regular auditing of data that is collected vs. dollars spent on bidding

PubMatic, for example, has set up a strict Trusted Partner Program™ for RTB and will pro-actively remove demand partners that do not meet the high expectations set in the agreement.

2. The Publisher Should Set The Rules Around What Data Is Passed and Have a Way To Enforce Those Rules

The publisher owns their own data and publishers need the ability to set rules around which data they pass to aspecific bidder.

In some cases ad networks or other demand partners will try to collect more information than is needed for the campaign. Publishers should have a way of protecting themselves from data theft.

For example, Data Firewall™, is a proprietary product developed by PubMatic that:

• Gives publisher total transparency a about what data is being passed
• Identifies pixels and tracks if ad network or advertiser is putting pixel on publishers without permission
• Automatically alerts a publisher when demand partners go beyond “normal targeting“

3. Screening Ads In Real-Time Process Helps Prevent Unwanted Ads

Ensuring creative control can be difficult. A publisher’s sell side platform partner should have a creative screening of all advertiser creative on the publisher’s site available to view in real-time.

Ideally, the sell side platform has this process built into their UI so that when the publisher logs in they can see the creative that is being shown on their site at that moment.

In order to provide the publisher with a snapshot of what ad sare going across their site, or sites, at any given moment, PubMatic offers publishers a Live Creative Dashboard™ that:

• Takes regular screenshots of publisher website in 5-60
  minute intervals
• Emails screenshots to PubMatic’s Creative Services Team
• Traces URLs referred to during ad serving
• Reduces manual work of reloading ad tags for checking creative

4. Preventing Unwanted Malware Is Key To a Good User Experience

For the most part, RTB advertisers do not use malware simply because the cost of RTB campaigns are too expensive to waste on such advertising.

However, it can happen and an extra safety net should be available to ensure that publishers have maximum safety.

There are now products available for publishers that:

• Automatically scans all ad tags
• Pro-actively and quickly identify any potential malware
• Alert the publisher if there is a security breach
• Send an email detailing ad calls + URL / Ad Network mapping

Publishers have the option of using the products themselves or partnering with a sell side platform such as PubMatic that has it built in as part of the service.

5. Loading Speed Should Never Be an Issue

Part of a good user experience is fast loading pages.

A globaldata center footprint ensures that demand partners return bids in milliseconds to ensure positive end-user experience.

Publishers may consider asking their partner about the location of data centers, and ask about:

• Speed delivery times
• How often the speed time is monitored
• Whether or not a third party company verifies the speed time

Publisher Results Using PubMatic To Participate In RTB Campaigns

It is critical to include as many RTB partners as possible in order to have the RTB partners increase the percentage of wins they have within the Ad Auction Engine™ process.

PubMatic has been live with Real-Time Bidding since February 2009, and as the first sell side platform to market with RTB, has been carefully monitoring the results.

PubMatic publishers participating in a fixed minimum number of Real-Time Bidding campaigns in 2009 saw an average eCPM boost of 64%.

Average Publisher eCPM

The following case studies represent PubMatic publishers that have been actively participating in RTB campaigns for at least 6 months to ensure revenue lift was consistent and stable.

The eCPMs reflect the averages before using PubMatic, the average using PubMatic without RTB, and using PubMatic with RTB.

Publisher RTB Case Study 1

Publisher RTB Case Study 2

Conclusion

If advertisers want Real-Time Bidding, publishers should think about real-time selling. And in 2010, we will see more publishers dipping their toes into the RTB pool as they realize its potential to connect them to more great brand advertisers and the opportunity to improve eCPMs for their valuable audiences as well as for their harder to sell inventory.

While a handful of media companies have shut out ad networks or replaced third parties with homegrown networks, many successful publishers – with great brands, experienced ad sellers and the latest technology – still struggle to fill 50% or more of their inventory.

“We have a very high touch sales organization,” an executive of one major publisher says, “and there has tended to be a bias against networks and exchanges.” In spite of intense debate in the company, they have committed to testing.

“Some of our inventory is currently biddable on exchanges through our optimizer, and we are excited about introducing RTB,” he says, adding that early tests seem promising.

He urges publishers to catalog and share successes and best practices. “Every publisher should be testing and getting ready for the day when RTB will become the norm. Otherwise, even now,you are just leaving money on the table.”

On the buy side, Anthony Rhind, Co-CEO, Havas Digital, recently told CMO.com,

“Buying at the impression level, as opposed to the placement level, allows segmentation strategies to be executed with greatly reduced waste.

Of course, segmentation must be informed, so with impression buying comes the need to use data to profile impressions to realize that segmentation. This is where the fusion of contact / customer data with campaign data, site data and profile data becomes critical to directing trading strategies.

This is an extremely exciting area for our industry, with major implications for our ability to drive clients’ business volumes that are attributed to digital media.“

As RTB continues to grow, publishers may earn more for their inventory while also gaining insights into their audience’s value that was previously available primarily to the networks.

Adding up the possibilities, there may be good reason to expect a five-fold increase in RTB volume this year.

As PubMatic’s co-founder & CEO Rajeev Goel cautions,

“Real-Time Bidding is still in its infancy, but it is gaining momentum every day. Publishers cannot afford to stay on the sidelines and let somebody else figure it out and take home the growing tide of RTB advertising dollars.“

Originally written by PubMatic and Bennett Zucker, and first published on February, 1st as “Understanding Real-Time Bidding (RTB) From The Publisher Perspective“.

About PubMatic

PubMatic is a global ad revenue optimization company that provides online publishers with a service solution to manage and monetize non-Guaranteed ad inventory. PubMatic’s real-time ad price prediction technology ensures that online publishers get the most money from their advertising space by deciding in real-time which ad network or exchange can best monetize each impression. There are currently over 6,000 large and medium publishers working with PubMatic. PubMatic is venture backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus India Capital, and Helion Ventures.

About Bennett Zucker

Bennett Zucker is currently the principal at Media Tech Business. In the past he was a publisher of magazines and books for such companies as Rodale and McGraw-Hill. In 2007, he was with Right Media, and also held a few shares in Tacoda, where he worked for three years, when it was acquired by AOL.

Photo credits:
Understanding The RTB Ecosystem – Chris Lamphear
Ensuring High Publisher eCPM with RTB – John Takai
Ensuring RTB Data Safety and Brand Protection – Mipan
Publisher Results Using PubMatic To Participate In RTB Campaigns – Sapsiwai

Although many web publishers consider email newsletters an old-fashioned way to update their readers and customers, in my opinion, email messages remain THE most familiar, intimate, direct and effective way to communicate with anyone you know. As such they represent one of the most powerful means to create and share value online and one of the few effective methods to start the “conversations” we keep hearing more and more about when it comes to marketing and community building.

Photo credit: mipan

But, how do you create, design and deliver an effective email newsletter?

Is it better to use plain text or take advantage of the cool formatting options available with HTML? How do you get readers to subscribe? What is the best writing style and format to use? How do you avoid having your newsletter trapped into a spam filter or your email added to a public mailing blacklist?

In this MasterNewMedia guide I am going to introduce you to the whole process of starting, designing and delivering an effective email newsletter.

Whether you want to keep up with your online community, promote your sales or increase your brand awareness, these guide will help you learn how to get started and how to avoid the most common pitfalls.

In this guide you will find everything about:

1. Newsletter Creation
2. Newsletter Writing
3. Newsletter Formatting
4. Newsletter Design
5. Newsletter Distribution and Performance Analysis
6. Newsletter Spam Testing

As a special bonus, I have also added at the end of this guide a selected list of free, quality newsletter templates that can be immediately downloaded and put to use to format your newsletter.

But before getting into all these details, let me share here with you first what I think are the key items you should be paying attention to, if you are serious about immediately starting an email newsletter.

• Make it stand out: Make your email subject line memorable; this is the first thing your readers will see. Most people receive tons of emails everyday, so it is really hard to get their attention. Speak to their heart and curiosity as if you were their friend, not their supplier.
• Make it readable: If you use HTML in your emails, use a smooth and big font type to make sure that your newsletter is clearly readable, especially for those who are not teenagers anymore.
• Make it scannable: Nobody likes lengthy documents to read, especially where the text is all crowded together. Be sure to space the paragraphs and sections of your newsletter properly and also provide short indexes and visual “anchors” that readers can use to quickly skim through the text.
• Make it intimate: Avoid the press-release-like writing style favoring instead a more confidential and direct tone to create a true “conversation” with your readers. Ask questions openly and try to understand what your audience really needs.
• Make it relevant: Only send your newsletter when you have something to say. Do not send out newsletters that are just full of your latest offers and suggestions to buy. Give first something really useful and relevant to your subscribers and use the newsletter to build intimacy, confidence and trust instead of using it as an offer-firing-cannon that only broadcasts and never listens.
• Make it light: Do not use videos, sounds, heavy images or attachments. If you want to provide such content, link back to it on your web site.
• Privacy and Disclosure: Establish a clear and comprehensive privacy policy and then stick to it. Reassure your readers that their email addresses will not be given to third-parties without their consent and make sure you have a visible and easy to click “unsubscribe” button at the end of your newsletter. If your policy changes, do notify readers about that.
• Don’t fancy up your newsletter with cool layouts and graphics: Those things, impactful-looking layouts and images are the trademarks of companies communicating via newsletter in the “old” way. In fact, if you pay attention, you will see that those very newsletters are the ones you read less and trash more. Why? Because they smell fake a mile away. The ones that work are the ones written as if a friend was writing to you, and as such these are normally written in plain text, with minimal formatting and no graphics at all. For now these are the traits of intimate, confidential and trustable. Use them.

If you want to dig deeper, and learn more about how to build and successfully distribute your email newsletter, here is the cream of the best tutorials, guides and resources you can find on the Internet:

Intro by Robin Good

How To Create, Design and Deliver Your Email Newsletter

1. How To Build Your Newsletter

How To Create An Effective Email Newsletter

In this PDF the Congressional Management Foundation shares some useful tips to create and manage an effective newsletter. Keep your newsletter scannable, have always something to say, get readers’ attention, etc. You will also learn how to build your own email newsletter distribution list.

by CMF Editors – Congressional Management Foundation

How To Get Started: What To Decide First

Before starting your newsletter you have to decide a few things: how you want to write your newsletter (plain text or HTML), how to let readers subscribe to your newsletter (opt-in or double opt-in) and how to value the response rate your newsletter will get.

by Jeanne Jennings – ClickZ

How To Choose The Focus And Goals of Your Newsletter

You have to set goals for your newsletter to see if it will really help you improve your sales, increase brand awareness or whatever your goal might be. In this article you will learn the most common goals a newsletter may help you achieve and also useful tips on how to create an effective subscription page and how to find affordable editorial content.

by Jeanne Jennings – ClickZ

Create an Email Newsletter With Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word helps you manage templates, adding images, and other bells and whistles to develop an effective email newsletter. In this article from microsoft you will be guided through the creation process of your newsletter starting with Word and ending with Outlook to send your finished newsletter to your mailing list.

by Microsoft Editors – Microsoft Office Online

2. How To Write Your Newsletter

How To Choose An Effective Writing Style

If you have ever wished you could convert more of your newsletter readers into raving fans of you or your brand, then in this article you will get to know some effective ways to develop a writing style that actually creates a “conversation” between you and your audience.

by John Alexander – Search Engine Guide

How To Produce Your Newsletter

Producing your newsletter doesn’t have to be a monumental task. You probably have a word processor and that’s just good enough to get started. You will then have to set up a few options and think of publication frequency, the topics your newsletter will deal with, a good template you want to use. What is really important is that you develop a unique newsletter “look“.

by MB Editors – MoreBusiness.com

How To Get Your Message Across

In today’s information overload world, it is vital to communicate clearly, concisely and effectively. People do not have time to read book-length emails, and they do not have the patience to scour badly-constructed emails for “buried” points. Then the better your writing skills are, the better the impression you will make.

by MT Editors – MindTools

3. How To Format Your Newsletter

Newsletter Formatting And The Remove Extra Line Breaks Issue

Robin Good explains how to resolve the annoying MS Outlook 2003 extra line breaks issue that most people come across when writing their email newsletter. As you will see, even though the solution is pretty easy it took quite some time and testing for Robin to sort this out. If you too have the same issue, here is what Robin has discovered.

by Robin Good – MasterNewMedia

How To Start and Format Your Newsletter

Cristopher Heng talks you through the very first steps you have to take when starting and formatting your email newsletter. Making the right choices in the very beginning of your experience with newsletters is crucial to make sure your email will look professional and not the result of the spur of the moment.

by Cristopher Heng – The Site Wizard

How To Code a HTML Newsletter

HTML emails are a very engaging communications medium for both publishers and readers. Publishers can track rates for email opens, forwards, and clickthroughs; readers are presented with information that is more visually appealing and much easier to scan and navigate than plain text emails.

by Tim Slavin – SitePoint

4. How To Design Your Newsletter

How To Style Your Email Newsletter

In this article, you will be presented with common design patterns of email newsletters and learn which approaches work well, so that you will be prepared to create one for yourself and your clients. Also included is a compilation and analysis of different newsletter designs so that you can learn from them as well as tips on what to do and what not to do.

by Noam Almosnino – WebDesignerDepot

Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples

Smashing Magazine editor Chui Chui Tan discusses some guidelines for designing and distributing email newsletters. Each point is accompanied by both good and bad examples, so you can get a better understanding of the problems to avoid and good design decisions to make.

by Chui Chui Tan – Smashing Magazine

How To Design and Build Your Newsletter

This article from Smashing Magazine is a quick guide to effective email newsletters which will give you the information you need to plan, design and build an HTML newsletter that renders well and is actually useful for your recipients.

by Matthew Peterson – Smashing Magazine

5. How To Distribute and Track Your Newsletter

Email Newsletter Distribution And Mailing Services: Guide To The Best Free Online Solutions

Communicating via email in a direct, intimate and informal way remains one of the best ways to market and promote your content, services and products online. This is why the most effective online businesses still rely on crafting quality newsletters and email updates to keep their fans and customers updated, entertained and happy. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best free email newsletter distribution and mailing services available out there, as well as complementary information to help you identify and select your ideal one.

by Daniele Bazzano – MasterNewMedia

Email Distribution And Commercial Newsletter Mailing Services: Guide To The Best Paid Online Solutions

Email distribution and newsletter mailing services are among the best and most utilized email marketing tools available out there. They allow you to get in touch with your audience in a direct and intimate way trough autoresponders, direct messages, and any type of newsletter format that can be used to market your ideas, or your online product or service. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best commercial newsletter distribution and mailing list services available out there, as well as complementary review information to help you select the best solution for your specific needs.

by Daniele Bazzano – MasterNewMedia

Distribute Your Newsletter Using a WordPress Blog

In this tutorial you will learn how to use WordPress and Feedburner with a few plugins to create a simple email newsletter service for your WordPress blog. You can track the performance of your newsletter by checking how many subscribers you have, how many clicks each link gets and much more.

by WPB Editors – WPBeginner

6. How To Test Your Newsletter For Spam

Spam Checking Tools And Tips To Avoid Your Newsletter Being Filtered, Blacklisted Or Marked As Spam

Sending out newsletters and having them delivered reliably to your list of subscribers has become a greater challenge than I would have ever thought. Problem is, if you don’t devote yourself to it, everything is set for your newsletter to run into trouble. To not run into such issues you really need to proactively do something about it. The negative consequences are blacklisting of your email and your newsletter filtered out by spam filters on your recipient ISP mail server or on their computers.

by Robin Good – MasterNewMedia

Proof-Test Your Newsletter With SpamCheck

SpamCheck is a free online service that will help you verify whether your newsletter will be treated as a spam message and thus trashed when it hits your receiver’s inbox. All you have to do is prepare your e-mail and then send it to SpamCheck which will analyze your newsletter and send back an error report to you with all the issues encountered and how to fix those.

by SS Editors – SiteSell

Use MailingCheck To Avoid Spam Filtering

MailingCheck is a free software for Windows that will analyze your email newsletter and help you clean it from anything that may lead email providers to treat your messages as spam. Just download the software, install it and open your emails. Then click on “Check now” to analyze your email and then go cleaning your newsletter from spam following the instructions.

by MC Editors – MailingCheck

Selected Quality Email Newsletter Templates

Here is a list of free quality email templates to help you style your newsletter:

• HTML Email Templates
• 30 Free HTML Email Templates
• 35+ Free HTML Email Newsletter Templates
• Design Newsletter Templates
• Free Newsletter and Email Templates

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on February 22nd, 2010 as “How To Create, Design And Deliver Your Email Newsletter“.

Viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or “ad hoc” networks of consumers and the harsh reality is that advertisers completely fail to understand the process whereby a content is redistributed over the web. Thus, and in sharp contrast with what they claim, advertisers are completely clueless about how to build a viral marketing campaign and completely ignore what metrics should be deployed to measure their viral campaigns effectiveness.

Photo credit: Kheng Ho Toh

Nevertheless, advertisers are so fascinated by the “concept” of viral marketing, that they are planning to spend increasingly greater budgets to start online viral marketing campaigns (eMarketer reports an estimated $1.4 billion in 2011 that advertisers will spend to place ads on social networking sites).

[...] the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist – is a problematic way to understand cultural practices.

At the root of this, there are two major misconceptions about viral marketing:

1. Viral content is something that gets published on the Internet and then spreads spontaneously like a virus.
2. People that find content interesting and meaningful for them or their social circle, proactively redistribute it using the Internet.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication – that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.

So, what makes a campaign really “viral” is not so much its ability to “be shared and re-transmitted” by as many people as possible, but the potential it has of being “repurposed“, “re-adapted” by the largest number of people in the largest number of new contexts.

Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes“, a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.

In this highly comprehensive and in-depth guide, MIT Professor Henry Jenkins and his team illustrate in simple terms how and what makes something “viral” as well as explain the dynamics that govern the social redistribution of your content across the web.

Here all the details:

If It Does Not Spread, It Is Dead: Media Viruses and Memes

by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf with Joshua Green

Media Viruses and Memes

Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers.

Definitions of ‘viral‘ media suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing. The term ‘viral‘ has been used to describe so many related but ultimately distinct practices – ranging from Word-of-Mouth marketing to video mash-ups and remixes posted to YouTube – that just what counts as viral is unclear. It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerrilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors.

Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape.

Ultimately, however, viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or “ad hoc” networks of consumers.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication – that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities.

In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry.

The Spreadable Media Model

A close look at particular examples of Internet “memes” or “viruses” highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture. Given these limitations, we are proposing an alternative model which we think better accounts for how and why media content circulates at the present time, the idea of spreadable media.

A spreadable model emphasizes the activity of consumers – or what Grant McCracken calls “multipliers” – in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets.

Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes“, a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.

This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain ‘purity‘ of message.

In this article, we will explore the roots of the concept of viral media, looking at the concept of the “media viruses” and its ties to the theory of the “meme“.

Limits of The Biological Metaphor

The reliance on a potent biological metaphor to describe the process of communication reflects a particular set of assumptions about the power relations between producers, texts, and consumers which may obscure the realities these terms seek to explain.

The metaphor of “infection” reduces consumers to the involuntary “hosts” of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design “killer” texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural “bloodstream“. While attractive, such a notion does not reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes.

A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.

In the following, we will outline the limits of these two analogies as part of making the case for the importance of adopting a new model for thinking about the grassroots circulation of content in the current media landscape.

In the end, we are going to propose that these concepts be retired in favor of a new framework – spreadable media.

The Concept of Viral Media

Consider what happened when a group of advertising executives sat down to discuss the concept of viral media, a conversation which demonstrates the confusion about what viral media might be, about what it is good for, and why it is worth thinking about.

One panelist began by suggesting viral media referred to situations “where the marketing messaging was powerful enough that it spread through the population like a virus“, a suggestion the properties of viral media lie in the message itself, or perhaps in those who crafted that message.

The second, on the other hand, described viral media in terms of the activity of consumers: “Anything you think is cool enough to send to your friends, that is viral“. Later in the same exchange, he suggested “Viral, just by definition, is something that gets passed around by people“.

As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder.

No one knew for sure why any given message “turned viral“, though there was lots of talk about “designing the DNA” of viral properties and being “organic” to the communities through which messages circulated.

To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on “how easy is it to pass“, suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community: “If you are getting a ton of negative comments, maybe you are not talking about it in the right place.”

By the end of the exchange, no one could sort out what was meant by “viral media” or what metrics should be deployed to measure its success. This kind of definitional fuzziness makes it increasingly difficult to approach the process analytically. Without certainty about what set of practices the term refers to, it is impossible to attempt to understand how and why such practices work.

As already noted, the reliance on a biological metaphor to explain the way communication takes place – through practices of ‘infection‘ – represents the first difficulty with the notion of viral media.

The attraction of the infection metaphor is two-fold:

1. It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary “hosts” of media viruses;
2. While holding onto the idea that media producers can design “killer” texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural “bloodstream“.

The Media Virus

Douglas Rushkoff’s 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term “viral media“, but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave.

The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes – messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to “infect” and spread, like a pathogen.

There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user’s consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content.

Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term “as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses… (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS” (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).

“Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace.

The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an

• event,
• invention,
• technology,
• system of thought,
• musical riff,
• visual image,
• scientific theory,
• sex scandal,
• clothing style or even a
• pop hero – as long as it can catch our attention.

Anyone of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed.

Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the data stream in the form of ideological code – not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call “memes” ” (Rushkoff, p. 9-10).

The “hidden agenda” and “embedded meanings” Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drum line of In the Air Tonight.

Memes Are Like Genes

The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages – messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether – are hidden by the “protein shell” of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them. These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute “memes“, conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene.

Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture.

Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:

1. Fidelity – memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
2. Fecundity – memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
3. Longevity – memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

The meme, then, is “a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds” (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.

“Language seems to ‘evolve‘ by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 1976, p.189)

Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii – funny, catchy, compelling bits of content – as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.

The Pull of Viral Ideas

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism.

No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p. 399)

Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of information and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era.

Media Snacks

It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of “media snacks“:

“We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips – in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture – and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).“

This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are “irrational,” and unable to escape their infection.

Yet these models – the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist – is a problematic way to understand cultural practices.

We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content spreads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:

1. That “memes” do not self-replicate;
2. That people are not “susceptible” to this viral media;
3. That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless ‘snacks‘.

Culture As a Metaphor For Memes

Central to the difficulties of both the meme and the media virus models is a particular confusion about the role people play in passing along media content. From the start, memetics has suffered from a confusion about the nature of agency.

Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any meaningful sense self-replicating – it relies on people to propel, develop and sustain it. The term ‘culture‘ originates from metaphors of agriculture: the analogy was of cultivating the human mind much as one cultivates the land.

Culture thus represents the assertion of human will and agency upon nature. As such, cultures are not something that happen to us, cultures are something we collectively create.

Certainly any individual can be influenced by the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but individuals make their own contributions to their cultures through the choices which they make.

The language of memetics, however, strips aside the concept of human agency.

How Ideas Acquire People

Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of meme circulation makes out. Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake must consider two factors not closely considered by memetics: human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated.

Dawkins writes not about how “people acquire ideas” but about how “ideas acquire people.”

Every day humans create and circulate many more ideas than are actually likely to gain any deep traction within a culture.

Over time, only a much smaller number of phrases, concepts, images, or stories survive. This winnowing down of cultural options is the product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be.

Few of the ideas get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts. By the same token, ideas circulate differently in and through different media.

How Ideas Circulate Differently In and Through Different Media

Some media allow for the more or less direct transmission of these ideas in something close to their original form – as when a video gets replayed many times – while others necessarily encourage much more rapid transformations – as occurs when we play a game of “telephone” and each person passing along a message changes it in some way.

So, it makes little sense to talk about “memes” as an all-purpose unit of thought without regard to the medium and processes of cultural transmission being described.

Indeed, discussing the emergence of Internet memes, education researchers Michael Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007) suggest Dawkins’ notion of memetic ‘fidelity‘ needs to be done away with altogether.

Defining the Internet meme as the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea, presented as a written text, image, language, ‘move‘ or some unit of cultural “stuff“, Knobel and Lankshear suggest adaptation is central to the propagation of memes:

“Many of the online memes in this study were not passed on entirely ‘intact‘ in that the meme ‘vehicle‘ was changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants…

A concept like ‘replicability‘ therefore needs to include remixing as an important practice associated with many successful online memes, where remixing includes modifying, bricolaging, splicing, reordering, superimposing, etc., original and other images, sounds, films, music, talk, and so on. (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, p. 208-209)“

Their argument is particularly revealing as a way to think about just what comprises the object at the heart of the Internet meme.

The “LOLcat” Internet Meme

The recent “LOLcat” Internet meme, built so heavily upon remixing and appropriation, is a good case study to illustrate the role of remixing in Internet memes.

“LOLcats” are pictures of animals, most commonly cats, with digitally superimposed text for humorous effect. Officially referred to as “image macros“, the pictures often feature “LOLspeak“, a type of broken English that enhances the amusing tone of the juxtaposition.

On websites such as icanhascheezburger.com, users are invited to upload their own “LOLcats” which are then shared throughout the web.

Over time, different contributors have stretched the “LOLcat” idea in many different directions which would not have been anticipated by the original posters – including

• a whole strand of images centering around Walruses and buckets,

<li>the use of “LOLspeak“ to translate religious texts (LOLbible) or represent complex theoretical arguments,

<li>the use of similar image macros to engage with Emo culture,

• philosophy (loltheorists), and
• dogs (LOLdogs, see: Ihasahotdog.com).

The Internet Structure Meme

So just what is the “meme” at the centre of this Internet meme? What is the idea that is replicated?

More than the content of the pictures, the “meme” at the heart of this Internet phenomenon is the structure of the picture itself – the juxtaposition, broken English, and particularly the use of irreverent humor.

Given the meme lies in the structure, however – how to throw the pot rather than the pot itself – then the very viability of the meme is dependent on the ability for the idea to be adapted in a variety of different ways.

In this sense, then, it is somewhat hard to see how contained within this structure is a “message” waiting to occupy unsuspecting minds.

The “Crank Dat” Song Meme

The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen in the case of the “Crank Dat” song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007.

Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song “Crank Dat“, which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music.

Along the way, Crank Dat got performed countless times by very different communities – from white suburban kids to black ballet dancers, from football teams to MIT graduate students.

The video was used as the basis for “mash up” videos featuring characters as diverse as Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. People added their own steps, lyrics, themes, and images to the videos they made. As the song circulated, Soulja Boy’s reputation grew – he scored a record contract, and emerged as a top recording artist. – in part as a consequence of his understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural content circulates within a participatory culture.

The success of “Crank Dat” cannot be explained as the slavish emulation of the dance by fans, as the self-replication of a “compelling” idea. Rather, “Crank Dat” spread the way dance crazes have always spread – through the processes of learning and adaptation by which people learn to dance.

As CMS student Kevin Driscoll discusses, watching others dance to learn steps and refining these steps so they express local experience or variation are crucial to dance itself. Similarly, the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations – theory, puppies, politicians – constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them.

Originally written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf with Joshua Green for the Convergence Culture Consortium, and first published on February 11th, 2009 as If It Does Not Spread, It Is Dead: Media Viruses and Memes

About Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of communication, journalism, and cinematic arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Previously, he was Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. He is also author of several books, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

About Xiaochang Li

Xiaochang Li recently graduated with a Masters of Science from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, where she was a researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium and was heavily involved in planning the annual Futures of Entertainment conference.

About Ana Domb Krauskopf

Ana Domb Krauskopf is a journalist and a film and music producer. She is also a researcher and graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she works with the Convergence Culture Consortium. In her native Costa Rica, she co-founded Cinergia a project to valorize and promote Center-American movies. In the past, Ana worked with the Papaya Music label where she co-produced the Papaya Fest.

About Joshua Green

Joshua Green is a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Media Studies Program working with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He is co-author of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Joshua is also an affiliate of the ARC Center of Excellence For Creative Industries and Innovation in Australia, and a member of the Advisory Board for the PBS social media project PBS Engage.

Photo credits:
Media Viruses and Memes – Geopaul
Spreadable Media Model – Nikolay Kropachev
Limits of The Biological Metaphor – Henrik Jonsson
The Concept of Viral Media – Peepo
The Media Virus – Alwyncooper
Memes Are Like Genes – Fotohunter
The Pull of Viral Media – SchulteProductions
Media Snacks – JLV Image Works
Culture As a Metaphor For Memes – ManoAfrica
How Ideas Acquire People – Hamza Türkkol
How Ideas Circulate Differently In and Through Different Media – Subrat Nayak
The “LOLcat” Internet Meme – Karindalziel
The Internet Structure Meme – Andrew Johnson

Email distribution and newsletter mailing services are among the best and most utilized email marketing tools available out there. They allow you to get in touch with your audience in a direct and intimate way trough autoresponders, direct messages, and any type of newsletter format that can be used to market your ideas, or your online product or service. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best commercial newsletter distribution and mailing list services available out there, as well as complementary review information to help you select the best solution for your specific needs.

Photo credit: KK Tan Photography

Using an email newsletter remains to date one of the best ways to create a real “conversation” with your audience, as emails remain the most direct and intimate way of communicating online.

Commercial newsletter distribution services are perfect to create this intimate relationship with your community of fans, because they offer advanced control over how you distribute your content to your mailing lists, how you layout and present your content in them, and over how you personalize and customize it so that it reads and feels written personally to all of your subscribers.

To use your newsletter effectively though, it is very important that you remember to use a confidential writing style. Putting yourself in the same shoes of your audience in fact, helps you have a greater understanding of what your customer really need and what you can offer them. Your audience must be made up of friends hanging from your lips, anxiously awaiting your next product or discovery.

What is also interesting, is that “commercial” is not equal to “expensive” in the case of newsletter distribution services. These professional tools in fact will often cost you less than $50/month to manage an average a few thousand subscribers.

Newsletter distribution services are also very easy to use, because, from a technical standpoint they are generally as simple and easy to use as sending a standard email message.

But, how do you select the right newsletter distribution service and what features and traits do characterize these offerings?

Generally, commercial newsletter distribution services are all characterized by the following set of standard features:

• List Management: You can create mailing lists to organize contacts who will receive your newsletter and you can also easily handle subscribes and unsubscribes.
• Scheduling: You can plan precise times and dates to send your newsletter.
• Autoresponders: You can design a set of email content templates which are automatically sent when your subscribers perform specific actions. For example, if a reader subscribes to your newsletter, she will receive a “Thank you” email in return, or an email which introduces her to your latest story and offerings.
• Embeddable sign-up form: You can place an embeddable registration form on your website or blog to facilitate readers and customers to subscribe to your newsletter. The sign-up form is fully managed and hosted by the newsletter service.
• Support: You receive assistance in the form of tutorials or support forums, to learn how to manage your email marketing campaigns efficiently, and oftentimes the service you choose will even share with you how to maximize your efforts when planning your email campaign.

While these are just some of the basic features that all commercial newsletter distribution services support, there are more specific features that really differentiate some of these services from the others.

To help you identify your ideal commercial newsletter distribution service, here below there is a set of comparative tables and individual reviews.

Here are the specific selection criteria used to compare these different services:

• Mailing list segmentation: Organization of your newsletter subscribers in niche-targeted groups of interest.
• Spam filter preview: Test to verify if major Internet providers will treat your email newsletter as spam.
• Customizable API: Integration of the newsletter distribution service with your business applications or content management system.
• Personalization: Automatically address your newsletter subscribers using their first names or company names.
• Analytics: Reports and statistics about the performance of your email newsletter (subscribes, unsubscribes, opened emails, etc.)
• Manual mailing list import: Upload of your subscribers by hand (instead of using an automatic procedure) to have greater control over your mailing lists and avoid spam.
• Custom sign-up form: Management of the data fields to include in the embeddable sign-up form for your newsletter.
• Price: Cost of the email newsletter distribution service.

Please note that, due to the large number of commercial newsletter distribution services available, this list does not claim to be yet fully exhaustive and complete as more tools and services will be added over the coming weeks and months thanks to your own feedback and suggestions.

Here all the details:

Commercial Newsletter Distribution and Mailing List Services – Comparative Tables

Commercial Newsletter Distribution and Mailing List Services

1. GetResponse

   

   GetResponse is a commercial email newsletter distribution and mailing list service. You can create audience segments to manage your lists for specific niches of subscribers and also personalize every email you send by using first names instead of generic writing formulas. You can also test emails before sending using the spam filter preview facility and you can track emails along the way to discover who opened your message, when, and how many people clicked on your newsletter links. Existing mailing lists can be imported into GetResponse database either automatically or by hand to achieve complete list managing control. You can even customize the embeddable website sign-up form to get only the information you need. Other features of GetResponse include: video email marketing, Twitter integration, pre-made templates, online surveys, split testing, a customizable API, and much more. The service provides even a free iPhone application to manage your email marketing campaigns on the move. GetResponse is priced at $28/month to handle up to 2,500 subscribers.
   
   http://www.getresponse.com/

2. AWeber

   

   AWeber is an email marketing tool to distribute online newsletters and to manage your mailing lists. You can segment your newsletter subscribers to manage groups of specific niches of readers and also customize every email by using personal data like first names or company names. You can also verify your emails before sending to make sure your messages won’t be trashed inside spam filters and you can monitor the performance of your newsletter to discover who opened your emails, when, and how many people clicked on the links you have inside your newsletter. Existing mailing lists can be imported into AWeber either automatically or manually. You can customize the embeddable website sign-up form to let subscribers input only the information you really need for your campaign. Other features of AWeber include: autoresponders, convert RSS feed to email, pre-made templates, shopping cart integration, and more. AWeber is priced at $29/month to manage up to 2,500 subscribers. No API is available.
   
   http://www.aweber.com/

3. MailChimp

   

   MailChimp is a commercial email newsletter distribution and mailing list service. You can organize your newsletter subscribers by creating audience segments that represent specific groups of interest to whom you can address your email messages. You can also address your customers using their first names or the name of their organization using the personalization feature. The spam filter preview facility allows you to test your email messages before sending to make sure spam filters won’t block or trash them. To monitor the performance of your newsletter you can use the analytics features which will tell you who opened your emails, when, and how many people clicked on the links you have inside your newsletter. Existing mailing lists can be imported into MailChimp either automatically or by hand. The embeddable website sign-up form can be customized to let subscribers input only selected information. Other features of MailChimp include: RSS-to-Email, a customizable API, free image and file hosting, autoresponders, and more. MailChimp is priced at $30/month to manage up to 2,500 subscribers.
   
   http://www.mailchimp.com/

4. VerticalResponse

   

   VerticalResponse is a professional solution to distribute email newsletters and manage mailing lists. The online tool allows you to segment your audience in specific niches of interest and also to personalize your email messages by using custom data like first names or company names. You can also test your emails using the spam filter preview to make sure your messages won’t be treated as malicious messages. VerticalResponse lets you track your newsletter to monitor in real-time who opens your emails, when, and how many clicks your newsletter links receive. Existing mailing lists can also be imported into VerticalResponse either automatically or manually. The customizable website sign-up form can be customized to gather only the information you really need. Other features of VerticalResponse include: newsletter sharing on Facebook and Twitter, sign-up notifications, opt-out form generator, a TypePad widget, a customizable API, and more. VerticalResponse is priced at $28/month to manage up to 4,000 subscribers.
   
   http://www.verticalresponse.com/email-marketing/

5. CampaignMonitor

   

   CampaignMonitor is a professional email marketing tool that allows you to distribute your email newsletter and manage your mailing lists using a web-based interface. You can segment your newsletter subscribers to manage groups of specific niches of readers and also customize emails by using personal data like first names or company names. You can also test email messages before sending to make sure spam filters won’t trash your email once received and you can monitor the performance of your newsletter to discover who opened your emails, when, and how many people clicked on your newsletter links. Mailing lists you have already created can be imported into CampaignMonitor either automatically or manually. You can even customize the embeddable website sign-up form to let subscribers input only the information you need. Other features of CampaignMonitor include: white-label platform you can re-sell or brand with your own logo, time-zone management, free template gallery, customizable API, Google Analytics integration, and more. CampaignMonitor costs $5 per campaign + 1¢ per recipient.
   
   http://www.campaignmonitor.com/

6. Constant Contact

   

   Constant Contact is a commercial online tool to distribute email newsletters and organize mailing lists. Constant Contact allows you to handle several groups of subscribers and also customize your email newsletter by using personal data like first names instead general introductory writing formulas. You can also test your emails to ensure your messages won’t be treated as spam by email providers. To monitor the performance of your newsletter you can access an online dashboard where the service collects information about who opened your emails, when, how many people clicked on the links you have inside, and more. Existing mailing lists can be imported into Constant Contact using either an automatic or manual procedure. You can also customize the embeddable website sign-up form to ask your subscribers to input only the information you really need. Other features include: online surveys, pre-made templates, personal coaching and support, a customizable API, and more. Constant Contact is priced at $30/month to handle up to 2,500 subscribers.
   
   http://www.constantcontact.com/

7. iContact

   

   iContact offers a proffessional email marketing service to send newsletters and manage your mailing lists. The tool allows you to segment your audience in specific groups of subscribers and also customize your email messages by using personal data like first names or company names. You can also scan and preview your email messages before sending to make sure your messages won’t be treated as malicious emails. iContact also lets you track your newsletter to monitor in real-time who opens your emails, when, and how many clicks your newsletter links receive. Those mailing lists you already have can also be imported into iContact either automatically or by hand. The customizable and embeddable sign-up form for your website can be customized to gather only the information you really need from your subscribers. Other features of iContact include: pe-made templates, an e-mail marketing white-paper for free download, online surveys, a customizable API, and more. iContact costs $29/month to manage up to 2,500 subscribers.
   
   http://www.icontact.com/

8. SubscriberMail

   

   SubscriberMail is an email marketing tool that allows you to distribute your email newsletter and manage your mailing list online. SubscriberMail allows you to organize your subscribers in groups and also personalize your email newsletter by using custom data like first names or company names. You can also scan and preview your email messages before sending to make sure your messages won’t be treated as malicious emails. Also, SubscriberMail lets you track your email messages to monitor in real-time who opens your emails, when, and how many clicks your newsletter links receive. Other features of the service include: Google Analytics integration, A/B testing, pre-made templates, a customizable API, and more. Prices for SubscriberMail are calculated individually by contacting the sales department. No custom sign-up screen, nor manual mailing list import.
   
   http://www.subscribermail.com/

9. Topica

   

   Topica is a commercial email newsletter distribution and mailing list service. Topica allows you to segment your subscribers in niche-targeted groups and also personalize your email newsletter by using custom data like first names or company names. You can also use the spam filter preview feature to test your email messages before sending to make sure your newsletter won’t be labeled as spam. Also, Topica lets you monitor in real-time your email messages to know at a glance who opens your emails, when, and how many clicks your newsletter links receive. Plus, the service lets you embed a customizable sign-up form on your website which you can adjust to gather only the information you really need. Other features of the service include: pe-made templates, a customizable API, autoresponders, and more. Prices for Topica are calculated individually by contacting the sales department. No manual mailing list import.
   
   http://www.topica.com/

10. Emma

    

    Emma is a commercial email newsletter distribution and mailing lists service that allows you to handle several groups of subscribers. You can also test your emails using the spam filter preview function to be sure your newsletter won’t be treated as spam by email providers. To monitor the performance of your newsletter you can access an online dashboard where the service collects information about who opened your emails, when, how many people clicked on the links you have inside, and more. You can also customize the embeddable website sign-up form to ask your subscribers to input only the information you really need from them. Emma is priced at $45/month to handle up to 2,500 subscribers plus a $99 one-time setup fee. No personalization, manual list import, nor API are available.
    
    http://www.myemma.com/

Originally prepared by Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on February 15th, 2010 as “Email Distribution And Commercial Newsletter Mailing Services: Guide To The Best Paid Online Solutions“.

Online ad pricing and advertising trends for 2009 showed an encouraging recovery from the economic downturn that hit publishers in 2008. Throughout 2009 ad pricing had been steadily growing till reaching the top in December 2009, where ad prices were even higher than pre-recession.

Photo credit: Pablo631

The PubMatic Ad Price Index 2009 states a 111% increase from the last quarter of 2008 to the last months of 2009. But which causes led to this strong recovery?

• Real-time bidding: Publishers using real-time bidding were able to value the specific combination of context and audience for a given ad impression and bid appropriately. This is in contrast to typical media and audience acquisition methods, in which a single price is set for a broad array of ad impressions.
• Audience targeting: Publishers generated increased eCPMs and ROI from audience data that allowed publishers to understand their audience and how to package it for advertisers.
• Demand side platforms: Publishers using demand side platforms enabled advertisers to aggregate media from many sources and to target audiences customized to the specifications provided by advertisers rather than the segmentation proffered by publishers, networks and data providers.
• Ad networks: Publishers using ad networks managed to differentiate their core offerings by leveraging better audience targeting capabilities.
• International markets: Publishers that were able to leverage local ad sales teams could monetize also the traffic coming from Europe, which accounts typically for the 20%-40% of the total traffic that online publishers receive.

Though this data specifically refer to PubMatic publishers, these ad price recovery drivers can indeed help you a great deal to focus on those online advertising strategies you want to deploy to maximize your ad revenues in 2010.

Here all the details:

Ad Price Index: 2009 Year In Review

by PubMatic

Ad Pricing Recovers In 2009

The recession hit online publishers the hardest in 2008 with ad prices falling to new lows, but 2009 proved to be a rebound year where ad pricing increased significantly and steadily.

Each quarter since the beginning of the year saw big gains in premium publisher ad pricing, ending with a surge that raised December 2009 prices even higher than pre-recession prices.

Sequential changes in ad pricing:

• Q1 2009 – Q2 2009: 57% increase
• Q2 2009 – Q3 2009: 31% increase
• Q3 2009 – Q4 2009: 42% increase

Year on year changes in ad pricing:

• Q4 2008 – Q4 2009: 111% increase

Drivers of Ad Pricing Recovery

There were likely many contributing factors to the ad pricing rebound of 2009, starting with the slow overall economic recovery in the United States.

However, rapid innovation of targeting technology from publisher vendors and better monetization strategies from PubMatic publishers helped to unlock the greater value of publishers’ ad space.

Contributors include:

1. Real-Time Bidding Campaigns

PubMatic launched the first sell side real-time bidding platform in January 2009.

While RTB-purchased impressions are a relatively small segment of overall online ad revenue, PubMatic data shows that publishers can achieve a more than 60% increase in eCPM when comparing RTB campaigns to non-RTB campaigns, and some publishers are achieving more than a 100% eCPM increase.

Real-time bidding was originally conceived as a method to allow advertisers and agencies to more granularly value and purchase ad impressions for a particular campaign.

With RTB, the advertiser can uniquely value the specific combination of context and audience for a given ad impression and bid appropriately. This is in contrast to typical media and audience acquisition methods, in which a single price is set for a broad array of ad impressions.

With advertisers willing to pay a much higher price to reach specific users, the value of ad space goes up and there is a potential for publishers to earn a much higher eCPM.

2. Audience Data

Creating a clear strategy to better utilize audience data for increased ad revenue was a hot topic in 2009, and for the early adopters the results have been significant.

Nearly every campaign that PubMatic helps to facilitate on behalf of publishers has audience data layered into it.

As more advertisers were persuaded to put more money online during the recession, they wanted to know that they had a safe environment to reach their target audience.

In 2009, many of PubMatic’s publishers leveraged new capabilities to better understand who their audience is and how to package it for advertisers.

As media is increasingly sold based on the audience behind the media, publishers are generating increased eCPMs from the superior targeting and advertiser ROI that results.

3. Demand Side Platforms

Demand side platforms, known as DSPs, gained significant traction in 2009 in terms of both scale and improved technologies.

DSPs enable advertisers to aggregate media from many sources and to target audiences customized to advertisers’ specifications, rather than the segmentation proffered by publishers, networks and data providers.

PubMatic is partnered with all of the major DSPs, and has seen that the improved campaign performance that they provide to advertisers has also translated into higher publisher eCPMs.

DSPs are expected to continue flourish in 2010.

PubMatic estimates that DSPs will manage 3-5% of online display advertising spend in the US in 2010, up from less than 1% in 2009.

DSPs will continue to be a force for improved publisher eCPMs in 2010.

4. Ad Networks

While some industry analysts predicted the demise of many ad networks, those predictions have not yet been realized.

In fact, many ad networks experienced better than expected growth by working to differentiate their core offerings with better targeting capabilities.

In 2009, the number of ad networks that PubMatic had relationships was double what is was in 2008, and pricing from ad networks saw similarly significant increases.

5. International Monetization

Premium US publishers typically have 20-40% of their traffic coming from Europe, and monetizing an international audience is best done leveraging local ad sales teams.

Last year, PubMatic expanded into Europe having publisher and ad network representation on the ground in London, Hamburg, Paris, and Amsterdam. The result has been increased ad pricing for international traffic, a goal that publishers commonly have difficultly with.

Conclusion

2009 turned out to be a much better year for online ad pricing than many expected, but many challenges still exist.

Gaining greater revenue control, improving protection from unwanted ads, and resolving latency problems will be issues that publishers will still face, but with better technology to help them.

It is impossible to predict what will happen with online ad pricing in 2010, but the year is off to a promising start and new opportunities will be available to help publishers unlock the true value of their audience, including the broader adoption of real-time bidding, increased abilities to better monetize audiences, and extending ad network optimization to publishers’ mobile platforms.

Originally written by PubMatic, and first published on October 8th, 2009 as “Ad Price Index: 2009 Year In Review“.

About PubMatic

PubMatic is a global ad revenue optimization company that provides online publishers with a service solution to manage and monetize non-Guaranteed ad inventory. PubMatic’s real-time ad price prediction technology ensures that online publishers get the most money from their advertising space by deciding in real-time which ad network or exchange can best monetize each impression. There are currently over 6,000 large and medium publishers working with PubMatic. PubMatic is venture backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Nexus India Capital, and Helion Ventures.

Photo credits:
Ad Pricing Recovers In 2009 – Palto
Drivers of Ad Pricing Recovery – Chris Lamphear
Real-Time Bidding Campaigns – Marc Pinter
Audience Data – Federated Media
Demand Side Platforms – Chris Lamphear
Ad Networks – Food Blog Alliance
International Monetization – 0tvalo

How can online journalists improve their design, usability and content creation skills? In this MasterNewMedia report journalist Eric Ulken shares some valuable insights on what online journalists can learn from web interaction designers to improve the way they create, layout and distribute their content.

Photo credit: Taketorise Computer

Usability and design should always be major concerns when you decide to post or share content on the web. But what if you have written an excellent article and have left it laying somewhere in a shady corner of your website? People may never find it and your great content may likely lose the attention it might really deserve.

Remember that the Internet (and your website, on a smaller scale) is like a library. You couldn’t just hope to enter a library and stumble upon the information you want. You need a catalog, an index of some sort that comprises all the information available with precise location references.

Think about your website. Is your content easy to find? Have you got categories that label all your areas of interest? Do you label your articles with titles that express clearly what you are talking about? Are you visible on search engines?

If the answer to most of these questions is “no“, here is a simple collection of suggestions you can immediately put to use to leverage what instructional designers recommend when it comes to improve content reach and visibility:

• Personas: In the digital world, it is easier to get a precise profile of an audience, but it still helps to be able to actually “picture” some typical users in your mind. Interaction designers call them “personas” and they can be a useful exercise to put yourself in the shoes of your readers and assess how well you are meeting their needs.
• User feedback: While it is extremely useful, user feedback should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, often users do not really have enough experience using your site to know what they want. Better information can be gleaned by observing how your site is actually used through analytics data and by making changes accordingly.
• User testing: Create two different versions of an element of your website or of a piece of content you have produced, and then show some of your users the “A” version and others the “B” version to determine which version works best.
• Community curation: You should leverage the opportunity to engage and collaborate with your users on the content creation process. For example, you may allow your readers to rate and share your content via social media thus gaining useful data on what your audience favors most.
• Search Engine Optimization: SEO can indeed help you a great deal to make your content findable and visible inside Google and other search engines. Titles, tags, writing style, all these components of your content do contribute to reach all those people who do not come to your web site on a daily basis or are not subscribed to your RSS feed. However, the biggest potential benefit in search engine optimization comes not from fresh content, but rather from the huge volume of archival content that your web sites accrues over time, and that can be re-used and further improved.

Here all the details:

What Online Journalists Can Learn From Information Scientists

by Eric Ulken

Why Journalists Should Think of Website Usability

I recently took part in a fascinating “unconference” in Seattle aimed at information professionals of various stripes – librarians, information architects, interaction designers and the like. It is called InfoCamp, and it seems like a natural venue for online journalists too – though there were few in attendance.

The sessions covered such familiar topics as information visualization and user-created content, but from a broader perspective than we journalists usually look. This got me thinking: Why should there be such a gap between the information gatherers (us) and the information organizers (them)?

Why do not we look at our content the way librarians do? It begs for classification, cross-linking, mapping and contextualizing.

Why do not we look at the design and functionality of our websites the way interaction designers do?

Most of our sites would benefit from some serious user testing and usability enhancements. In that spirit, here are some ideas I picked up at InfoCamp that online journalists could steal from information scientists:

Use Personas To Identify Your Audience

At university, I had a broadcast journalism professor who used to implore students to “remember Mabel“, a hypothetical retiree who represented the regular news viewers of the small TV station where we worked.

When a student would pitch some wacky, avant-garde story idea, the prof. would ask, “Do you think Mabel cares about that?”

In the digital world, it is easier to get a more precise picture of the audience, but it still helps to have some typical users in mind. Interaction designers call them “personas“, and often give them names and pictures and even biographies.

Mabel probably represents only a fraction of the audience of most news sites, but an audience could be typified by several different personas. And, while personas will not give you feedback, it can be a useful exercise to put yourself in their shoes on occasion and assess how well you are meeting their needs – particularly if you are an editor making coverage decisions.

Always Evaluate User Feedback

If there was a theme at InfoCamp, this was it. Information architects and user experience experts repeatedly cautioned that user feedback should be taken with a grain of salt. Of course it is valuable, but often users do not really have enough experience using your site to know what they want, which could result in them asking for features or content they will not use.

Better information can be gleaned by observing how your site is actually used – through site analytics and, perhaps, user testing – and making changes accordingly.

Compare, Measure and Test

As user testing goes, it is about the simplest form:

1. You create two different versions of something – say, a design element or textual cue – and show some of your users the “A” version and others the “B” version.
2. Then you measure the behavior of the two groups to determine which version worked best.

You might test user clicks on blue underlined headlines versus black non-underlined headlines to see which results in more clicks, or you might test the language on a button (”Sign up now” versus “Click here to register!“). News sites could extend this idea to the content of headlines.

The Huffington Post has experimented with testing two headlines for a story and, after analyzing early results, going with whichever headline generated the most clicks.

Leverage Community Curation

First it was the mechanical term “user-generated content“. Then it was “user-created content“, which sounded more respectful of the users doing the creation.

The next buzzword – though it is a mouthful – could be “community-curated user-created content“, the idea that users should be in charge of moderating each other. The jargon is my invention, but the topic was raised in a fascinating discussion on the motivations and behaviors of users who post content to the web.

We already see community curation on a lot of sites. Wikipedia is an obvious example, but the idea is also represented in comment boards that allow readers to “vote” posts up and down.

Few news sites have seriously embraced community curation, though – perhaps because they fear giving up too much control.

The Importance of Search Engine Optimization

A slide from Vanessa Fox’s keynote presentation on search showed that the proportion of traffic arriving at news, sports and entertainment sites from search engines has grown by as much as 30% year-over-year. This trend underscores the importance of search engine optimization for news websites.

Some elements of SEO are technical in nature, but others – such as ensuring key terms are represented in headlines and stories – are the domain of editors.

The biggest potential benefit in search engine optimization comes not on breaking news but on the huge volume of archival content that news sites accrue over time.

Features such as topics pages can help maximize the findability of archived content through search. (See my previous post on the introduction of curated topics pages at Germany’s Spiegel Online.)

Originally written by Eric Ulken for De Nieuwe Reporter, and first published on November 9th, 2009 as What Online Journalists Can Learn From Information Scientists.

About Eric Ulken

Eric Ulken is currently consulting for the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for 5 years until November 2008. From January to April 2010, he will be a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Eric Ulken is also designing an online course on writing headlines for the web for the Poynter Institute’s NewsU. He writes a regular column for De Nieuwe Reporter and he is also an occasional contributor to Online Journalism Review. Eric Ulken is a member of the Online News Association and of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Photo credits:
Why Journalists Should Think About Website Usability – Evan Sharboneau
Use Personas To Identify Your Audience – Kirsty Pargeter
Always Evaluate User Feedback – Phil Date
Compare, Measure and Test – Daniel Rajszczak
Leverage Community Curation – Lammeyer
The Importance of Search Engine Optimization – MacXever