Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer held a press conference today to flesh out more details about its $1.1 billion acquisition of blog platform Tumblr, which was confirmed yesterday after days of rumors.

“Tumblr prides itself on being a home for brands, established and emerging, we at Yahoo are all about brands,” Mayer said on the call. She also compared some of the more obvious talking points about the new companies, such as Tumblr skewing a much younger audience to Yahoo’s very aging populace. Yahoo has about 700 million to 1 billion users to Tumblr’s 300 million users, so there will be some spillover, but not in terms of how people are using these two services since both are very different. She also said eight of the top 10 most valuable brands are using Tumblr to promote themselves on Tumblr, which should continue in the future.

But the biggest thing Mayer touched on was Yahoo’s commitment to monetizing Tumblr, which is something the blog platform struggled with as it grew. Mayer highlighted that she would bring the company’s newly launched streaming ads product to the site, which are now featured on both Yahoo’s homepage and its newsfeed. Not only that but Yahoo’s commitment means hiring new engineers and ad sales people to boost revenue from Tumblr.

“You only do an acquisition of this size and scale if you find an exceptional company… and find an exceptional fit,” Mayer said, adding that Tumblr is that company. Yahoo plans to keep the entire Tumblr team in place with founder David Karp in place as CEO. Both brands will also stay separate with Karp reporting directly to Mayer.

“We want to let Tumblr be Tumblr, she said.

“In terms of advertizing, David and I both share a love for pop culture and… [he] talked wistfully about the ads he saw as a child that would make him want to see a movie or want a particular car. Where are the ads that are like that [online]? Where are the ads that are great content in and of themselves?,” Mayer said of the deal. “The current state of Internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change.”

Any new ad products that Yahoo introduces to Tumblr will likely be native-based, and enhance the whole experience. That’s nice to hear if it ends up being true, because the last thing Tumblr users want is to notice is Yahoo’s strategy to grab cash.

Image via Marissa Mayer/Tumblr

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

Over the last few years, media companies and brands have turned to Mass Relevance’s social curating platform for plenty of projects, and now the startup said it’s hit a big milestone.

Today, Mass Relevance announced that it’s pushed 25 billion pieces of “social content” (tweets, Vines, status updates, Instagram photos, and such) through its platform from the more than 250 big media companies that are its clients. That’s a lot of social content when you consider that Mass Relevance’s tech is focused on reviewing everything  before it goes out and doing it in a way that’s, well … pretty. And if you haven’t heard of Mass Relevance, that’s because the company stays largely behind the scenes.

Mass Relevance is worth keeping an eye on because it’s helping Twitter and Facebook use their social interaction data in unique ways that are appealing to media companies and big brands during live or notable events. For example, it’s in the CBS’s best interest to curate and increase social interactions during the Super Bowl because it can then justify the higher advertising rate prices to advertisers that want to run a commercial during the big game.

The platform itself allows highly visible media companies to manage the flow of social information they’re consistently getting hit with. It takes social data streams from various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and others) and weaves them into a single console for clients. From there you can set word/hashtag filters, audience demographic filters (age range, gender, geography), media or social network filters, and so on — basically fine-tuning all that social data for a specific purpose. The platform can also help its clients display that “social content” intelligently through mobile apps, live TV broadcasts, websites, projector screens at conferences, stadium displays, and other visualizations that run alongside media events.

Source: Mass Relevance

Mass Relevance CTO Eric Falcao presenting to President Obama during his recent trip to Austin, Texas.

You’ve probably experienced Mass Relevance’s tech in action without realizing it, too. It’s already working with all four major broadcast TV stations (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC) as well as the most socially engaged prime time television shows (X Factor, Glee, American Idol, and The Voice). Previously, the company curating tweeted questions from audience members watching panels at SXSWi back in March, helped launch the first Twitter Town Hall for President Barack Obama, managed Twitter data during the 2012 Olympic Games, integrated Facebook data for CNN’s coverage of the 2012 election, and also worked with some of last year’s biggest media events (2012 Grammys, MTV music video awards, Super Bowl XLVI, the BET awards, NBA Finals).

Mass Relevance isn’t the only startup offering media companies (and brands) a way to streamline interactions from across multiple social networks. One example is indirect competitor Echo, which has seen success of its own platform of social curation tools with clients like pro wrestling company WWE. Yet, Mass Relevance does seem to be emerging as a leader when it comes to building tools for large events. While it didn’t disclose financial figures, the company said its revenue quadrupled in 2012 (compared to the previous year), and estimates doubling revenue again by the end of 2013.

Founded in 2010, the Austin-based startup has previously raised $5.5 million in total funding to date. Mass Relevance has 90 employees, but plans to double its R&D team in the next year as well as open an international office in London, U.K. this month.

Photos via Mass Relevance

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

Advertisers are infamous for their relentless attempt to learn even the most mundane details about your life in the hopes of selling you something.  But there is one thing that’s always eluded them: your physical reaction to their efforts.  Whether a billboard, banner, or mobile ad, advertisers have had to rely on other indicators to know whether they’ve successfully grabbed your attention.

Unfortunately, this may be coming to an end.  Advances in eye tracking technologies will soon make it possible for the ads you look at to watch you right back. As the next generation of computing turns to the eyes, a whole new world of interaction and control is becoming possible – along with entirely new methods of invasive data collection and tracking.

The same technologies that will make playing Fruit Ninja with your eyes a reality will also allow advertisers to monitor and measure everything you look at. As UCLA Professor John Villasenor explained in his piece on the issue for Slate, “Today, when we read something online, our thoughts are still our own. We should enjoy it while it lasts.”

Once a set of technologies used for assisting the disabled, eye tracking is quickly moving from the lab to mainstream applications. In its most high profile, albeit gimmicky, release yet, the new Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with “Smart Scroll” and “Smart Pause” features that let you (somewhat) move the screen up and down and pause videos with the movement of your eyes.  Reviews of the phone haven’t been great – but there seems to be a lot of interest in the feature itself.

Although advanced eye tracking is still years away from mainstream deployment, in the last year alone there have been some incredible advancements in usability and accuracy.

Later this year, Tobii is will release a limited edition of “REX,” a small USB-connected bar that will let you control your desktop with your eyes. PredictGaze has developed a technology that can be used on ordinary cameras, work in different types of lighting, and supposedly function at distances of up to 12 feet. It is capable of performing facial recognition on shoppers to gauge how they react to different products and to determine which demographic groups they belong to.

In perhaps the most startling development, researchers have developed a product called Sideways that can also work on ordinary cameras – except it doesn’t need to calibrate to each user and can even measure multiple people at once. In one instance, “14 people of various heights, ages, and eye colors, who interacted with it simply by looking at a series of CD covers on a screen” were tracked at the same time.

The technology still has a long way to go, and by itself, eye tracking data wouldn’t be nearly useful enough for informing a serious business decision. But in practice, this information would be paired with other data sets. Retailers, for example, have recently started to embrace methods more traditionally synonymous with surveillance. Traditional loyalty card programs have now entered the age of big data, and some malls are even using your cell phone location data to attempt to determine what products you are looking at. In the cutthroat world of retail, success or failure can depend on knowing more about what your customer wants than your competition.

Jay Stanley, ACLU Senior Policy Analyst, points out that there has already been extensive research into what we can learn about people from tracking where they look, and the results are worrisome. To varying degrees of accuracy, eye tracking can possibly reveal certain cognitive disorders, the use of drugs and alcohol, mental and psychological illness, deceitfulness, and even sexual orientation. This is not to suggest that any of these inferences are currently actionable. But if any of these measurements even come close to revealing your behaviors or traits, you can be sure somebody will collect and sell this information.

The hype surrounding the release of Google Glass has sparked intense debates over what limits should be placed on recording devices in public. Many of its fanboys have been cheering for the eradication of whatever minimal semblance of privacy in public we have left. They evoke the dangerous and intellectually-lazy falsehood that those with nothing to hide have nothing to worry about. What was once a common-sense observation about there being no expectation of privacy in public has now been perverted into an excuse for law enforcement and advertisers to gather as much data as possible.

Naturally, when you walk down a street, your face is visible to those around you – this is the justification given for the use of facial recognition and behavior detection systems in public.  Does this same reasoning apply to eye movements? If your attention can be quantified, should you have any rights or control over how that information is used?

As technologies enable us to measure things that once were inconceivable, there will constantly be new classes of data, and we’ll have to evaluate them and determine their worth to us.  Hopefully, by then, we will have learned our lessons from the Do Not Track fiasco and the “cost” of social media. We live in a digital environment where we own little, but everything seems free – where the real price we pay in personal information to advertisers is not immediately visible, and we’re told that in order to participate, we have no choice but to oblige.

Consider for a moment the type of future that Moti Krispil, CEO of eye tracking startup Umoove, describes (and warns about): “If you see a picture of Adele somewhere in an article, when you’re looking at her for more than 2 seconds, an Amazon ad could pop up suggesting you buy her latest record now.” For advertisers, this is a goldmine – there’s an enormous amount of value in knowing what groups of people pay attention to which types of ads. But what exactly do consumers stand to gain from this?

Tarun Wadhwa is a writer, researcher, and entrepreneur working at the intersection of technology and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter – @twadhwa – or contact him directly at VB@tarunwadhwa.com. Also, check out his upcoming book, Identified, which will be out later this year. 

Photo: Flickr/Dolbs

San Francisco startup Chute has raised a second round of institutional funding: $7 million led by Foundry Group with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and U.S. Venture Partners.

It’s also announcing today the advent of Chute Ads, which use “real-time,” user-generated content as commercial fodder for big brands.

Chute, a Y Combinator alumnus company, makes it easier for developers and designers to get high-quality user-generated images into their apps and sites with a cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations, and user authentication, all with a few lines of code.

As for Chute Ads, the company promises potential advertisers quite a bag of tricks: real-time content, user-generated aggregation, voting and moderation, social sharing, and customized displays. End users can upload their content directly to a campaign, comment on it, upvote it, or share it across other networks:

Chute Ads can run as display ad units on any partner site, and clients can create a standalone site of their own to display all the ads (i.e. all the user-generated content for the campaign) in one place.

The startup raised $2.7 million last July. The company was founded in 2011.

Adsolut launched today as the “admeld for Africa.” It is an ad network and management platform that helps web publishers more effectively reach their target audience and sell and manage their ads online.

“Nigeria has thousands of blogs and websites catering for every facet of human life,” said founder Morzook Biobaku in an interview. “There are the blogs but there are no advertisers, yet advertisers want to have their products on the net. This is where adsolut comes in; we will be the bridge between advertisers and web publishers. There is a huge market for online advertising in Nigeria and adsolut wants to pioneer the movement.”

Biobaku said advertisers in Africa struggle to find the right channels to promote their products, and Adsolut is a local, “home-grown” solution that makes it easier. The company not only provides a network, but also takes on an agency role by using actual marketing professionals to help customers identify and target the right audience. The company also monitors ads and provides analytics.

Adsolut is currently in the process of building its own ad servers. The company is raising a seed round on Angel List which will support building out the technology and growing the network of advertisers and publishers. Attracting venture capital is not easy in Africa and the cost of getting online is still high. Furthermore, there is not consistent electricity so startups have to rely on electric generators which are expensive. Biobaku said that while these factors increase overhead costs and slow growth, Nigeria is currently home to an Internet “craze” and the market is bubbling with opportunity.

There are other a few other homegrown ad networks that serve Nigeria (and Africa), including mobile advertising network Twinpine and South African Offer Forge. Adsolut currently has three employees and is based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Photo Credit: crashdburnd

After being available only to select businesses for about a year, Twitter Ads is now available to almost all U.S. companies that want to use it, Kevin Weil, Twitter Senior Director of Product for Revenue, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Twitter’s ad platform is a self-service solution that lets advertisers buy Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. The service gives brands a larger opportunity to get exposure to Twitter’s more than 200 million active users rather than simply pushing messages through standard tweets.

These ad products also let advertisers target users by geography, and they are offered on a pay-per-engagement basis. Offering these products to more businesses makes Twitter another powerful force alongside Facebook or Google in social advertising.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Showing that Yahoo is definitely concerned with improving its advertising business, CEO Marissa Mayer just announced two new ad units that are distinctly focused on Yahoo products and services.

Yahoo is currently implementing a new strategy that will see plenty of useless products trashed while popular products/services refined and improved. This includes Yahoo’s content strategy, which recently included signing a deal with Broadway Video to host Saturday Night Live video clips exclusively. And now, the company is trying to spruce up its advertising products.

The first new ad unit, called Stream Ads, will run alongside content on Yahoo’s news feed. Mayer describes the unit as “the sponsored twin to our news feed articles and are every bit as personalized and engaging.” That may be true, but the ultimate indicator will be if advertisers start seeing results when they run these ads. I can’t really tell you the last time I used Yahoo’s news feed, but that’s an entirely different issue (albeit, one that’s fixable).

The other unit Mayer calls “Billboard” adds, which isn’t anything new. Whenever a video plays, advertisers have the option of swallowing up the background, offering helpful links, and including a display ad next to the video player. It’s an effort to make those display ads more useful than just something you see and react to either on or offline. The example used is of a movie trailer (the Hobbit, as shown in the screenshot above), which lets you buy movie tickets. If they can make these ads more functional without causing people to leave the screen (meaning, a link pushes you to another site where you actually buy tickets), I can see these new unit’s having lots of potential.

Filed under: Business, Media ]]> http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/29/yahoo-rolls-out-new-display-ad-units-for-news-feeds-video-content/feed/ 0 Yahoo rolls out new display ad units for news feeds & video content vbtomcheredar Yahoo ads Billboard Ads http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/29/twitter-followgen/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/29/twitter-followgen/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:24:16 +0000 Meghan Kelly http://venturebeat.com/?p=727331 Twitter is finally talking to one developer who created an advertising app he said should be shut down by the social network.

Myles Recny looked in the face of Twitter yesterday and said, “You should shut my company down.” Now, the social network is in talks with Recny about the app he claimed was “better than Twitter Ads.”

“Twitter reached out to me, as has the ad team at one of the other big social networks, and we’re trying to work something out,” Recny said today, in an interview with VentureBeat.

His app, Followgen, uses Twitter’s application programming interface to automate “favoriting” people’s tweets. A company signs up with Followgen and decides on a target market. The app finds relevant Twitters users and favorites some of their tweets. If all works according to plan, the person will be pleased at having a tweet favorited and then, in turn, follow the company’s Twitter profile.

Recny considers this a form of advertising. Instead of serving impressions, he’s serving favorites that convert into follows. And that’s why he wrote that Twitter should shut him down: His app may violate Twitter’s terms of service.

However, he believes that if he had legitimate access to Twitter’s special advertising API, he could make money for both companies.

“It’s been kind of an emotional roller coaster. I’ve been having uncertainty whether what I was doing was white hat or black hat in regards to Twitter’s Terms of Service,” said Recny.

Twitter has a habit of shutting companies like his down, particularly when they encroach on its business model. Instead of waiting for the inevitable, Recny explained to me that he tried to contact Twitter first by applying for the special API two months ago. He then reached out through friends who knew Twitter big wigs. Both attempts failed.

Only after he wrote the blog post yesterday did the social network get in touch with Recny.

“We both know how the dev ecosystem feels about Twitter right now, and it’s not a positive sentiment, is it?” said Recny. “People feel that their API access can be turned off for any reason. People feel like there’s no trustworthy channel in which to get in contact with Twitter.”

He says Followgen customers can expect one of three outcomes:

1. Twitter will yank Followgen’s API access and he will have to shut down the company.
2. Twitter will yank Followgen’s “favoriting” business, but give Recny its Ads API access to build something that will be mutually beneficial.
3. Twitter and Followgen will figure out a revenue sharing partnership and keep both the favoriting product and a new Ads API-supported product on the market.

That last one, even Recny admits, is highly unlikely. But Recny is not without options. Twitter and the mysterious second social network could be interested in him as an employee on their ads teams.

We asked Recny if Facebook was the second social network to get in touch with him. He replied, “Would no comment be a comment?”

He leaves the experience having learned about the struggles of not only working with Twitter, but working with yourself. He says he would not recommend the solo-founder route, and would find a co-founder next time around. Or, at least, a co-working space with people he enjoys.

Twitter image via Andreas Eldh/Flickr

Filed under: Business, Dev, Social

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Enterprise cloud software titan Salesforce has launched a new social advertising management app called Social.com that will become the third offering in Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce has used the past few months to emphasize that it now wants to help businesses become “customer companies” and spark a “trust revolution.” To do this, it wants people to use its Marketing Cloud to better connect with customers. Marketing Cloud is already used by 55 businesses in the Fortune 100 and includes Radian6 and Buddy Media, two companies previously acquired by Salesforce. Now Social.com will be the third puff in this cloud of products.

“We think social is one of the most transformed ways to market,” Gordon Evans, VP of product marketing for Marketing Cloud, told VentureBeat. “The audience has moved online … and it’s an incredible targeting opportunity.”

Social.com’s roots lie in Brighter Option, a company Buddy Media acquired back in Feb. 2012. When Buddy Media was acquired by Salesforce in August 2012, Brighter Option and its team came along with the deal.

Brighter Option offered social ad management software to make it easier for businesses to create, monitor, and measure Twitter, Facebook, and other social ads. So Salesforce has taken Brighter Option’s core features, revamped the package with Buddy Media and Radian6 integration, and changed the name to something with an easy-to-remember URL. Salesforce has done app revamps similar to this previously with Do.com, which used to be Manymoon and Desk.com, which used to be Assistly.

The main features Social.com includes are:

• Create and optimize social ad campaigns
• Connect brands with agencies for better ad results
• Define goals and the app will optimize accordingly
• Adjust ad spend automatically
• Connect Radian6 social listening to create relevant campaigns
• Connect Salesforce CRM customer data to target and optimize social ads
• Simple self-service application

Salesforce insists that Social.com works best when your company also uses Radian6 and Buddy Media because the apps are integrated. Basically, Radian6′s social listening and Buddy Media’s social posting abilities give you more insight and control over campaigns.

“There is so much advantage to using them together and integrated with Salesforce data,” Evans said. “They’re all great products alone but it becomes a powerhouse when used together.”

Some of the top advertising companies in the world are already using Social.com, including OmicomGroup, WPP Group, Mindshare, Mediacom, and Razorfish.

The deal is for “special access” to advertising slots, as well as research data and new, as-yet-unannounced advertising products, in return for which Starcom has committed to spend $200 million — or more — of its clients’ money. Full financial details were not released, but I would assume that a deal of this magnitude also includes significant financial incentives, AKA discounts.

Twitter has been unveiling new advertising products such as demographic targeting tools and keyword targeting options with furious rapidity in the past weeks, as well as Twitter #Music. That seems to indicate the company is focusing on monetization … and, if the Silicon Valley buzz is to be believed, a 2013 IPO.

In any case, Twitter is certainly focused on advertisers and advertising. But even with all its recently-announced products, it’s still early days, and the upside is difficult to estimate.

“We’re in really uncharted territory here,” said Eric Covino, president of digital marketing firm Creative Signals. “You have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them … but they’re still in their infancy in terms of advertising.”

In any case, this is not Starcom’s first rodeo. The company has been experimenting, testing, and learning on Twitter for a year and a half, Starcom CEO Laura Desmond said. Which means that it believes Twitter ads are driving real, measurable ROI for its clients.

Covino is a little skeptical.

“All these millions of dollars have to overcome basic psychology,” he says. “Twitter has publicly announced that they look at themselves as a media company, not a social media service. But its users think Twitter is social media.”

In other news, Twitter and Starcom are also apparently building a “social TV” lab together, so perhaps Twitter #TV will soon be joining Twitter #Music.

Image credit: Starcom; Hat tip: AllThingsD

The technology converts digital content into affiliate links. Brands or publishers can then earn money through affiliate marketing without making much of an effort. The company’s SkimLinks product turns normal links into affiliate links, while SkimWords uses natural language processing to detect product references in the text and direct people to where they can buy them.

“We are the only technology in the world that can detect granular product references in content, in real time across multiple verticals, and link them accurately to the most relevant retailer of that product,” the company said on its site.

Skimlinks has a network of 140,000 active publishers and 17,000 affiliate programs. According to a statement issued this morning, Skimlinks generates seven-figure revenues each month from its network and processes 300 million clicks per month. Clients include Conde Nast, Gawker, AOL Europe, WordPress, Hearst Digital, Amazon, and eBay. The company anticipates it will drive $500 million of e-commerce sales globally in 2013.

The amount of this round is undisclosed, but the company says it will use the funds to build out its products and expand into Asia. Along with the funding announcement, SkimLinks’ Japanese-language website went live this morning.

Greycroft Partners led this round — its portfolio includes other ad tech and online publishing startups including Buddy Media, Klout, and the Huffington Post. A group of Japanese angel investors also participated, along with Forum Foundry and existing investors. Skimlinks previously raised $7.02 million, closing its second round of institutional financing in November 2011.

SkimLinks was founded in 2007. It has 55 employees, with headquarters in London and offices in San Francisco and New York. It will open operations in Asia this year.

Photo Credit: Shiraz Chakera/Flickr

Microsoft has launched a new ad campaign for Internet Explorer that emphasizes IE’s inclusion of the “Do Not Track” setting that helps protect users’ privacy.

Ad Age reports that this campaign will consist of TV, print, billboard, and online ads all dedicated to showing that Internet Explorer includes “Do Not Track” function, which explicitly asks advertisers to not track your personal information. The campaign will run online and have a prominent presence in two cities — Washington, DC, where federal policy makers live, and Kansas City, Mo. where Google Fiber is rolling out.

These ads quietly go after Google and its closeness to an advertising industry that relies on tracking data to better serve users ads. Microsoft previously targeted Google with its loud “Scroogled” ads that criticized Gmail and Google search, but these new ads don’t mention Google by name.

Microsoft has also launched a new website dedicated to explaining some facets of online privacy. It even includes a quiz to “find Your Privacy Type.”

The first video of the campaign can be seen below. It’s called “Your Privacy is Our Priority” and shows a series of things people might share online along with things they may not want to share.

“Some personal information you’re happy to share online; some not so much,” the video’s narrator states. “So Microsoft is trying to help by adding tracking protetion in Internet Explorer and including Do Not Track with the belief that one day it too will give you more control.”

Paul Pellman is the CEO of Adometry, Inc.

In recent weeks there has been substantial debate about fraud in the advertising industry. Of course, these conversations aren’t new. Click fraud lawsuits have been a near constant for almost a decade.

In 2009, the Wall Street Journal wrote an in-depth report about hidden ads, prompting the formation of an industry group, StopAdFraud.org, which for a time attempted to create a blacklist of offenders in order to curtail the number of publishers enabling click fraud or low-quality impressions. More recently, there have been widely-reported organized click fraud rings – mostly originating from China and Russia in the form of “Botnets” – that involve tens of thousands of IP addresses visiting hundreds of domains and clicking millions of digital ads. Among our clients, which include large and small advertisers, agencies and ad networks, approximately 16 percent of monthly clicks are invalid – roughly half the industry average aided by sophisticated blocking lists that have been assembled to weed out known offenders over several years. While a 100 percent block rate is impossible, this number is still much too high.

All of this fraudulent activity comes at the (literal and figurative) expense of advertisers and agencies. To quote a former editor of a well-regarded tech blog who wrote frequently about this topic, “as long as advertisers pay for clicks, there will be click fraud.” Unfortunately, this mantra has only expanded to encompass the full swath of digital advertising including page-view impressions, views of online video and the like.

A persistent problem

There are many types of fraud and each has a slightly different impact on advertisers depending on the revenue models being used. Some of the most nefarious activity is caused by Botnets described above — these are sophisticated programs designed specifically for click fraud that leverage a network of computers (with or without the users’ consent) to visit websites or click display ads in an effort to generate unnaturally high traffic for commercial gain. Click fraud practices also continue to be present within Ad Networks themselves. We often see programmatic or scripted activity designed to appear to be human behavior. Beyond simple “invalid click” behavior through human or technological means, we see ad injectors, “stacking” ads one behind another, 1×1 pixels, fraudulent browser plugins, and cookie stuffing.

The arms race conundrum

Companies like ours work closely with advertisers, ad networks and agencies to help protect brands and combat all aspects of ad fraud, including maintaining growing lists of bad actors and providing data to clients to ensure they don’t pay for invalid clicks or inflated traffic. These ‘sell side’ solutions are important as they represent the front lines of the fight against ad fraud and protect the underlying economics of the online advertising business. Unfortunately, these technologies can’t prevent scammers from attempting to game the system entirely, and as long as there are incentives to do so there will be offenders that attempt to steal a slice of the multi-billion dollar advertising industry. In other words, we’ll continue to get better at detecting and preventing their tactics, and they’ll continue to develop new ways to circumvent the system.

It’s time for an ad fraud ‘pivot’

If you’ve ever seen the 80’s film War Games you remember the famous scene at the end of the movie during which the war games simulator has a sentient moment when it realizes “the only winning move is not to play.” Similarly, up to this point many online advertisers have decided to deal with fraud by simply ignoring it, leaving it up to ad networks and a small group of fraud-fighting vendors to deal with the problem. Long-term this approach is not only doomed to fail, but it also ignores the important role advertisers and agencies must play if the industry is ever going to disrupt the growing universe of scam-y, click fraud offenders in a meaningful way.

Unlike sell-side platforms and ad networks, advertisers hold a critical card in the fight against fraud – money. By virtue of controlling how ad budgets are spent and allocated, big advertisers and their agencies ultimately have the power to starve out scammers. In this model, instead of solely relying on ad networks catching a higher percentage of fraudulent activity, advertisers change the game by developing new measures that only reward good behavior. In other words, they stop looking only at ineffective KPIs like CPMs and start developing systems that weed out all but those supplying high-quality traffic and impression that accrue to revenue.

In the marketing attribution space, one approach we’re seeing many companies employ successfully is a gradual move away from simple metrics to new, modern techniques that calculate conversion credits on a granular level. There are many reasons for this, but one motivating factor that is often cited is a desire to understand not just what happened as a result of any given marketing campaign but how and why it happened. Using attribution algorithms, advertisers can identify which channels and media are performing well or poorly, then redistribute budgets or optimize spending around what’s performing best. Using the same data, marketers can give targeted feedback to demand-side platforms (DSPs) and real-time bidding partners to improve results and buy higher-quality placements. Ultimately, they may decide to stop allocating budget to specific ad networks if the inventory fails to deliver. Another benefit of cross-channel attribution is that pure-play vendors are like Switzerland – a beacon of neutrality. By having no stake in the outcome, independent attribution vendors can focus on providing unbiased analysis and let you worry about what to do with that information.

Final word

Depending on who you ask, you’re likely to get different answers as to how serious a problem fraud is in the digital advertising industry. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but when it comes to fraud one thing that is certain is the status quo is no longer working. Advertisers would be wise to heed the famous words of Jack Welch, “control your own destiny or someone else will.”

Boxing photo via Shutterstock

Paul Pellman is the CEO of Adometry, Inc., a marketing analytics provider that generates insights about the performance of marketing campaigns through combining and interpreting advertising data from online and offline channels.

That’s the theory behind Twitter’s new ad tool, keyword targeting in timelines.

Available today globally, the new targeting mechanism will allow advertisers to tailor which audience they choose to market to by the content of the tweets those people write. Twitter says this is important for advertisers, since it lets marketers reach the right audience at the right time, in the right context.

And they’re right, to a degree.

Twitter’s optimistic scenario is a user tweeting about a great song from their favorite band. As it happens in contrived examples, this band just happens to be playing a nearby venue that very night, which means that promoters can run geotargeted Twitter ad campaigns against local users who have tweeted that band’s name, and thereby inform this particular user that her favorite group is in town.

There’s no doubt that there’s huge value in this new targeting option. And, as AllThingsD notes, Twitter has included negative sentiment filtering, which is critical, because no advertiser wants to target people who are tweeting about Wu-Tang Clan, only to find that they were tweeting that Wu-Tang Clan sucks, or something similar.

But it’s also challenging, because many tweets are difficult to register commercial intent for.

If I tweet about my wife’s illness, are you going to target me with a random medicine? Or if you tweet about a great dinner you’re just about to eat, will you really be receptive to ads about a Greek restaurant just down the road? Twitter says it’s helping advertisers target “signals of intent,” and that might sound like Google-ish search keyword targeting, but it’s not clear that the link is quite as obvious as an intentional, directed search.

But it is yet another tool in the Twitter advertiser toolbox, and with all the others, will add up to better results. Twitter says that it has tested the feature with Walgreens and Microsoft, among others, and “users were significantly more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.”

Which sounds like Twitter ad products are synergistic: 1 + 1 = 3, not 2. And in fact, GoPro achieve engagement rates as high as 11 percent, Twitter says, using the new feature. That’s startlingly high.

And, doubtless, music to advertisers ears.

photo credit: mkandlez via photopin cc

If advertisers want to take advantage of Facebook’s upcoming video ad platform, they’re going to have to pay up — big time.

The video ads, which will likely launch this summer, will run for $1 million each per day, as AdAge reports. According to sources, Facebook plans to sell four ad spots per day, each of which will target specific demographics. Assuming Facebook actually sells those ads, the video ad platform could pull in an extra $4 million a day — or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, over $1 billion a year.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook: More ads, all the time.

Again, that’s assuming Facebook sells those spots.

From the outset, Facebook’s biggest challenge with video ads is proving to advertisers that they will actually pay off. This has traditionally been one of Facebook’s biggest problems, as its high-profile spat with General Motors last year showed.

In that situation, GM didn’t have much proof that advertising on Facebook was worth it, and it wanted to expand its Facebook advertising presence beyond the Facebook sidebar. GM has since returned to the Facebook flock, and the video ads could be the key to reinvigorating its Facebook presence — assuming it doesn’t balk at that price tag. (GM is rumored to have spent $10 million on Facebook advertising in 2011.)

The other problem, of course, is Facebook’s user base, which is particularly sensitive to change and probably won’t be crazy about the prospect of the  News Feeds being bogged down by large, potentially obtrusive advertisements.

Facebook, however, has probably done its homework on this: The ads will be limited to 15 seconds, and Facebook also plans to limit the number of them users see per day. So if users do complain, they won’t have terribly much to complain about. In theory, anyway.

If a rumored music service wasn’t enough to push Twitter into the territory media, now the company might be trying to get TV content playing through its service.

The social network is close to making partnerships with cable network company Viacom (MTV, Comedy Central, Spike) and major media company Comcast (NBCUniversal) to bring more high-quality videos to the service, along with commercials, according to a Bloomberg report that cites anonymous people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg’s sources indicate that the partnership would allow TV video content to play on Twitter, and Twitter would then split the revenue on any ads. I’m guessing this means Twitter would give you the option of playing a clip from, say, The Daily Show within your Twitter stream, and then play an ad either before or after the video starts. Perhaps those clips could even be featured within sponsored tweets that appear before search results and such.

If true, this would be an interesting move for Twitter, and one that shows how much it wants a piece of the lucrative television advertising market. But this isn’t the first time the company has shown an interest in getting closer to the TV industry. Twitter purchased social TV analytics platform Bluefin Labs back in February, and prior to that it signed an agreement to work with Nielsen on a standardized form of social TV ratings. Twitter has also stacked its board of directors and employee roster with plenty of influential media executives.

We’re reaching out to Twitter for more information about its possible dealings with Viacom and Comcast and will update this post with any new information.

But a new report from Forrester says that Google’s going to win both battles.

“The database of affinity is Facebook’s birthright,” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott says. “And it’s going to blow it.

Google has owned intent with its AdWords product because intent is often most visibly demonstrated via a search. You’re looking for a new TV, you search for “flatscreen TV,” Google matches ads against your query. Affinity is fuzzier: you like Samsung, so you might be biased toward buying a Samsung TV.

Forrester says the database of affinity that Facebook and others are building is the holy grail of marketing, but adds, shockingly, that Facebook is not going to win.

“While it’s Facebook’s birthright to win the race for monetizing the database of affinity — after all it practically owns the trademark on ‘liking’ something — ultimately it will be Google that reaches the finish line first,” according to Elliot.

How?

You need three things to turn affinity data into that holy grail, Elliot says. Those three things are lots of affinity data from many varied sources, the capability to bring meaning to that data through intensive analysis, and a variety of brand ad units from markets to monetize that data and that meaning. According to Elliot, Google is able to beat Facebook on all three of those criteria.

Source: Forrester

Affinity data: Facebook vs Google

Even affinity data — the kind of data that Facebook’s 83 billion likes is supposed to be able to deliver more than any other social network or search company.

“While Facebook has more affinity data than anyone else, Google’s got a lot more of this data than you think it does — and Google’s affinity data covers a much broader range of social actions,” Elliot writes, citing 800 million YouTube visitors and 500 million Gmail users … and that Google “cheats” because it doesn’t just have access to data from its own sites and services but also from its search index, which “includes almost every review posted on any site online; the contents of billions of blog posts; and nearly everything posted on Twitter.”

In addition, the Forrester report says Google is both better at bringing meaning to data — better at “big data” analysis — and has more experience with and access to advertisers and multiple types of ad units, including video-based preroll ads on YouTube.

Building the database of affinity will help advertisers reduce wasted ad dollars by better targeting their best potential customers. It’ll also reward or punish social networks, search engines, and online sites’ ad revenues based on a better understanding of who is actually visiting, and what they’re actually doing.

Elliot sees this database of affinity emerging in four stages:

1. Simple affinity:
   Facebook likes, Twitter accounts a user follows.
2. Big affinity:
   Multiple merged datasets including purchase history.
3. Smart affinity:
   Even more data, but now with real-time dynamic analysis to target ads down to the individual.
4. Ubiquitous affinity:
   Applying online data to offline ads.

As that progression occurs, Forrester sees Facebook’s privacy issues going away and Google buying companies like CBS and MGM … and TV advertising starting to grow again as online affinity data informs offline ad buys.

“When Facebook shares too much with the public, it merely annoys people,” the report says. “But when Facebook shares with marketers, it creates value for those marketers — and users never even notice.”

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

While Facebook has always been great at providing specific demographics to advertisers, it has struggled with helping advertisers target demand: the people most likely to be in the market for their product. That’s been Google’s forte, and it’s the reason the search engine is worth $260 billion and the social network is worth $60 billion.

But Facebook is looking to change that.

Today Facebook launched a new self-serve advertising product, partner categories, which will allow advertisers to target specific categories of people based on what they actually buy and want to buy, both online and offline.

The new product mixes Facebook’s own personal data with information from third-party consumer segmentation and data companies such as Datalogix, Epsilon, and Acxiom to identify people who are in the market for certain products, and deliver those people in an anonymized group to advertisers:

The new targeting mechanism is available today for U.S. advertisers in the Facebook’s Power Editor, which helps advertisers manage large numbers of ads, and includes more than 500 unique categories of consumers. Advertisers can also take these groups and fine-tune the exact audience they want with Facebook’s other targeting options, meaning that you can now layer a demographic slice with a demand slice and get a very fine-grained target sample for exactly your defined customer base.

The offline part is key.

Partner Categories “allows brands to reach groups of people based on interests they have expressed and actions they have taken off of Facebook,” one of the new ad partners, Epsilon, said in a statement.

Epsilon is an old-school data company started in 1969 that leverages transactional data (sales) and database marketing to help advertisers target. It’s joined by Acxiom, a 40-year-old company that has been big in database marketing but also enables over a trillion digital data transactions a week, and Datalogix, another company that started in the pre-digital, pre-social world of marketing. Other companies may yet be added, as Facebook notes.

The real question is, although these companies have all invested heavily in digital technologies for the modern age, how good are they at targeting demand compared to Google, which has the best consumer insights platform in the world: a search engine that is constantly learning what people want. My guess is: in some things like consumer packaged goods, better. And in other things that have largely migrated online, like electronics and big-ticket items, not so much.

In any case, it’s an interesting combination of online and offline data to understand the whole consumer, as Epsilon EVP Eric Stein says:

“There is a tremendous opportunity for marketers to leverage offline data to reach their customers and prospective customers where and when they are deeply engaged.”

The objective, according to Facebook, is better ads, more relevant ads — ads, in fact, that are as interesting as the original reason you came to Facebook.

“Our ultimate goal is to make the ads people see on Facebook as relevant as the information they see from their friends,” Facebook director Yvette Lui said in a statement.

photo credit: Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist via photopin cc

For General Motors, all advertising roads lead back to Facebook.

Almost a year ago, GM, the U.S’s second-largest advertiser and one of the largest auto manufacturers on the planet, publicly parted ways with Facebook, arguing that the social network’s display ads were ineffective. This was just days ahead of Facebook’s less-than-stellar IPO, so the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Now, the pair are back together. AdAge reports that GM will advertise via Facebook as a part of the “Find New Roads” campaign for the Chevrolet Sonic. According to GM, the campaign will be mobile-only and will take advantage of Facebook’s new mobile targeting features.

The mobile-only focus is interesting, especially since Zuckerberg has made a point of pushing Facebook as mobile-first. “Facebook is a mobile company,” he said in January.

Despite its earlier distaste with Facebook, GM seems to be willing to give mobile advertising a go. Let’s just hope GM has better success on mobile than it apparently did on the desktop — for Facebook’s sake, anyway.

Digital media company RMG Networks has gone public in a complex reverse merger with SCG Financial Acquisition Corp, bypassing the traditional IPO process.

RMG Networks provides “place-based advertising” and offers services, signs, and ads for locales such as airplanes and malls. As we noted Friday, RMG Networks was first acquired by SCG, and then the company’s public profile will shift from SCG to RMG in the next two weeks. In the next few weeks, RMG will also acquire Texas-based digital signage company Symon.com.

Garry McGuire, the CEO of RMG Networks, will remain the CEO of the company in the merger. Gregory Sachs, the chairman, president, and CEO of SCG, will shift to become simply the executive chairman of the now-public RMG Networks.

RMG’s shares are currently listed under the SCGQ ticker symbol on the Nasdaq exchange. The ticker symbol will change to RMGN in one to two weeks.

RMG had a decent 2012 with $25.7 million in revenue and $2.9 million in profit. The company wanted to go public, so it decided to go the reverse merger route instead of the more time-consuming traditional IPO. The company’s share price was listed at $10 a share for opening on the market today.

Strangely enough, the market actually closed with SCGQ trading at exactly $10. Even with all the wild volatility of tech IPOs in the past year, this IPO didn’t move the needle a bit. An RMG spokesperson said the IPO was “appropriately priced.”

The San Francisco-based RMG Networks previously raised funding from major VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Former KPCB partner Aileen Lee sits on its board of directors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With all of Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about Facebook Home’s focus on people over apps, it’s easy to forget that Facebook holds something else above even people: advertising.

During a Q&A session with reporters today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered the question that’s been on all of our cynical minds: Will Facebook Home’s Cover Feed be home to advertisements?

Zuckerberg’s surprisingly direct response: Yup!

“There are no ads in this yet. I’m sure that one day there will be,” he told reporters

While Facebook is being uncharacteristically candid with its responses so far, it’s tough to see how it couldn’t be.  Facebook is set to suck up 30 percent of mobile ad dollars this year, so obviously, advertising will be a core part of its plans with Home.

Cover Feed will represent a particularly attractive bit of real estate for advertisers, as they can take advantage of the large smartphone home screens of Android devices.

Facebook, like Amazon, has caught onto a very clear reality: The smartphone and tablet lockscreen is a largely untapped market for a potentially lucrative sort of advertising. Just don’t expect Facebook to run around broadcasting its plans to the world. Cover Feed advertising is sure to be far more subtle than that.

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital.

Video advertising will double approximately every two years until all online ads will be video ads. That’s right — all online ads will be video.

I am calling this prediction “Cam’s Law” (after moi) with due respect and deep regard to Intel Founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years thereby exponentially increasing computing power.

Trust me, it does not take a genius to see the trends. My prediction is firmly guided by data. comScore’s recently reported that Americans watched 11.3 billion video ads in December, setting a new peak, and a sharp 10% rise from November’s 10.3 billion. December 2012 ad views were twice as many as in January 2012, representing 59% year-over-year growth. Video ads accounted for 22.6% of all videos viewed in December, and 1.9% of time spent viewing video online.

But That Was Last Year

Now three months into 2013, I feel ever more confident about Cam’s Law given the astronomical speed at which video advertising has grown in popularity. All signs point to the death of banner and static ads. Here’s why:

1. Consumers love video; not just cat MEMEs, but original content. And they watch a lot of video online. Nielsen says Americans spent more than 360 billion minutes online in December 2012 and streamed 24.6 billion videos.

2. Consumers watch video ads. After 60 years of television we have learned to watch the ads to get to the content. Yes, we know you want to get to your show, but often the ads are entertaining, visual and mercifully brief – and getting more interactive by the day.

3. Advertisers like video ads because consumers watch them. From August this year, market research company Nielsen will validate the astronomical shift to online video by including video viewed on tablet and mobile devices in their ratings measures. This will provide advertisers the data they need to shift their spend to online video in even greater numbers.

4. Consumers are buying (lots of) tablets. The global market for tablet computers surged 78.4 percent last year, according to research firm IDC, and sales are on schedule to pass PCs by 2017.

5. Tablets & smart phones make watching video easy in the bedroom, train, couch, park bench, and, ahem, bathroom.

6. Tablets make shopping easy and you can bet your last dollar that online retailers took notice last Thanksgiving and Christmas, so expect a monumental change in online sales strategies this year and increased consumer purchases via mobile and tablet.

7. If consumers are buying on their tablets, guess where advertisers will want to run their ads?

8. 4G will make watching video anywhere seamless. Did someone say “conversation killer?”

9. Banner ads do not work, but you already knew that.

Advertisers can’t ignore the numbers

As advertisers are beginning to embrace tablet advertising, in virtually every case they want video in their ad units. Consumers are watching those video ads hundreds of times more than they are clicking on banner ads.

While display and banner advertising were yesterday’s stepping stones for advertisers to enter the digital market, video is where the real action is.

Watch this space.

In 2014, we will review Cam’s Law to see where the market is; and we’ll do it via video because we know you will watch that. On your tablet.

Original TV image via Shutterstock

Cameron Yuill is the Founder and CEO of AdGent Digital, the company behind AdTouch™, a patent-pending HTML5 tablet ad platform for the creation, management and analysis of ad units on tablets for the mobile web.

Collective Bias has raised $10.5 million for its approach to consumer engagement. This “social shopper media company” connects brands with consumers through its Social Fabric community of 1,400 influencers. These influencers tell “real-life” stories about their shopping experiences and product usage and share them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The company claims to have an aggregate, multichannel reach of more than 50 million people.

“Collective Bias was founded to create a solution to the challenges posed to shopper marketers by social media,” said founder and CEO John Andrews in an email. “Specifically, we create an alternative to traditional ways brands and retailers have reached shoppers along the path to purchase.  Our goal was to create a predictable social shopper media format that has measurable scale and performance that is superior to existing mediums.”

This marketing method seeks to harness the power of social media and integrate into people’s everyday life, so brand promotion seems more authentic (and hopefully persuasive) than display ads. Clients include Walgreens, Sears, Disney, Nestle, Tyson, and Starbucks. These companies set their parameters for a campaign, and Collective Bias taps the appropriate influencers to generate content about a specific product.

With this first round of funding led by Updata Partners, Collective Bias will work on developing new products to streamline influencer identification, content delivery, and campaign management. It will also grow the Social Fabric community member training and technological support and continue to expand regional offices into NYC, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco as well as push into Canada and the UK.

Collective Bias is headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock/Collective Bias

We might be unsuccessful at getting congress to double NASA’s funding to a full cent on every taxed dollar, but look out when someone starts a crowdfunding campaign.

The latest example is a new IndieGoGo campaign started by a group of organizers in the aerospace industry that want to run a public service announcement video before this summer’s blockbuster movie  Star Trek Into Darkness, the sequel to the J.J. Abrams-directed 2009 hit reboot of Star Trek.

INTERNET! Let's get a PSA for NASA to run before Star Trek Into Darkness! Who's with me?! bit.ly/WZlKvb—
Wil Wheaton (@wilw) March 28, 2013

“NASA recently made an inspiring new online video narrated by Mr. Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime, to show the progress being made on these new systems, but the agency is barred by law from buying advertising time for such a spot,” project organizers state on the campaign page. “Today we’re running a crowdfunding campaign to edit this video into a 30 second spot, and place it in over 50 movie theater screens around the country.”

The movie trailer, titled We Are The Explorers, in its current form is almost three minutes in length (embedded below), but would be edited down for the theater advertising spot. The campaign is asking for $33,000 to make this happen and has nearly reached that goal (less than $3,000 away at the time of publication) with over 33 days left. If the group raises more than the initial goal, the money will be used to put the PSA in even more theaters.

Via Wil Wheaton/Twitter; Image via Star Trek

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Big data may be cool, but it’s not pretty. Visual.ly, a startup focused on data visualizations and infographics, has raised a new $2 million round of funding, the company has confirmed to VentureBeat today.

Visual.ly’s platform is like a “basecamp” for design projects that want to utilize big data from multiple sources. It’s clients (brands, businesses, and news organizations) subscribe for access to the platform, which can match them with Visual.ly’s community of over 55,000 designers. Once matched,the designer and the client work together using the platform, with Visual.ly’s team acting as a project manager. Essentially, it answer the question of what do to for companies after they’ve hired a designer and don’t quite know what to do next.

“Right now existing ad agencies are our biggest competitors,” Visual.ly CEO Stew Langille told me in a phone interview. He explained that, in addition to building useful, interactive graphics for clients, Visual.ly is becoming more attractive because it allows designers to earn more money on a project and advertisers to spend less.

Depending on the level of project management, Visual.ly takes anywhere from 10 to 30 percent cut of each project’s total cost. The goal, Langille said, is to improve the collaboration platform for designers and clients to work on their own. And while he didn’t disclose financial figures, Langille did say that Visual.ly’s revenue is increasing 300 percent each quarter, and the number of projects are increasing 200 percent per quarter.

The new round came from previous investors, such as SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and Giza Venture Capital, as well as strategic investors that include Yammer chief product officer James Patterson and several top executives from the advertising industry that will help Visual.ly build out its presence in New York City.

The additional capital will primarily be used to advance the startup’s data visualization /collaboration technology and hire more talent over the next year. Langille said Visual.ly has held off on raising a larger round, but does plan on raising additional funding in the future.

Langille also said he’d like to use the funding to produce more free data visualization tools that showcase the Visual.ly platform’s potential. For example, the startup’s recently released tool that interfaces with Google Analytics to produce a weekly traffic report, which you can send via email automatically. Also, the startup’s Twitter user battle infographic tool.

Founded in 2011, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $4.4 million in funding to date. Visual.ly currently has 25 employees, with plans to hire another 10 to 15 people before the end of 2013.

In the eternal tug of war between publishers and readers, the readers have an enormous advantage right now.

But publishers are starting to pull the rope back a tiny bit toward their side.

The AP won a legal victory against the Meltwater Group, a news aggregation service, earlier this week, with a court decision that affirmed the AP’s ownership of its stories. Newspapers like the New York Times and independent bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have started experimenting, successfully, with partial paywalls: Their sites let readers view a certain number of stories for free but demand payment for the full slate.

There’s even some backlash against the multimillion-dollar sale of Summly to Yahoo earlier this week. While most commentators focused on the the youthfulness of Summly’s 17-year-old founder and the reported $30 million price tag, Time‘s Victor Luckerson wondered how Summly — another news aggregation service — got away with what it does. Essentially, Summly was aggregating and summarizing news stories for the benefit of its users without compensating the creators of those stories. As suggested by the Associated Press v. Meltwater decision, that might not even be legal.

These court decisions and paywall strategies are just skirmishes in the bigger battle.

Just as Napster did with the music industry and The Pirate Bay did with the movie industry, aggregators like Summly and Meltwater are hollowing out the old business models of the news industry and leaving destruction in their wake. But while musicians have started to figure out new business models, news publishers and moviemakers haven’t got there, yet.

Expect more experimentation

Never before in the history of humanity have we had so much content available for free. The Internet’s default mode of publishing is to offer content — news stories, videos, music, movies, whatever — for free. To the extent that there’s a commercial transaction involved, it’s usually the rather tenuous exchange of attention for advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising is a diminishing business: Print dollars turn into dimes on the web. And web dimes turn into pennies in mobile.

Now with the increased use of tools like AdBlock and Readability, it’s possible for readers to avoid even that tiny exchange, stripping out the advertisements and leaving just the content they’re interested in reading.

Don’t get me wrong. Although VentureBeat publishes an ad-supported website, I use these tools myself occasionally. I’ll turn on AdBlock when I have a less-than-ideal Internet connection (like at a conference or during my commute) and want to optimize download times. I use Instapaper frequently to clip articles that I don’t have time to read during work hours and want to save for later.

In fact, I was an early fan of Instapaper and Readability. These tools’ capability to strip out extraneous formatting from a web page and make it more readable pointed out a serious flaw with many content sites’ designs: They were simply too cluttered.

Instead, such tools suggested another way: a combination of minimalism and user control over design, which I labeled “undesign” in a 2010 post.

The message to site designers was clear: If you want people to read your stuff, make it easy for them to do so, or else get out of the way. If readers don’t like the way your site looks, they’ll use these tools to reformat them.

Since then, other tools have popped up to fill this gap. Amazon now offers a “Kindle” button that lets readers send a story directly to their Kindles. Another popular read-later service, Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later), works similarly to Instapaper, reformatting text into a cleaner, more readable version and saving it in a queue so you can read it at your convenience. Apple’s Safari browser even has an ad-free Reader option built-in.

In short, people are doing just what I predicted. The question for publishers is how to respond?

Embrace or resist?

Pocket this week added publisher tools that let content owners see statistics on who is using Pocket. That’s helpful (and VentureBeat is considering using these tools) because it at least gives the publisher some visibility into how people are using Pocket. And by encouraging people to save articles for later, it can increase the shelf life of a good story, encouraging people to read it and share it over a longer period than they otherwise would have.

Publishers have also started experimenting with different kinds of advertising. So-called “native advertising,” or sponsored posts, are easier to integrate into the content stream and harder to filter out. Done right, a sponsored post or advertorial should be just as interesting to readers as a piece of editorial.

However, native advertising can be a dangerous game. Publishing sponsored posts without sufficiently disclosing that they’re sponsored risks blowing any trust you have with your readers, as the Atlantic discovered recently when it published a post created by the Church of Scientology. Also, Google has made it clear that Google News will punish publishers who mix sponsored content in with news content without sufficiently distinguishing the two.

Yahoo is discontinuing the Summly app, but will fold its algorithms into Yahoo itself. Should publishers embrace news summaries by Yahoo or try to find ways to thwart it, either by using tech or in the courts? There won’t be an easy answer.

As readers get more and more control over the content they want to read, publishers are in a difficult place: Run alongside them, in the ever-diminishing hope of recouping revenues at some point down the line, or risk being left behind.

Old newspapers and Reddit alien photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Yahoo might see significant growth for the first time in years, with analysts predicting net ad revenues rising by 3.2 percent to a total of $3.28 billion for 2013.

Ad and marketing research firm eMarketer is also forecasting growth in Yahoo’s search marketing revenues: up by 7 percent to $1.23 billion for 2013.

When it comes to display ads, Yahoo has actually been posting negative numbers in years past. eMarketer expects that to turn around for the first time in 2013, with Yahoo posting one percent display revenue growth this year and increasing that growth to four percent by 2015.

Granted, the online and search ad market is growing at a greater rate than Yahoo’s gains, and companies like Google and Facebook are posting truly killer year-over-year numbers. All this means that while Yahoo’s bottom-line numbers will grow, its share of the domestic online ad market will decrease, shrinking to just 6.2 percent. For contrast, Google claims more than 72 percent of the total online ad spend in the United States.

But as eMarketer points out, 2012 was the first time in several years that Yahoo posted such revenue gains at all, and that trend continuing through 2013 is a very good sign.

“eMarketer … remains bullish about Yahoo!’s display business and expects growth in 2013 and 2014 as the company removes clutter and increases prices with higher-quality inventory,” a rep stated via email.

In terms of display ad revenue, eMarketer expects newcomers like Twitter to post dwindling returns while Yahoo makes a slow but steady comeback and Google continues to hold steady at around 35 percent growth year-over-year for the foreseeable future.

Other signs Yahoo is staging a comeback: a string of splashy acquisitions (the Dailymotion buyout, the Jybe acquihire, and then Summly) , a new data center and added jobs, and CEO Marissa Mayer’s zero-tolerance policy on WFH slackers, underperforming mobile apps, and cluttered homepages.

Overall, Yahoo’s stock price has gone up around 48 percent since Mayer took the CEO’s seat and is currently trading at $23.54:

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Yup, real ads, not social ads. Retargeted ads: ads from vendors who have noticed where you surf and what you search for, and are presenting ads for products that, based on those actions, they think you might want.

“The owned, earned, and paid media sides of Facebook are coming together really quickly,” says Rob Leathern, CEO of digital ad agency and Facebook API partner Optimal. “This is a great opportunity to reach people within the news feed.”

The new ads aren’t promoted posts, and they’re not native ads. Nor are they ads based on what you’ve liked, posted about, or done on Facebook. Rather, they’re ads straight from marketers who are targeting you based on your browsing interests.

Facebook previously allowed ads like this on the right side of the Facebook page, but this is their first foray into the news feed. There’s a good reason why:

“Allowing advertisers to reach people in News Feed is important because people spend more time in News Feed than any other part of Facebook,” Facebook posted today.

Leathern agrees, saying that it’s great news for marketers. ”We see much better performance of News Feed ads. They get a lot more user attention,” he told me today. “Certainly they come at a higher price point.”

That’s fairly simple, of course: Advertisers want their ads where the people are.

So how will Facebook users react to this new form of advertising? Mobile Facebook users have already told me they’re less than impressed with the amount of advertising that has been showing up in Facebook apps relatively recently.

Facebook knows this, of course, so other ads will be toned down:

“Introducing Facebook Exchange in Desktop News Feed will not change the number of ads people see in their News Feeds,” Facebook added.

This is an important step in monetization for Facebook and an important step in its battle for ad dollars with Google. Social has not monetized as well as search, simply because social is about friends and communication, while search is about active intent. But by adding retargeted ads to the main news feed, Facebook gets intent “for free” essentially and is therefore theoretically able to monetize people’s attention in a social environment for products they might have been looking for in an individual environment 15 minutes earlier.

Another reason it’s a big step is that the new ad units will not necessarily link to brand pages on Facebook; they can link to landing pages outside of Facebook, something that ads in the news feed have never done before.

“It’s a clear signal that Facebook wants a very dynamic ad ecosystem,” Leathern says, adding that Facebook will inevitably fine-tune and tweak this particular ad unit for both advertisers’ and users’ benefit. “If there’s one thing Facebook does really well, it’s test and iterate products.”

The initial test includes ads and participation from TellApart, MediaMath, and Nanigans. Interestingly, retargeting leader AdRoll is not on the list.