Internet ad spending has overtaken TV for the first time, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) today.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, said: “Internet advertising has beaten all expectations to achieve growth in the most challenging market conditions.”

TV revenues fell 16.1%, according to the figures, meaning it has lost its status as the medium with the biggest market share to the one that had the smallest share only six years ago.

Online now has a 23.5% market share compared to TV’s 21.9%.

PricewaterhouseCoopers online advertising expert Eva Berg-Winters said “Perhaps surprisingly, a slowing economy has accelerated the migration to digital technology and hence the continuing shift from more traditional forms of advertising to online, which promises return on investment and measurability in a period of instability. The only certainty is that this transgression demands fundamental structural change of business models across all industries.”

The marketing director Lindsey Clay of Thinkbox, a UK commercial TV marketing body is one of those who doesn’t want to see their business model change.

The original articles here:

Internet outstrips TV but total ad spend plummets 17%

Online advertising spend ’surpasses TV’

Exciting things lie ahead with emerging browser technologies supporting the new HTML5  standard.

I found this blog post “Video Tag and Subtitles” which demonstrates the new video tag, but also uses JavaScript to add subtitles.

The demonstration requires a standards compliant browser supporting the HTML5 video tag, which currently is Firefox 3.1 / 3.5 or the nightly build versions of Safari (Webkit) or Opera.

From time to time I visit Reuters.com to look at the latest news events in video. How sorely was disappointed and quickly annoyed with the advertising that they’ve appended to EACH news item video. It makes it an absolute horror to watch. It is even worse than prime time television news broadcasting. At least they only hit you once every 10 minutes or so.

So greedy have they become, the same adverts that run in the video are also displayed as static image adverts along the side of the page. The adverts aren’t even contextual. So you could be watching a story about the latest horrific bombing of civilians after your happy family chocolates advert. Hardly the sort of product placement I’d want for my brand or product.

Many of the large corporations seem to be at a loss as what to do with online video. The bandwidth and storage it consumes is costly. And so they are left scratching their heads as to how they can possibly turn a profit from it.

The must be long deafening silences in corporate think tanks until some bright spark comes up with the idea of let’s do it the old way because we don’t dare try anything new. Just ram it down people’s throats. Why we’re so big, the audience doesn’t have a choice.

Or do they? The coporations seem to be longing for the silver bullet fix to this nasty new media technology, that gives the consumer, god forbid, a choice. As I wrote in my previous post about Facebook overtaking MySpace, the quickening pace of innovation is threatening the very foundations of the business models that have dominated our modern media.

New upstart startups can quickly rocket ahead of lumbering Jurassic giants leaving them scrambling in the dust to catch up. This can be seen the make overs, widgets and other functionality features that MySpace quickly sticky taped on to their website.

And now there’s a new can of worms called mobile media. With expensive data transfer rates and limited screen space on hand held mobile devices, there will be even less tolerance from audiences for advertising bully boy tactics.

A growing thorn in the sides of these media moguls is the fact that the audience is no longer a dumb mute consumer. They have a voice and are willing to share their opinions and experiences amongst their social networks. Enabled by the immediacy of networked digital technology they can quickly inform each other of where better opportunities or offers are.

Oft of late have I read the of the media complaining of this citizen journalism, complaining how they are leeches that take their hard work and regurgitate it. These same voices fail to  then acknowledge the two way street where the “professional” journalists are now trawling social media networks for the latest events as they are proving more immediate than the standard news networks, as evidenced recently with the Twitter and Gaza and plane crashes.

Think it impossible for the status quo to be challenged? Ponder this. Neither Google or Facebook have been sold into established media hands. They both rose from backyard obscurity to being two of the most powerful companies on the internet. They could challenge establishment because of their willingness to innovate. Both have been shrewd enough not to opt for the easy path and attempt to force advertising on their users.

But the question often asked in the media circles today, is how and when will they turn a profit from their huge user bases? The answer to that lies with how innovative and useful they choose to be for the people who use their services and paying close attention to how they are used and giving people what they want or need.

Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of MySpace’s parent company InterMix Media, which News Corp. bought in 2005, believes that Facebook has won in the battle for Social Networking supremacy… for now. He goes on to warn that Facebook could be usurped in the next few years by a social networking startup that offers better functionality for mobile phones.

In his white paper “The Black Gold of the 21st Century – Social Data Flows & Analytics”, Alan Moore states that it is expected by 2015, five billion people will be connected to the internet via a mobile device.

This won’t please Mr. Murdoch one bit after all of the money that his News Corp paid out for MySpace as it seems destined to slip in relevance. It appears to be typical old school media thinking, buy and dominate. The part of the story that the old dinosaurs seem to fail to understand is that given the pace of technology developments these days, innovation is the key to the game.

Why did Facebook rise to become so popular and overtake MySpace? Because it offered new and easier ways to connect with people, and manage those connections. The same will happen again as mobile media comes to the forefront of the consumer market.

Peoples needs and expectations continue to change as the technology they use changes, which at this point, is only quickening.

Everybody wants to be on Twitter, spammers included. There is now software available to assist and manage a spam campaign. The biggest security failing of Twitter which allows this abuse is that the registered email is not validated. So unless Twitter acts quick, its days of big time celebrity media fueled fame will come to a screeching halt.

Sixty percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) intend to spend more than half of their total budgets on internet marketing in the next 12 months, a new survey has found.

This is likely to result in a decline in expenditure on more traditional channels of marketing, the poll by Rackspace indicated. The survey found that out of 130 marketing bosses, 61 per cent will make the online medium their biggest outlet in 2009, despite 40 per cent saying they have had difficulties in the past due to technical problems, New Media Age reports.

However, the majority of respondents said they believed the effectiveness of social networking campaigns in an online strategy was limited, with only 35 per cent of CMOs stating that they thought the online medium offered the best results transparency.

Furthermore, the survey showed that not enough marketers are considering website performance when rolling out new campaigns – fewer than half (48%) of respondents said that they took steps to make sure their websites could cope with higher traffic levels when running an internet marketing campaign.

Last month, TNS Media Intelligence research found that US advertising spending was on the decline, with a 1.6 per cent drop during the first half of 2008.

However, online advertising was one of the few sectors that bucked the trend, with spend increasing by eight per cent. A recent eMarketer report suggested that spending on search marketing in the UK will rise to more than £2 billion by the end of this year. While in the U.S., a recent study commissioned by the American Marketing Association and carried out by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University revealed that US business-to-business product marketers intend to increase online spending by 12.87 per cent in the next 12 months, eMarketer reports.

Dean DeBiase of TNS remarked: "It appears marketers are placing an emphasis upon enhanced efficiencies for their brands and the ability to engage with well-defined audiences to ensure ever greater return on investment."

Bounce Rate is a term which is often used to measure a website's audience engagement. It is the percentage of initial visitors who leave your site after arriving at the entry page, without viewing other pages on your site. Google Analytics is a tool that can help you determine your bounce rate.

A low bounce rate means that visitors are exploring your website in greater detail. This can be inferred to mean that they are more engaged with your content.

Further detail and supporting links can be found on the DoshDosh.com article:

How to Analyze and Improve the ‘Bounce Rate’ for Your Website

Dosh Dosh is a blog offering internet marketing and blogging tips, alongside social media strategies. Best consumed by bloggers, entrepreneurs, web publishers, marketers, freelancers and small business owners.

Joost, the internet TV platform being developed by the influential creators of Skype and Kazaa, has signed several new content distribution agreements, including one to show CNN programs.

Joost's strategy is to deliver content at no charge to viewers. The business model is to charge advertisers on a per-view basis, and to share the revenue with content providers.

Content is distributed by streaming video "peer-to-peer," or user-to-user, over the Internet. Consumers choose a channel via a software interface on their desktop that resembles a remote control.

Joost's global advertisers include Coca-Cola, HP, Intel and Nike, while US viewers will also see ads from companies including Electronic Arts, Garnier, Kraft, Microsoft, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Taco Bell, United Airlines, the US Army, Visa, and Wrigley. For European audiences, the company has signed General Motors Europe (Opel/Vauxhall), IBM, L'Oréal, Nokia, Virgin Money, Vodafone, and Warner Bros.

The overwhelming response by high calibre launch partners proves that TV is a rapidly shrinking market. Advertisers are aware that the TV audience is slipping away to the Internet, especially amongst the younger generations. People want to watch their content, when they want it, and how they want it. The first part of this equation Joost understand, however the second is completely missed as evidenced by Alberdingk Thijm's following comment. 

"The company is still experimenting with when and how it will run ads, including short advertisements before or after programs, traditional 30-second ads in the middle of longer programs, and more experimental ideas such as ads that appear on the screen briefly and then fade away while a program is running. Overall there would be less advertising than on regular TV."

Joost seem to think that the option of more invasive advertising over the top of content is acceptable. What they haven't come to accept yet, is people are abandoning TV because the internet currently provides content that is free of advertising or the ability to filter it. In the beginning of course there will be less advertising, but we all know what comes later. Traditional TV started out the same way.

Joost is seen as one of the many candidates to become a distributor of television and video to the Internet, competing against Google Inc.'s YouTube, Revver, broadcasters' own websites, an as-yet unnamed cooperation between General Electric Co.'s NBC and News Corp, and file-sharing programs such as BitTorrent, among others.

What they will have to come to accept is that rehashing the same old advertising models on the Internet will not work. The average Internet user has a notoriously short attention span, because they know they have choice, surf off elsewhere or respond (blogging, social tagging). The quantification of audience attention is also immediately apparent through server statistics.

The Internet is a far more responsive environment. I would not use the descriptions of interactive or democratic as touted by some web evangelists. 

So if the large content providers want to stem the flow of unauthorized video content appearing on the Net, and monetize the new media, they'd better take a look at the lessons currently being learnt by their music counterparts with Digital Rights Management.

Listen to their audience.