Ad Age on digital revenues
Ad Age takes a double shot at digital revenues.
In The Fuzzy Math of Big Media's Digital Revenue, the lament the analysts woes:
the problem for analysts is figuring out what is being counted as digital revenue. Is it video advertising? ITunes-download fees? Banner ads? Social-networking sites? Wireless? Online sales of ringtones and Bill O'Reilly coffee mugs? All are thrown onto the same line, leaving observers to wonder just which parts of the business are growing the fastest.
Sounds like movie accounting.
In The Short Tail: Big Players
They write:
There has been much talk about how the democratizing web has opened a brave new long tail (in Wired Editor Chris Anderson's coinage) world, where many small sites can survive and thrive. But the truth, where internet ad dollars are concerned, is that it seems to be shaping up to look a lot more like the broadcast world, with a handful of players dominating marketers' spending.and
Of course, apart from the operational efficiency in going to one publisher vs. 20 niche publishers, there is also the likelihood that the biggest sites have spent the most on getting the best possible research and have the top sales people and the best behavioral targeting capabilities.
However the long tail is served by Adsense and other products like that where aggregation and targeting are most efficient to scale. So if the head and tail are served, everything in the middle may be served more and more by "boutique" advertising and promotional packages from individual sites. The example given:
Heavy.com has had to attract advertisers' attention with heavily customized ad deals on his young male-centered site, tailoring large-scale, one-off packages for advertisers to persuade them to pony up the big bucks they normally reserve for the big four or five.
They work hard for the money.
