Advertise Space - Blog Avertising » 2007 » April

Well the first sessions of the morning are standing room only which is very exciting to see.  The turnout here at the show is much higher than I had anticipated.  Great venue and wow, the wi-fi works!
The Gamer Nation session came out with some interesting stats:
-       343,000,000 unique users visited game related websites in March 2007
-       MMORPG players are average of 26 years old spend 22 hours a week gaming.
-       As for advertising a banner must be shown to a user for 10 seconds before it is counted as an impression.
-       Massive is still the key player in the industry. (Recently acquired by Microsoft)
Trench Warfare: Blogs, Podcasts and Vidcasts
Well this was by far the best session of the day and quite humorous. 
-       AskANinja.com’s co-creator Kent Nichols casually mentioned that the federated media deal was a whopping 7 figures!
-       Jeremiah Owyang, main message was to join in the conversation and be part of your own audience
-       The panel mentioning avoiding ‘astro- turf marketing’ which is seeding your own viral marketing or a fake grass roots program. Funny term, I like that one.

Opening bell here in sunny San Fran and there is tonnes of eager marketers in the house.
Opening Keynote starts with a brief State of the industry:
-       99% of revenue to top 10 sites
-       90 revenue to YaGoo
-       Today’s brand conversation is creating dialog with you customers, unregulated and interactive.
Opening Keynote: Lynne Johnson, Senior Editor FastCompany.com interviewing Brian McAndrews, President & CEO, aQuantive.
-       Nothing groundbreaking discussed here.  (More media becoming digital.  More advertisers going online, make websites more interactive to engage users. etc.) Too much conversation about aQuantive’s in general and history of their M&A’s. It appears that Lynne is inexperience at interviewing, at least in person, with a drone monotone and very basic canned questions.  Sitting on the soft couches might have added to the laid back discussion.  I would have liked seeing more edgy questions, such as, “Is Google’s new acquisition going to create an out of control monster in this industry?”  A very lacklustre start to what it potentially might be a great show.  Hopefully the energy level of the speakers is going to pick up significantly.

The latest black hat marketing trend in the web 2.0 sphere is gaming the system and manipulating the votes so un-suspecting users will believe that 500 people really do find your crappy site or article is cool.   Most savvy webmasters will agree that Digg is easy to cheat and now a few companies are trying to make a business model out of it.  The latest venture is Subvert and Profit as mentioned today on TechCrunch that pays users .50 to Digg a story and advertisers looking fake a story up the ranks will pay an even dollar.   Another site teetering on the wall of ethics is PayPerPost which ultimately will damage the credibility of blogging in general to make you second guess whether that rave about the latest and greatest product is in fact genuine or a paid placement.  So, what are your thoughts?  Will paying users to post and Digg ruin the core of the ‘share this’ and social movement?