…if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

PR stunt or the new journalism?: The titans of public relations are going direct to viewers and readers

In generating their own video and text-based digital content on behalf of clients, PR agencies are not only taking the bread from the table of a weakened advertising sector but encroaching onto the old territory of television and press companies.

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’

I chose the PodPress plugin to manage and deliver his podcasts.

The online documentation for the plugin seemed unailable from the wiki that the author’s website directed me to. So I then did some searches and came up with a number of video tutorials. These are very nice because you can also see the exact options that they are talking about. There appears to be an explosion of video tutorials on the web as many are attempting to add value added service to their web sites.

Here is one of the best I found for PodPress.

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.

As a footnote, I’ve now found an more extensive XML-RPC list of sites on OptimizeYourWeb.net.

Ian Lurie has some put forward a basic out line of realistic costs for internet marketing.

Strangely many businesses still have expectations that internet marketing costs next to nothing. As they say, you get what you pay for.

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."

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased, young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites.” Tancer said.

Tancer, in his new book, "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters", said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people's behavior. 

Tancer said the change in communication patterns was one of the most noticeable shifts in society in the past five years — a key point for marketers seeking to learn about their audiences.

In terms of behaviour, Tancer says his study also shows searches for anti-depression drugs spike around Thanksgiving, people are more interested in tropical storms since Katrina.

Tancer said the current obsession with celebrities was also reflected through web data, with celebrity websites garnering more attention than sites devoted to religion, politics, well-being and diets combined – and there is no sign that this is waning.

This celebrity mentality had also overlapped into the November presidential election in the United States with surfers looking for images of Republican vice presidential candidate Sara Palin rather than looking for her policies.

"A lot of the focus around the candidates in general is image based. People want to know how tall Barack Obama is and also to search for their families," he said.

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.