The news last week from Paris that ICANN is about to blow open the entire domain name industry got me thinking, mainly along the lines of why on earth this would be a good idea, given that history is littered with examples that suggest it is not.

So why would opening-up the domain name market even more be a good idea? ICANN started going through a similar motion back in 2001, when it feared that the .com ‘real estate’ was quickly going to run out. After the launch of .info (which has been reasonably successful) ICANN decided it was a good idea to launch industry-specific domain suffixes. In principal you might think this makes sense, but in practice, suffixes like .museum and .travel proved to be massive flops with both consumers and brands.

When it comes to surfing the web, there is a huge disconnect between what ICANN wants and what the public’s collective consciousness is willing and able to accept. For consumers, the standard expectation remains .com, and no matter how liberalised the market becomes, brands will never stick two fingers up to .com domain and only secure their .brandname address instead. We’re too far gone for that to ever work out.

Industry-specific domains have struggled for that reason.

Country code domains such as .uk, .de, .fr etc have enjoyed success simply because they assure the person looking for a website that the information they will find will be relevant to their local market and in a language they can understand. They provide a genuinely useful filter. A .anything policy would provide a completely useless filter.

As for the threat the new plans will pose to brands -and a lot has been made of it in the press this past week - but in fact at $100,000 to set up your own domain, the price tag will remain largely prohibitive for any large-scale cybersquatting, domaining or speculator activity. Besides, and perhaps more worryingly for ICANN, brands have already shown some resistance to the never ending process of defensive registrations in response to yet-another-new-suffix-launch. You just need to see how much lower take-up of .asia was compared to .eu just a few years before, that it seems domain suffix fatigue may be setting in.

Complicating the system even further under the guise of liberalisation suggests whatever ICANN is trying to achieve, it is not going about it in the right way.

 

 The Daily Telegraph is making strides in implementing its online strategy after the latest ABCe figures revealed that the Mail Online had overtaken it to become the UK’s most popular national newspaper site in May, with 18.7 million unique users.

Crucially, the Telegraph isn’t just thinking that having a Facebook and Twitter presence is the key to a great digital strategy, like so many of its rivals. What the Telegraph has realised is that just as social media allows individuals to consume media in a more fragmented and personalised way, so they can actually benefit from that, by allowing individuals to follow personalised sections of Telegraph content. The dream for content owners trying to fight against falling traditional media circulations, is being able to segment and offer their content online to their audience in a completely personalised way. It’s quite an involved process to achieve that when you consider how broad a national newspaper’s coverage is, and how many segments that could be, but the Telegraph has taken a big first step on that road, and with these widgets is making an important stride into the mobile space too.

What is worth noting about the Telegraph’s approach is that six of its eight new widgets are all designed to drive traffic and engagement with Telegraph TV - the online video that’s become so important to all the major newspapers. Beyond that, there’s a breaking news widget and a toe in the water with a slightly more ‘niche’ European Championships Football widget. Apparently there are plans to launch further specific sports and business widgets shortly.

Above all this shows the Telegraph’s open approach to digital and clear understanding that it’s not just about pushing people through the Telegraph.co.uk front page, or amassing a number of fans on a Facebook page or twitter feed, but giving people direct access to the content they are really interested in, in the way they want it. We’ll just have to see in the next two or three months how big an impact that will have on the ABCe figures…

When it comes to evaluating the success of social media campaigns, why does ’social’ seem to suddenly disappear? Ivan Ristic discusses. Read more…

 

That’s what an interesting article in the latest edition of The Economist claims, specifically looking at the US newspaper market. The piece uses the faltering fortunes of the New York Times as a case in point, citing slipping circulation figures and advertising revenues being down 12.5 per cent on the same time last year. Now the two are, to a large extent linked. What is to blame, I hear you ask? well nothing other than The Big Bad Internet offering free, 24/7 news coverage and taking with it a share of the classified advertising newspapers relied on for so many decades.

But that’s the bad half of the story, the good half of the story is the vast oppotunity the The Big Bad Internet is offering media companies. People’s habits have changed, and the 24/7 news market moved away from newspapers a long time ago to TV and cable news networks. It’s just gone online too in the past five years. So what’s the big problem? Well there isn’t one if you accept how media consumption has changed and adapt. London’s Daily Telegraph has done so and seen it’s web site traffic surge.

Newspapers will never die - there will always be a huge market of individuals who like the experience of leafing through a newspaper, and getting stuck into more detailed news analysis and features. Those same people will likely be getting their breaking news fix online. I can say that with confidence because I am one of those people.

The key for newspapers is to understand that dynamic and look at what kind of publication you are, want to remain and adapt to reach your audience through the channel they want to receive you through. IDG is one media house that’s done that successfully and is doing very well out of it. Now it’s time that others follow suit, rather than moan about how traditional media consumption no longer exists.

Change, is after all, a good thing. Isn’t it?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt came out earlier this week saying that he hasn’t yet figured out the perfect solution for making money from online video. His comments come after Google’s earnings report revealed that the $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube is yet to reap the kind of financial rewards that were hoped for.

But across the board, advertising in online video is something that still hasn’t been addressed properly, and the PCTV market is going through an interesting phase. Lack of content has already forced the once heralded Joost to retreat to the US and niche content areas. Hulu is doing well with content, but finding many of the same issues with advertising as the rest of the market. Meanwhile others such as Vuze are hoping that a technology advantage in delivering high-def content will help them gain cut-through.  

But while different online video providers are fighting to carve out their own niche, none has yet addressed the major issue for driving advertising revenue - and that is finding a genuine format and solution that works for advertisers - and educating them about it.

Schmidt was typically cryptic about what answers Google has planned saying only that top secret new products would be launched this year and that the advertising format - whatever it is - will be valuable to consumers as well as advertisers themselves. He insisted they will go far beyond the in-line text ads, overlays and top and tail ads that are already common with online video.

 Until then, plenty of others are just playing catch-up and trying to squeeze more value out of a model that is far from perfect. Warner Bros has just announced that it will offer its DVD film titles online, on-demand on the same day they release the DVDs, which is progress, but a long time coming… Will Google come to the rescue?

 

I stumbled across a great post on TechCrunch yesterday - an expose on Google’s astounding domain name portfolio that contains the obvious, the shrewd, the clever, and the downright baffling terms.

The analysis conducted by uptime monitoring service Pingdom exposed some very strange registrations for Google. Now before we go any further, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not unusual for a major corporation to have in excess of 1,500 domain names on its books at any one time - sure only 20 per cent of them are being used to market and the rest are a combination of defensive registrations and protection for future or past products and services.

But, in my opinion, if you’re so bad with a keyboard that you type geggle.com, glougle.com or glogoo.com when you’re trying to get to Google - you don’t deserve to find the right site. But somebody advising Google told them it was a good idea. Probably as good an idea as it was to make sure nobody else got their hands on goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com.

There were some worrying things in there too - Google is the overwhelming favourite search engine but googlereligion.com? Beyond the obvious product and service domains you’d expect Google to register, you have to wonder what googleporn.com, googlesex.com and google-yahoo-porn.com are intended for. I know that the adult industry was one of very few that continued to flurish after the dot-com bubble burst, but surely that will never be a revenue stream for Google, even in today’s economic climate?! 

Looking through the full list from Pingdom one thing is clear - a lot of Google’s domain name strategy belongs on googlejokes.com. The whole thing reminds me a bit of the time Microsoft tried to sue a 17-year-old schoolkid called Mike Rowe for having registered MikeRoweSoft.com… I suggest Google puts in a call to a real domain expert like Jonathan Robinson at NetNames to make sure they’re protected without going domain crazy.

Rupert Murdoch’s $580million acquisition of MySpace may have seemed a steal compared to the $240m Microsoft paid for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook, but all is not well with Murdoch’s plans for his social network, and it is being felt in its stock price after Fox Interactive Media (where MySpace sits in the News Corp empire) reported it would miss its 2008 revenue goal of $1billion. News Corp’s stock price has slipped 9.9 per cent this year alone.

Sure, Murdoch is throwing money at MySpace to expand into India and South Korea and add a music downloads service, but the social network is struggling to attract and retain advertisers in the volumes it needs because of the risk of their brands being shown next to inappropriate user-generated content. It is precisely the freedom and flexibility MySpace user love so much, which is causing the company problems with advertisers.

Bloomberg reports that Fox Interactive’s costs will rise a massive 46 per cent this year as they bid to open new channels for MySpace - almost as much as revenue is expected to grow. The bottom line with investors is that while MySpace continues to try to grow its audience in different markets - it is still failing to fully monetise the vast audience it already has.

However, today MySpace launched a new ad platform to give advertisers more control over where their ads are being run. It is a small step - arguably long overdue - but whether it will solve the site’s short-term adveritsing issues remains to be seen, when rival networks have already stolen a lead. While Facebook wrestles privacy issues, today enabling an ad system opt-out, it is at least driving strong advertising revenue.

MySpace’s hope has to be in the medium term, beating Facebook into new markets where advertiser sensitivity to site content is far less pronounced, doesn’t it?

Google’s surprise decision to change its trademark policy will effectively remove protection brands have from rivals, or impersonators bidding on their trademarked paid search terms. It’s also expected to have an impact natural search, but that will, naturally, take longer to be felt and may not be quite as obvious as you first think.

Google has justified the move as simply reflecting users’ behaviour, and that it will give the person searching access to far more choice, thereby improving the overall quality of results. However it will present a new brand protection nightmare for companies already facing more, evolving online brand threats than they can shake a stick at.

Having worked with a number of companies, specialising in various aspects of the online brand protection picture I can see a major similarity in what Google is allowing to what has existed in the ICANN governed domain names industry since year dot. There are currently over 150million registered domain names around the world and estimates I’ve heard suggest that around 25 per cent of all those registrations are speculative or opportunistic (by cybersquatters, domain name warehousers and those engaged in kiting). If that’s the scale of the threat, you can only imagine the scale of defensive registrations being made by brand owners where easily more than two-thirds of your portfolio of names could be purely to stop a rival or speculator acquiring it and doing your brand damage.

The domain names industry is that way for a reason - and that’s the relatively loose ‘first come first served’ principle of registrations (for search read: ‘highest bid, first listed’) but until now, with one very major difference - in domain names there is very little practical or enforceable protection for brand owners beyond being first up, whereas in search there was always Google’s common sense.

While Google’s move may help address the slow in growth of clicks on paid Google ads, perpetrated by the search engine’s bid to ensure more relevant, better quality results, it could all too quickly degenerate into the free-for-all model of the domain name industry.

Marketers are already struggling to keep rising paid search costs in check and if this plays out the way many fear it might then likely two things will happen:

1. The current increased interest in natural search will swell dramatically and impact investment in paid search - after all an increasing number of voices are joining the chorus that natural search delivers better quality leads at a fraction of the CPA

2. Major brands will need to agree a code of conduct between themselves to avoid needlessly burning budgets trying to outbid the other’s trademarks and instead focus on dealing with the far more serious threat posed to their brand value by counterfeiters, cybersquatters and impersonators who won’t think twice about taking advantage of the new system.

The bidding for Yahoo!’s future took another twist today when it emerged that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was trying to work with Microsoft to find a way they both could get their hands on Yahoo!.

Yahoo!’s rejection of Microsoft’s $31-a-share-offer earlier this week did not please a number of Yahoo!’s investors. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster asked 20 of Yahoo’s Institutional investors their opinion and the majority said they would prefer to deal with Microsoft on that offer, than do no deal at all. The growing feeling among Silicon Valley investors is that a deal will be completed in the next 3-4 weeks.

What that deal will be and what good it will be to whom, remains to be seen. Google is remaining omimously quiet although, Yahoo! is about to turn over three per cent of its US search queries advertising inventory to Google in a two week trial - clearly a little detail that - if you were cynical - might say is being done to annoy Microsoft during its pursuit.

Difficult as it is to keep up with all the twists and turns - Jemima Kiss over at the Guardian has summarised key events here in a neat timeline.

My post yesterday about web TV got me thinking about online video in general which is when I came across this piece on Press Gazette inspired by a study from researchers at City University into the use of video on UK news websites.

Online video is an interesting proposition for newspapers in particular. The success of any online video venture - whether on a news site, or a dedicated web TV service - comes down to the quality of the content. That’s something newspapers have plenty of. The FT in fact recently relaunched its video player and that channel is a key focus for the paper’s online ambitions, and has become one of its most popular sections, broadcasting hundreds of its own in-house made videos online each month.

So on the face of it the newspapers have a winning forumla to give readers what they want. And that’s what it’s really about for the audience - not the novelty of being able to watch a video online, but being able to actually get the content they want, through the medium they prefer. The companies that succeed will be those who give readers the content they want, the way they want, and not the way the newspaper thinks they should consume it.

Bearing that in mind, monetising Internet video is not a major challenge. Speaking to media buyers, pre-roll blindness and associated issues are not as big a problem as some might have you believe. If the Internet video content is worth watching, most viewers are willing to endure a reasonable (apparently up to 15 seconds is optimal) of pre-roll or equivalent advertising.