MetaMuse

Search Engine Trust Declines

Found this post very interesting regarding the decline of trust in search results.  Source was USC research. Findings:

The survey found that only 51% of people trust information provided by search engines, down from 62% in 2006. Google, as the most popular search engine in the United States, isn’t trusted by nearly half (49%) of the people who use it, an interesting result.

... this despite ...

The Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them — this over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books.

I would expect a fairly strong indirect correlation between search result trust and the extent of SEM/SEO and rank gaming. Maybe Jason is right.

Others Online Listed at KillerStarups.com

We have reached the peak of the PR world, and now my life is complete. Others Online was listed last night on KillerStartups, along with a bunch of other startups I've never heard of.  The exposure has been immense -- our servers can barely keep up!  ;-)

Please do me a favor and give us a vote though? ... maybe even a kind comment?!

Playing Hooky for Fresh Tracks

I'm a powder hound, which means I don't just "ski" -- I wait for the conditions to be right. I watch out for powder alerts, read detailed mountain weather forecasts, look at pass conditions, and check hourly mountain weather reports (temps, precipitation, wind speed, snow accumulation, etc.). I usually wait until the last minute to decide whether I'm going to ski, and where. It doesn't bother me at all to go alone because as we say (in my powder hound posse): "on a powder day you have no friends". Hey, my time is valuable and I don't get to ski much -- so I want to optimize each hour on the slopes!

Yesterday I allowed myself the luxury of playing a few hours of hooky in favor of hitting Alpental first thing in the morning. I knew the low freezing levels combined with lots of precipitation, on a weekday, would make for a very strong "quality vertical skiing per hour" score (which translates to how much kickass skiing you can get per hour, measured in feet of vertical drop).

The snow was outstanding, the lift lines were almost nonexistent, the temperature remained cold and I was getting fresh tracks on every run! I only needed 3 hours of continuous skiing to get a ton of vertical and be absolutely wiped, then it was back to the office.

CPM Rates Will Rise. They Have To.

It's been more than a week since I first read about JPMorgan's forecast "Nothing but Net". The key takeaways for me were that (a) average CPMs bottomed in 2007 at $3.31, and (b) 83% of graphically advertising in 2007 sold for less than $1 CPM.

What's it going to take to increase CPM rates? Will average CPM rates continue to decrease, or was 2007 truly the bottom?

JPMorgan forecasts increasing CPM rates. Andrew Chen feels that CPMs will decrease over the next year, possibly quite a bit. Pat McCarthy believes 2008 will result in average CPMs for display ads about the same as 2007. The viewpoints rightly center around the following points:

• Use of technology and targeting improving, enabling a more efficient market and better performance, which increases the rates. (behavioral advertising, exchanges, etc.)
• Growth in online advertising market stimulates increased demand and therefore increased rates.
• Available ad inventory is increasing, which softens/decreases rates. Much of the increase in ad inventory is in social media, which has been notoriously hard to monetize.

I think in 2008 we'll see two overall market factors that will initially result in some correction to the graphical advertising market within 2008, but then by early 2009 give way to ongoing increases in CPM rates:

1. Economic uncertainty -- this will result in brand marketers, who over the last couple of years incurred negative ROI on CPM advertising campaigns, to pull back their spending and focus on ROI.
2. Escalating CPC rates -- the search engine advertising market has been on a tear for the past several years. CPC rates will only get more competitive (unreasonably so?), which will encourage advertisers to reconsider display advertising.

Escalating CPC rates and better targeting/technology (IMHO) will be the major forces behind a rebirth in display advertising, rate increases, etc. Think about this. If you're a marketer seeing your bid rate for keywords exceeding $2 per click, the effective CPM rate you're paying is high. At .25% CTR, you're paying $5 CPM. At 1% CTR, it's $20 CPM.  If you're paying $2 CPC rates , all you need is a measly .05% CTR to put $1 CPM inventory on par (which is what 83% of the inventory is selling for, and also 5-10x the price of most social media inventory these days)! As CPC rates escalate, new targeting techniques for CPM ads will shift dollars back towards the display market -- assuming ad networks rise to meet the market opportunity. I think they will, slowly but surely. They have to, in order to grow their business.

The display advertising market is frought with inefficiencies. I continue to see leggings ads on Facebook, Tallahassee (Florida) ads on Yahoo, and credit repair ads on MSN -- none of these are even remotely interesting to me. It doesn't work!! Yet these are leaders in today's online advertising market. At the same time, advertisers are increasingly demanding ROI, as they should be. CPM rates have to go up at some point, as the market finds and corrects the inefficiencies, and balances ad spend between search and display.  There's just too much of a gap right now, which represents too much of an opportunity for the online ad market to pass up.

FTC Proposes Privacy Principles for BT

Hadn't seen this until now. To address consumer privacy concerns associated with online behavioral advertising, the FTC released a set of proposed principles. They define behavioral advertising as "the tracking of a consumer’s activities online – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests".

Poorly Behaved Mountain Bike

One of my online monikers is Kickstand. Because when I started this blog almost 3 years ago, and thus my forray into the world of social media, I was taking some time off between projects, biking a lot, and therefore decided that my primary job was to keep my bike up. Mountain bikes often have a mind of their own and, much like a spirited horse, can behave poorly at times and throw you.

And sometimes they'll even keep going, requiring you to chase after them ... ;-)

Attention Data and User Value

I believe most people on the Web are lazy, and would prefer services to read their minds instead of requiring them to expend more effort. I'm talking about most uses of the Web. This is why social bookmarking and tagging in general isn't mainstream -- at some point, the explicit effort gets to be too much work. That's why I believe so strongly in the power of the Implicit Web, and using Attention Data as the backbone of Web services (in addition to explicit user preferences/indications).

I just read a post from Marshall at R/WW on different things you can do to "fall in love with tagging again" -- in general providing good ideas for how to tag content for improved productivity/efficiency/communication. He starts off saying that he stopped using social bookmarking services last year because of the cost/benefit (cost being the effort required). Ok Marshall, I'm with you so far. His 5 useful ways to use tagging weren't very interesting to me, though I can see how it would be for some content junkies.

His "reason 5 1/2" I thought was weak though. In it, Marshall discusses the future where we'll be able to influence our attention profiles through tagging. I can't disagree with that, but I thought his example was thoroughly uninspiring. Marshall is very smart and tuned in, so I suspect he just lobbed the example out there instead of applying much thought to it. So I thought I would provide some examples ...

Ok first of all, tagging is inherently an explicit action -- an extra step -- and therefore (in my mind) just one small way to influence your attention profile. I believe your existing actions, such as reading content, searching the Web, publishing, shopping, etc. represent a much more powerful way, since it's more thorough and doesn't require any incremental user effort.

So let's assume we can leverage explicit and implicit user behavior within an attention profile. And let's also assume we have many many attention profiles and an infrastructure/ecosystem in place. Here are a few more examples of user benefits, which I think are more compelling that the "African photoblogging" example Marshall gave:

• Connections to people -- what if I was able to connect with people who were most relevant to the Google search I just did, or the camera I'm looking at? From within an "attention warehouse", one could even introduce you to someone who owns that camera, ALSO uses it primarily for outdoor adventure photography, and whose blog displays many pictures.
• Connections to content -- what if you could connect with the content being viewed and/or published by groups of people who indicate the same level of attention in certain areas? You could view the Web through a filtered lens of those with an attention affinity to "Barack Obama, Seattle, readwriteweb.com", and even do keyword searches of content viewed/published within that congregation. There are many jewels in the long tail, often hidden due to lack of popularity -- viewing the Web through the eyes of the many instead the eyes of the few improves discovery.
• Attention metrics -- do you ever wonder what your readers are paying most attention to these days? Do they care about Dick Clark? What % of them show an affinity to UK Premiership Football? Understanding what people care about gives you a much different view of the world, and helps break up all the echo chambers.

I believe 2008 will be the year of Attention Data, and user benefits therefrom. Just as the content Web is comprised of HTML links, I think we'll finally see the emergence of the "people Web", comprised of similarities and matches between attention profiles.