A concept in video advertising has been bubbling up amongst the professionals I’ve been listening to over the last six months, one that makes a lot of sense and is already in use by several successful podcasters, but one that is rarely described explicitly and definitely lacks a cute buzzword-y name, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Most advertising in video and audio media is treated separately from any other content, text or otherwise. Most blogs and news organizations that regularly (or irregularly) produce and feature video and audio content don’t monetize it at all. Those that do monetize it either rely on remnant advertising methods or sell by CPM, and are often discouraged when production costs outpace the sales returns for the content being created.

I’ve spoken here before many times about the value of sponsorship models for all forms of online content, and their inherent superiority over metrics-based advertising for publishers. The topic has come up a few times when we’ve discussed different ways to monetize Twitter, particularly in the context of making money from a personal brand, rather than trying to look at the content as monetizable inventory:

Folks like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble have been able to launch entire Web 2.0 niches just by describing a problem, and then subsequently promoting a company or set of developers that work to solve those issues. Those are just two names I’m intimately familiar with within the hundreds of Twitter users that have several thousand or more subscribers. Twitter should be striking deals with these users and splitting the cash with them.

And I spoke even more recently about the idea of sponsorship in the context of online video when I explored some of the hidden reasons behind Revision3’s recent cuts:

For a real world example, why is it, do you think, that Cisco signed on to sponsor the Mashable Conversations video podcast (one with zero subscribers at the time when they signed the deal) before we’d ever put out an episode?  Why do you think Seagate continues to sponsor Robert Scoble’s endeavors, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the distribution of larger blogs like us?  The answer is the same in both cases - those advertisers want to have their name associated with the brands they’re buying into. 

When you compare the budgets spent on brand sponsorship to metrics based ads on the very same show, the value to the publisher is clear - sponsorship is the way to go, as it can swing the money dial upwards easily by between a factor of 10 and 100.

With a Difference Like That, Doesn’t Advertiser Value Suffer?

Advertiser value, in theory, should go up. The reality of sponsorship situations is that they’re chosen much more carefully, and with much more manual interference. A company simply isn’t going to drop what can easily be a six figure sum on a well known publisher’s brand without some human interaction taking place. Conversely, buys that take place on remnant video inventory or CPC text and image inventory can easily exceed that value, and most of the time it’s handled primarily by automated systems.

Perhaps in a coming age, these sponsorship transactions will also take place by sophisticated automated means (and when that day comes, a lot of folks in the sales and marketing business will be fearful of their jobs), but I rather doubt it.

These types of sponsorships are generally made because careful consideration has been made by both the savvy publisher and the savvy marketer to identify where the audience for the product or service and the content being monetized coincide closely.

For a real example of what I’m talking about, simply look no further than our daily sponsored feature at Mashable, the Sun Startup Review. The content and the sponsorship is strictly textual in nature, but the concept here is the same. Sun decided that a key target for their future business lay in the startup sector, and Mashable’s brand is inextricably tied to the startup business, so thus a sponsor-publisher relationship made sense.

Sun could have simply bid on a text ad on the side bar, or even purchased one of the more expensive graphic ads we sell, but they were looking to shape their image to our audience beyond what may or may not be glimpsed when a reader scrolls through our pages looking for content. 

In terms of online video, these concepts are no different, it’s just that the added value of the sponsorship becomes much more stark and visible.

New Media Beats Heritage Media Moguls at Their Own Game

Although I’ve vocally disagreed with Brightcove’s media distribution strategies from time to time, their Vice President Adam Berrey very succinctly made this point about publishers with respect to how they work to monetize their video efforts at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Beet.TV.

The point that he’s driving at there is that it’s the audience you’re selling, and not the content. This is true for any media organization, and it’s an important distinction for those who are trying to sell any New Media inventory to learn and learn well.

Put another way, New Media publishers hold in their grasp the holy grail that moguls of the olden days spent millions, if not billions, to acquire - the ability to sell against multiple media types. Congress won’t ever pass legislation to break up a media monopoly by an online website in an effort to prevent them from utilizing video, audio, images and text on their website. On the other hand, congressional hearings are routinely held whenever mergers and acquisitions take place that consolidate too much media in the hands of too few publishers.

Just In Case You Need a Refresher on the Value of Video

Case study after case study shows how video and audio are more valuable than simple text content. The old standby study I like to cite was published two years ago by Ken Rutkowski, and it documented the simply amazing response rates to online video advertisements.

It found that of those that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website. Of those that watched the advertisement, 16% ended up making a purchase, and separate 13% either signed up for a free trial or ordered a subscription.

Plainly, if under half watch the advertisement, and then 45% of those folks respond, you’ve got around a 25% viewer to response ratio, a not insignificant number. Likewise, of all the folks that will view a video, 12.9% will end up buying the product, requesting a free trial, or ordering a subscription.

At this point, evangelism for online video response rates is almost preaching to the choir, no matter who it is you’re talking to. The reasons behind it, particularly for the web savvy, are almost common sense.  

A video advertisement defeats most common forms of web ad-blindness. 

Standard video and audio CPM base rates for even remnant ads are far higher than that of text.

Video and audio are more memorable and often easier venues for conveying complex ideas, and thus …

… better at creating a lasting impression of advertiser brands, offers, products and services.

The formulas for CPMs and CPCs are great starting points, but shouldn’t be set in stone. When a publisher is looking to solidify the sponsorship relationship, they should treat all inventory (be it audio, video or text) as ala carte.  The key is, for both advertisers and those who sell ads, to wrap your head around the concept of what a video or audio ad is worth, what your brand and audience is worth, and how to convey that to those who want to partner with you to reach your audience.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Testing AdSense for VideosThe CommunityNext::Monetize Event is Coming Up!Broadband Enterprises Partners with ScanScout for Video Overlay AdsNew Media Expo 2008 Conference Ticket GiveawayLiveRail is a Video Ad Distribution NetworkFor Your Imagination Gets Another $1M for Internet Video ProductionYouTube IPO?

Source:Mashable!

A day after Yahoo announced how the new front page of Yahoo.com will look like, and a couple of days after AOL redesigned its front page, Microsoft does pretty much the same thing, turning Live.com into a social networking hub of sorts.

It’s impossible to compare the three sites since neither the new Live nor Yahoo are live yet (the new Live.com homepage should be available later today at home.live.com), but the trend is obvious. The old, static (some would say boring) concept of a big web portal is dead: the social revolution is coming.

AOL is only dipping its toes into the new revolution, by adding the ability to check out various social sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Bebo and Twitter, directly from the front page. Yahoo, although currently in test phase, will go so far as to enable third party developers to create applications for the Yahoo front page; furthermore, users will be able to fully customize the site to their liking.

The new Live.com will fall somewhere in between. It will integrate about 50 third party sites, such as Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and LinkedIn, into the new homepage; users will be able to check out what’s happening on all of their profiles directly from Live.com. Furthermore, everyone who uses Live Messenger will automatically be connected with their friends through the site. One thing that still confuses me is naming; I don’t understand the difference between all the different iterations of live.com, home.live.com, windowslive.com and so forth. Regardless of the new changes, Microsoft needs to start making sense out of this mess before they completely confuse their users.

[image courtesy of Microsoft Watch]

Regarding web portals in general, the paradigm has shifted. It is no longer important to have people click on various links on a portal, thus increasing your pageview count; all the major portals want to have their users’ undivided attention. They’re doing this by turning the portal into a social activity hub; a one stop shop for users who are dabbling with social networking but aren’t hardcore users and they don’t have time to open a dozen web sites each day. This, at least, is what AOL, Live.com and Yahoo are betting on; the question is, are such users an endangered species, and is there really need for a huge, all-encompassing hub for them to start their day with? Google, for example, doesn’t need a web portal; the closest thing they’ve got is iGoogle, a fully customizable personalized portal akin to Netvibes. It seems that the major web portals are going in that direction anyway, so one can perceive Google as being one step ahead of them. In any case, it’ll be interesting to monitor how the big three will fare in terms of traffic in the months following the redesign.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Battle On: Microsoft to Launch Proxy Fight at YahooYahoo And Microsoft - The Stalemate ContinuesThe Daily Poll: What’s Your Level of Interest in Lifecasting?The Daily Poll: Is Microsoft-Yahoo Inevitable?Yahoo Musicmatch Jukebox Closing, to the Dismay of UsersYahoo Live to Shutdown; A Yahoo Problem or a Doomed Niche?Yahoo-Google Deal Looking Good; Common Sense Packs Up And Leaves

FriendFeed has released a new feature tonight in their usual cavalier method - no lead up or hints and a short email in the inbox explaining how to find it. Bret Taylor explained to me what they’ve turned on this evening:

We just released a real-time version of FriendFeed in beta. In the new real-time view, comments and posts will appear at the top of your feed as quickly as they arrive. You can view your home feed, all your friend lists, and rooms in real-time.

The real-time view of feeds can also be embedded in other websites (the FriendFeed Feedback room is embedded in the blog post above). The feature is well-suited for live-blogging, and we hope this embed functionality will make that easier for all the bloggers that use FriendFeed.

As Bret said, given the popularity of FriendFeed and the ability to remotely embed a room, I can easily see how this is going to take off as a common method of liveblogging (and even give my favorite liveblogging platform CoverItLive a run for it’s money).

The live view works for every list and view on FriendFeed, but so far only really seems to be truly useful for rooms where there’s live coverage going on. There might be other uses where this could come in as a handy view, but none are springing to mind at the moment. The main downside to this view is that the threading that most of us love FriendFeed for completely disappears.  

In a situation where constantly arriving updates can be beneficial (like an event-based room), this won’t matter as much, but for the rest of the site, the trade-off might be a bit much. 

FriendFeed has set up a room tonight for the live coverage of the debates. You can see it there at the site, or you can particpate by way of the embed below.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Mashable Rocks: Connect with us on FriendFeedFriendFeed Launches SearchFriendFeed Recommendations? Who Are You Likely to Like?FriendFeed Gets $5M, Launches to the PublicFormer Googlers Team Up to Launch FriendFeedFriendFeed Brings Twitter BackFriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?

DiggTop is an Adobe Air desktop app that scrapes and displays the images and videos from the Digg stories that you choose to track. After installing DiggTop you customize which categories you want to follow for News, Videos and Images. You can then view a slideshow of the images related to the stories you’re reading.

As for videos, DiggTop does a similar thing. You can change which topics you want to follow for video and they will appear in the app’s player which does a good job handling video.

At any time, you can launch a browser session and go to any particular story on Digg by double-clicking it. This comes in handy whenever you want access to the Digg service. However, the app can provide most of the day to day features of Digg such as reading and digging stories.

MP4 / Subscribe for Free!

I know there have been way too many useless Adobe Air apps unleashed to our desktops lately, but I think DiggTop is actually a rare useful one. If you want a quick glimpse at the hottest news items along with a visual slideshow of images and the ability to play videos instantly right next to the story then DiggTop is the app for you. It’s small and fast and gives Digg a new look and feel.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:7 Awesome Things Built on the Digg APIThe 10 Coolest Apollo Apps30+ Adobe AIR AppsDIGG TOOLBOX: 50+ Digg Tools and ResourcesMashable On Digg: Our 50 Most Popular Stories

Source:Mashable!

Among the hundreds of companies and social platforms debuting at Web 2.0 Expo NY was Xignite, a new financial web service. Xignite’s platform lets financial sites show global delayed stock data in their applications and satisfies the growing demand for reliable stock quotes from emerging countries.

MP4 / Subscribe for Free

Xignite uses an on-demand model to serve clients like ING, Goodyear, and McDonald’s and provide market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, tools and more. Until recently, much of the data that Xignite collects and organizes was otherwise scattered, raw or only available in bulk form. With their services, Xignite is leading the way for service-oriented business applications.

I had the opportunity to meet with Stephane Dubois, the CEO and Founder of Xignite, and discuss Xignite’s goals, special features and Splice, their new platform for creating web services mashups. (And, I don’t need to remind you how excited I get about mashups). Using the Splice visual designer, developers can create a mashup in just 60 seconds by dragging and dropping objects without ever having to write code.

A special thanks to Sony for letting me use their amazing TG1 HD camcorder, without which none of the Web 2.0 Expo videos would have been possible. You can watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4 directly.

How many times have you seen a YouTube video and just had to buy a product or a service related to the video? Ok, never. But still, if you want to spend your hard earned cash in these times of looming recession, now you can do it directly from YouTube.

Thousands of YouTube partner videos will now get click-to-buy links, which appear on the watch page beneath the video, right there with the other community features, like share, favorite, or flag. For starters, iTunes and Amazon.com links will be embedded on videos from media companies such as EMI Music - I cannot see it, because it apparently works only in the United States. Google says that they’ll slowly expand this program to international users, too.

Google promises that this is just the beginning of a broad e-commerce platform from which both users and partners will benefit. Partners who use YouTube’s content identification and management system can enable these links on user-generated content, if they use Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site. So, next time you create that viral video, kids, make sure that it features a lots of enticing products which your viewers might want to buy.

From the user perspective, maybe sometime in the future this turns out to be the key of making YouTube profitable, but currently it’s just a bunch of simple “buy me” links which are far from earth shattering.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:YouTube Puts AdSense in Embedded PlayersYouTube Adds “Choose Another Image” for Video ThumbnailsYouTube on YouTube’s UpdatesYouTube Clips Further Integrated into Google NewsGoogle Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-CallNew Video Tagging Services: Veotag and Click.TVShoZu Adds Facebook App and One-Click Upload

Source:Mashable!

Facebook rolled out Microsoft Live Search today as an integrated part of its search. It gives the exact same results as you would get on Live.com, but in generic Facebook layout.

Sorry Facebook, that’s not really all that exciting. Especially for the innovators of the Internet, we know you can do better. So in that spirit, here are a few quick suggestions for Facebook to make its newly upgraded search features more interesting and a hell of a lot more useful:

1) Show your friends’ searches in News Feed

Come on, who doesn’t want to know who their girlfriend or boyfriend has been searching for? There would be hours of entertainment just watching your news feed fill up with searches. Find out who has been searching for you or announce to the world that you’ve been searching that one girl you work with ten times a day.

Maybe on second thought…

2) Live search cashback for Facebookers

What college kid doesn’t need a little more cash on the side for…uh, books? For those who don’t already know, Microsoft offers a cashback program for searching and shopping through Live.com. It only amounts to a few bucks here and there, but to a cash-strapped college student? That’s a case of Bud Light, baby!

So come on Facebook, help out the poor college student. Give them a financial reason to justify their 4-hour-a-day Facebook usage.

3) Add Live Image and Video search

Facebook Live search functionality is very basic. Search for a term, come up with some website results. But often times we are not just searching for Web sites, but images, videos, and other dynamic media. Live search, just like the other major search engines, has the functionality to search for images, videos, news, and more. Why not extend this to Facebook? Facebook, as one of the largest photo libraries in the world, is a natural place for image searching. I’m hoping that Facebook will eventually offer it as well, because when someone updates their status about their new car, I’d like to quickly search for a picture of it.

4) Some space-themed search backgrounds, anyone?

I’m sorry, but I’m simply a fan of space, space exploration, the stars, you name it. I’m attracted to the very cool layout that Live.com uses as its homepage theme. Hover around the page and you’ll find information on NASA projects and more.

Now, I’m not saying Facebook needs to go all out, but some Moon action would be great to look at while I search. It will give Facebook Search some… unique flavor.

5) Suggest searches based on my friends and related searches

Facebook’s core asset and one of its best value propositions is its social graph. Knowing what your friends are doing and who they are connected to are invaluable pieces of information. Using this information to help suggest searches, just as Live.com does with related searches, would help people discover new and relevant content based on their social circles. Plus you can insert suggested searches into the news feed.

Funny. That sort of sounds like Facebook Beacon…

6) Allow users to comment and vote on search results

I couldn’t finish this list off without tipping my hat to one of our commenters. Oliver suggests that Facebook should allow users to comment and vote on search results. It’s an interesting suggestion that I actually envision happening in the future.

The reason this is possible is because Facebook already allows you to do this for your news feed and for ads you see. You can vote ads down and you can comment on any news feed item. It’s a little more complicated of a proposition to do it for search, but it is done by sites such as scour.com. The extra benefit to Microsoft is that it will have a mountain of user-generated data on their preferences in search. This can only help to improve their results.

Regardless of whether or not Facebook takes my suggestions and uses them, you can expect a lot more features to come out of Facebook’s new integration with Live search. And you can expect people using Facebook even more than they already do.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Facebook Claims to Lead in People SearchFacebook Launches Auto-Complete Feature for Quick Access to FriendsSujjest Offers Visual eBay SearchFacebook Overtakes MySpace for Search Inquiries in the UKTalkShoe Upgrades to the Facebook PlatformFacebook Rolls Out Microsoft Live SearchGoogle Launches Official Facebook App

If you’ve heard about Berlin, Germany a lot recently, it’s because it’s a growing technology hub in Europe that many people are calling Europe’s next “Silicon Valley.” There are a lot of web companies opening offices all over Berlin, like eBay, Nokia, and Wikimedia, and they already have their own “Facebook,” the social networking site studiVZ.

Berlin is certainly Germany’s internet capital and quickly rising in the ranks as Europe’s top technology-oriented city (behind only London and Paris).

In order to attract American and global companies to Germany, Berlin Partner, a business development agency, partners with companies looking to expand to Europe and offers them reimbursement grants of up to 50% of a company’s investment.

At New York City’s Web 2.0 Expo I sat down with Alexander Kolpin of Berlin Partner to talk about why Berlin is so hot, what exactly is going on in Europe in terms of social media, and how Berlin plans to host their own European Web 2.0 Expo in October. You can watch via the embed below or download the MP4.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007: 100€ Off for Mashable ReadersiPhone to Launch in Germany on T-MobileHas Google Changed the Ad Network Landscape — Again?BuzzDash Platform: Co-Branded PollsPartnersBerlin Talent Campus Partners With YouTube To Show ShortsMeebo Launches Partner Edition Rooms

Today the Startonomics workshop is underway, and Mashable friend and occasional contributor Muhammad Saleem is presenting a session on social media and word of mouth marketing for startups:

Digg, Delicious, Twitter. Word of mouth has never been sexier. Learn how to use social media & social bookmarking to spread the word to your mother.

This is something he’s imminently qualified to speak on as a social media consultant and one of the most visible individual presences across just about every social media platform there is.

Since UStream is graciously providing streaming services for the event, we figured we’d take the opportunity to liveblog his speech.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:It’s All in The Name: Free Tix to the Startonomics Conference!Startonomics for Success: It’s Coming and It’s GoodMashable’s Guide to Upcoming Conferences and EventsMashable’s Upcoming Guide to Conferences and EventsMashable’s Guide to Upcoming Conferences and EventsMashable’s Guide to Upcoming Conferences and EventsMashable’s Guide to Upcoming Conferences and Events

Residential real estate receives an enormous amount of attention from sites around the Web. Commercial, a bit less so. And according to Rofo, a service launched earlier this year as a beta and now officially unveiled, commercial space sized just right for the entrepreneurial, small business set is more treacherous still. Particularly in the fast-paced San Francisco Bay Area and cities beyond.

Established by two former commercial real estate brokers, Alan Bernier and Garrett Krueger, Rofo is said to catalogue some 6,000+ spaces in California’s central fixation for the startup world, all for the purposes of finding locations with square-footage that more or less encapsulates that very demographic of business. And not only does it publish listings, it cuts out the need for users to monitor posts with space needs notifications. Once items come across your account inbox, you can send property managers requests for showings, conduct Q&A sessions with users, and even publish reviews and directions for fellow users to consider when searching for space and ruminating needs.

Most everything is well drawn within Rofo’s various quarters. There’s nothing scattered or overwhelming about the place. And as far as expert- and user-generated tips and content, posts are concise and worth browsing, whether you’re involved with pre-lease or post-lease planning and habitation. Also, if for whatever reason you’d like to gauge the average price for a space in a particular city within the Rofo database, you can input your specifications into the Rofometer (embeddable on any webpage) to find out if you’re getting it too easy, too hard, or somewhere in the middle.

As a search utility alone Rofo is quite good, if unfortunately very selective in regional focus. But you can argue that being thorough in one area is better than stretching thin across a vast swath of land. And chances are Rofo will grow with time as usage demands it. As a comprehensive source for location spotting and the give-some-take-some that the advice forum provides, it’s even better.

Source:Mashable!

Last week, Web 2.0 Expo NY brought out a lot of different companies and social networking platforms to debut their latest endeavors, and among the big players this year was the very popular site, Hi5. Very popular, that is, internationally.

Ever since Hi5 debuted in 2003, it has garnered millions of users in countries like Japan and Mexico, making it the third most popular social networking website worldwide after Facebook and MySpace, but only 83rd in the U.S.

I met up with Mike Trigg, head of marketing for Hi5, during the week of the conference to talk about what makes Hi5 so different from Facebook and MySpace and what the network’s plans are to win over Americans.

A special thanks to Sony for letting me use their amazing TG1 HD camcorder, without which none of the Web 2.0 Expo videos would have been possible. You can watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4 directly.

Never Miss an Episode!

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here (video feed).

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Mashable Web 2.0 Expo Winners AnnouncedWeb 2.0 Expo is HereWeb 2.0 Expo Berlin 2007: 100€ Off for Mashable ReadersCan’t Go to Web 2.0 Expo? Network with Technology Influencers on Tuesday Night, 9/16Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco: Discount for Mashable ReadersMashing At Web 2.0 ExpoWin a Pass to Next Week’s Web 2.0 Expo NY

Microsoft’s online collaboration space for Office users, where they can store, exchange and share their documents, now has one million users. We’ve gone through the most interesting features of Office Live Workspace when the beta opened up to everyone, and it was a solid effort, whose biggest advantage was the fact that it’s integrated into new Office products, which means that it’s very easy for Office users to start using it.

This milestone is an opportunity for Microsoft to bless us with some marketingese. “The pace at which people are signing up for the beta tells us that they are looking for ways to resolve the complexities of their work, school and home projects through a range of choices,” said Kirk Gregersen, director of consumer and small-business product management for Microsoft Office.

But, it’s also a good reminder of how easy is to underestimate Microsoft when it comes to online applications. Sure, Microsoft might seem dwarfed by Google when it comes to search, and many other online markets. But Microsoft has an immense user base which can easily be leveraged to push other products, online or offline, and if they get it right, they can easily overshadow many, if not all, opponents in a market.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Microsoft Office Live Workspace Coming SoonScreenshots: Microsoft Office Live WorkspaceLive Documents Looks Exactly Like OfficeMicrosoft Testing Live Office in Limited BetaMicrosoft Launches Expanded Language Support For Office Live WorkspaceFotolia Offers Free Images on Microsoft Office to Lure New CustomersLive Documents, A Microsoft Office Killer?