comScore’s Digital Year in Review 2009 reports that U.S. consumers viewed 4.3 trillion online display advertisements, including static and rich media ads, during 2009 (as measured by comScore’s Ad Metrix system). This represents a 21% increase over 2008, driven by increases in both the number of people exposed to display ads online (+8%) and the average ad frequency (+12%). What I found interesting about these stats is that the top 10 publishers (shown above) accounted for 1.8 trillion (or 42%), with the thousands upon thousands of other publishers, including all the major newspaper brands (Gannett, Hearst, NYT, Tribune etc), accounting for just 58%.
Earlier this month Quantcast announced a Series C funding round of $27.5m (led by Cisco Systems and also including existing investors Polaris Venture Partners, Founders Fund and Revolution Ventures), increasing total investment in Quantcast to around $50m.
Today, Techcrunch is reporting that NuConomy is being acquired by LivePerson for around $3m.
Although they take different approaches, both of these companies are focused on making online analytics more useful and actionable for sites and advertisers – it is great to see investment activity in this space.
I wrote a piece titled “Hey Microsoft…. backup much?” over on DailyMe.com about the data loss experienced by T-Mobile Sidekick customers this weekend as a result of a “server failure” by Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick.
Danger/Microsoft’s failure to have a backup (or multiple backups) of their customer’s data is absolutely mind-blowing and is certainly a wakeup call to the ever-increasing number of businesses whose products/services rely on such data.
Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic wrote a (lengthy) opinion about the incident in which he argues that Sidekick customers who lost their data may only have themselves to blame since:
if you didn’t care enough to take care of it yourself, then you didn’t really need it.
Cubrilovic’s advice for those Sidekick customers who find themselves without their contacts, photos, calendars and to-do lists:
The solution may be to do nothing, certainly not to panic. The biggest problem is that we hoard data. We produce more data and information than we ever have, and we are all vain enough to believe that the data we create is so fantastic that it should live on for eternity. Losing the contact list on your phone shouldn’t be a problem – you should know who your friends are anyway. If you are losing sleep because you can’t find an old email you wrote, you likely have deeper issues to address.
However, as Dave Winer and others point out in the comments, in the case of Sidekick customers this kind of misses the point.
Companies who charge customers to have their data stored and available via ‘the cloud’, as was the case with Sidekick customers, have an obligation to protect that data regardless of its ‘value’. And, given all the PR that Danger/Microsoft and T-Mobile have received over the last few days, it is pretty clear there is a strong business incentive for companies who are trusted with such data to make sure they don’t lose it.
Just a quick plug for two upcoming events of interest to those in the web analytics arena:
First, eMetrics is holding the Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, D.C., October 19-23. This year’s summit is focused on the Art and Science of Digital Marketing Management and features great speakers from digital marketing and web analytics practitioners, vendors and consultants. The kind folks at the Google Analytics blog have shared a promo code providing 20% off a 1-day or 3-day pass when you register for the summit (eMetrics discount code: SPONSORDC09).
Second, the Web Analytics Association is holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM) October 29. The AGM is open to all WAA members (if you’re a web analytics professional and not a member click here to join the WAA). The WAA also moderates the Web Analytics Forum at Yahoo! Groups which is a great source of information and support for the web analytics community.
It was a big weekend in the online news field with the Online News Association’s annual conference (“ONA09″) and the Online Journalism Awards (congrats to all the winners especially the awesome folks at Publish2 who won the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism).
While I didn’t go this year (DailyMe was represented by President / Chief Product Officer — and ONA Vice President — Neil Budde), I followed proceedings closely via the #ONA09 hashtag. I was particularly interested in the various sessions on the use of data and metrics by online news organizations (#ONAmtrx and #ONAdata). As Dana Chinn of USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism (and author of the NewsNumbers blog) pointed out, web analytics is a complex area for online news sites and measuring user engagement requires looking at a number of different metrics (Dana’s presentation is available here).
One of the hits of the #ONAdata strand seemed to be the alpha demo of DocumentCloud, the Knight News Challenge-funded investigative journalism tool that plans to “turn documents into data”. The ‘data’ part of DocumentCloud is powered by OpenCalais. The semantic processing for Newstogram, DailyMe’s analytics / intelligence platform for online news sites, is also powered in part by OpenCalais, so I was glad to see it getting exposure at ONA09. OpenCalais is a great opensource resource and I’m sure it won’t be long until OpenCalais-powered functionality is widespread in the online news industry.
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