Once the darling of web TV, Joost is apparently struggling and according to James Ashton at The Times, is planning a retreat after failing to attract enough users and worthwhile broadcasting rights. Ashton claims that Joost is set to refocus its ambitions from global domination, to just the US market.

Joost launched last year and enjoyed a monumental wave of popularity and hype courtesy of it being ‘The Next Big Thing’ from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. With A-list backing it didn’t have to try hard to stir up a major buzz, but what it needed to do was follow through the very astute viral and seeding process with quality content that users would want to watch. I’ve played extensively with Joost and while it’s a nice, slick piece of software and is fun to play with from that perspective, there simply isn’t the content that can keep you glued to your screen.

The Web TV market is burgeoning. According to a new report published this week, the web-based TV viewing audience is growing steadily and now nearly one in ten of all broadcast and cable TV shows in the US are being viewed online. The authors of the report, the Convergence Consulting Group estimate that 9 per cent of all full-episode TV viewing was done online in 2007, 50 per cent more than in 2006 and expects that to grow to 14 per cent in 2008, 19 per cent in 2009 and almost a quarter of all viewing in 2010.

The consumer demand is there - and of the tens of web TV services to be launched in the past year, the stand out winners have been BBC’s iPlayer in the UK and News Corp/NBC’s Hulu in America. The secret to their success? Rights and access to content that is at least as good as what is available on traditional television.

So what now for Joost? unless it’s happy to become a niche player in the US, it will need to imminently align very closely with a major content owner. And for the rest of the market? well in the UK at least, nobody has yet taken on the challenge of convincing the marketing and advertising community of the opportunities and effectiveness of web TV as a channel to carry their messages - whoever manages to align themselves first as the leader and expert on web TV advertising stands to gain big-time.

Yahoo! has responded bluntly to Microsoft’s three-week deadline to accept its $42 billion offer via a defiant open letter issued today saying the offer did not represent good value for Yahoo! shareholders, but that the company would be open to a better deal.

So why is Microsoft so keen on Yahoo still? Well its stock price has slipped more than 15 per cent since the start of the year an in a tightening market, search is one particular sector that is still thriving.

So that’s why the sector is so interesting - but what about Google, and if Microsoft and Yahoo! get together, do they really stand a chance? According to the latest stats from Nielsen, Google retains a 59 per cent share of all searches compared with 18 per cent for Yahoo! and 11 per cent for MSN.

Just because on their own, Yahoo! and Microsoft have failed to take make any impact on Google’s dominance, does not mean that if they get together they will miraculously make inroads. In fact, the cultures of the two companies are so vastly different that any alignment of the two businesses will take a long time to achieve and will struggle to become seemless. The real benefits of Microsoft and Yahoo! coming together will be beyond search, in terms of all the content and other services the two companies own, but that doesn’t address the sweet-spot that is search.

We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft’s next move is, and if a hostile takeover attempt may be on the cards. Regardless, in the search sector both Microsoft and Yahoo will continue to struggle against Google. The secret to Google’s success has always been its simplicity and the fact that it was always a search engine and everything else has been built around that core, winning formula. Hard as they may try, Microsoft and Yahoo will always be coming at search from the perspective of a portal and content owner and making search the core of what they do is far easier said than done.

Google endured a second straight month of poor growth in paid search clicks, and that has brought out the usual scaremongers (the same that were predicting the end of social networks earlier this year when traffic growth plateaued) are saying it’s bad news for the market and showing that fears of a recession have truly hit online revenues.

Lets take a look at the facts:

1. The actual figures from Comscore show a 3% year-on-year rise during February in paid search clicks. The slowdown comes after Google began implementing a new system to cut down accidental clicks on paid search listings

2. Google’s move to stamp out irrelevant clicks is good news for the long term as it will increase the relevance of paid search and make it an even more efficient format.

So is the (non)recession having an impact? Well, traditionally in a time of recession marketing spend gets cut back to tried and tested methods that deliver strong and measurable ROI, such as direct marketing. Search marketing falls into that same category and certainly many of the people I’ve spoken to in the first quarter of this year can see certain aspects of their budgets being cut if times get tighter, but search isn’t one of them.

But beyond what Google has done, and all the scaremongering, there are still some changes afoot. Paid search costs continue to inflate and speaking to some search marketing firms, they are beginning to find - and some scared to find - that clients are looking more seriously at natural search, and increasing their investment in search engine optimization.

There is an ongoing threat to the paid search market - not to its existence, but to the way it’s used - there has for some time been a growing school of thought that natural search delivers better quality leads to your site and Google’s latest moves can be seen, in part at least to be a clear attempt to arrest that movement and safeguard the quality of clicks on paid search. The short-term blip is nothing to worry about - a blip is all it is - and if there is a recession, it’s not search that should be worried about budgets.

Beleaguered British broadcaster ITV is peddling fast to catch up with the rest of the digital world by announcing a deal this morning with Bebo to show its ITV2 programming on the social network. The move comes as ITV struggles with a decline in global content revenues and Michael Grade is increasingly waking up to online as the new distribution channel, but anything ITV has produced in terms of its online video player thus far lags so far behind rival BBC’s iPlayer.

The Bebo deal is interesting on a number of fronts - it’s cheap and arguably quick to deploy as a bandage measure to help stem ITV’s hemorrhaging younger viewers - an increasing number of which are getting all the broadcast content they want online and on-demand. Secondly, given that ITV owns Friends Reunited, you have to ask why it chose someone else’s social network as a digital route to market…

Despite insisting he is ahead of where he expected to be, ITV’s shares have fallen more than 20 per cent since the start of the year as Michael Grade struggles to turn the corporation’s fortunes around, and to clearly articulate the corporation’s digital strategy. Let’s hope when it is finally revealed it is not ‘digital on ice’… and in the meantime Holly Willoughby can continue to keep ITV’s weekend end up, but for how much longer?

The rise of Social Media, whether it be blogging, social networks or YouTube has created a new generation of consumer content creators. Individuals now have tools to publish and broadcast their views on your organisation, brand or industry and potentially reach an audience of millions with the simple click of a mouse.

As the content creation generation matures, what are the implications for traditional media? Will today’s news organisations whether in print, TV or online survive and more importantly retain their authority and influence? How are media outlets adapting to the rise in ‘citizen journalism’ and reaching out to the public to help create the news?

Above all, what are the implications of Social Media for the symbiotic relationship between the media and PR industry that has endured for so long? On Wednesday March 26th the Greater London Group is bringing together an expert panel to debate these fundamental issues and attempt to find some answers including:

- Pete Clifton, the BBC’s Head of Editorial Development and Multi-Media Journalism

- Shane Richmond, Communities Editor of Telegraph.co.uk.

- Stephen Davies, Webitpr, Social Media and PR blogger

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Cost: Tickets for this event are £20 for CIPR members and £25 for non CIPR members.

Booking: To reserve your place please email Marta Sadowska on marta@dapr.com. Payment in advance by cheque is required. Cheques made payable to CIPR Greater London Group should be sent to Marta Sadowska, Davies Associates, 95 York Street, London W1H 4QG quoting your membership number, email address and contact phone number. An electronic invoice or receipt can be supplied on request. The closing date for bookings is Wed 19 March 2008.

Would you pay £2000 to join an online social network? Well the FT is hoping so with the announcement today that its will be launching the first of what it’s calling Members Forums aimed at leading figures in digital, new media, mobile and telecoms. The £2000 includes an access pass to its conferences, which might be the real motive for setting up these groups. It will be interesting to see how the tools and services put in place by the FT compare to those freely or far more cheaply available from the likes of LinkedIn and others.

The idea of focusing on elite executives and bringing them together online is an in interesting one and I can see the logic of the FT helping to do this where sector-specific networks don’t currently exist. The Property and Luxury Goods sector are apparently the next on the FT’s list to be targeted.

Whether members will continue to pay the premiums once larger and far cheaper alternatives become established is another question.

I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised as I was at the volume of press coverage triggered by figures from Nielsen yesterday, claiming the first ever monthly fall in Facebook users in the UK. According to the research firm only 8.5 million unique users in Britain spent time on Facebook in January 2008, compared to 8.9 million in December - a 5% fall.

Speaking to Forbes yesterday I was keen to stress that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on a single set of figures, but at the same time we shouldn’t expect the growth of social networks to continue at such a phenomenal rate. Despite this hiccup Facebook fans have been keen to point out that the audience is a remarkable 712% higher than in January 2007 and 9% larger than at the end of October 2007. This contrasts with an apparent 9% fall for MySpace over the course of last year.

What these figures have done is moved the focus onto the next stage of social networking development. A number of commentators have suggested that the future of social networking sites lies in them becoming more niche. The million dollar question is which niche?

The sub-25s may be more relaxed about privacy and advertising but arguably more promiscuous over which ‘cool’ site to spend their time on. Older professionals may be more stable and attractive to brands but generationally far more sensitive to how advertisers take advantage of their personal data.

In any case there’s no need to perform the last rites over social networking quite yet.

UPDATE: Henry over at Tamar has some interesting analysis predicting that next month should see the Facebook numbers recover…

The leading lights of the digital industry gathered in Soho last night for a Chinwag Live event tackling the contentious issue of Measuring Social Media. The expert panel included Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online, Robin Grant of 1000heads, Ankur Shah Co-founder of Techlightenment, Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes with Jim Sterne from the Web Analytics Association in the chair. While the debate generated a little heat there was a disappointing if not unsurprising, lack of light. The discussion covered four key strands:

1. Can Social Media be measured?
2. If it can, what’s the best way to do it?
3. Do we need an industry standard set of metrics?
4. Would such metrics actually be of interest/any use to the CEO?

The debate resisted the urge to begin by defining Social Media, but many of the difficulties around measurement are rooted in its disparate nature. Counting hits on YouTube, the number of friends on MySpace or downloads of a Facebook application are at the ‘relatively straightforward’ end of the measurement spectrum with blog conversations, product reviews on forums, negative search results etc, at the other. We are all used to measuring clicks but conversations are another matter.

Will made the point early on that there is something counter-intuitive about measuring “conversations” and questioned whether automated monitoring services from the Nielsen’s of this world can attempt to do that effectively. When it comes to analysis of human interactions people are slow and computers are dumb he added. I have to agree, from personal experience in producing social media audits for FTSE 100 companies, the value of those reports are not contained in the statistics but in the commentary and analysis of the data and trends.

Numbers need to be put into context by professionals who understand the company, its products and customers and the industry it is operating in. Apparently we are going to have to wait until 2029 for machines to become as intelligent as man, so until then slow humans and dumb computers are going to need to work better together to generate meaningful insight into Social Media impact. There are no short-cuts or quick fixes, which for those wishing to sell their Social Media expertise is surely a good thing?

Whether the evaluation process would be helped by developing an industry agreed set of metrics was the next question. Some on the panel strongly advocated the sector working together to develop open standards for measurement and effectiveness. Some in the audience shared their own proprietary and largely fluffy approaches, while others argued that it would be an impossible task.

This part of the discussion for me showed the digital industry at its parochial and navel gazing worst. Given the pace at which the landscape is developing, by the point a set of metrics had been agreed (conservatively c.2011) they would have limited relevance to the current reality. My frustration was shared by others in the audience and highlighted by a questioner who hit the nail on the head in arguing that it’s the outcomes rather than the outputs of Social Media which really matter the most to organisations.

In my mind Social Media techniques need to be employed to address specific marketing and business challenges and to reach out to specific audiences. The objectives and desired outcomes of a campaign whether it’s to directly drive sales, mitigate a crisis, reshape a reputation or whatever are going to be so particular to the client concerned that developing a one-size-fits-all set of metrics really misses the point.

Ultimately, with Social Media as with so much else, it’s not measuring it that counts but what you do with it!

Further reviews of the night from Wendy McAuliffe, Stuart Bruce and Seb Mysko.

Check-out this link next week to hear the podcast of the event.

Neil McCormick at the Telegraph has written a great piece looking at the phenomenon of Will.i.am’s Yes, We Can video on YouTube in support of Barack Obama. The video has already attracted 13 million views with that number growing at a rate of 1 million hits a day.

However, Seth Finkelstein at the Guardian has a word of caution arguing that great online campaigns do not always translate into political success and it’s all too easy to conveniently forget Internet campaigns that haven’t worked. Having set the standard, Will.i.am is already spawning imitators like the No, You Can’t video below attacking John McCain.

It will be fascinating to watch whether the Republicans have the creativity and Internet-savvy to effectively retaliate.