I demand more On Demand

Over the long weekend, I browsed through Comcast's ON DEMAND. They recently added in an HD section, which brought me great joy. It just didn't seem fitting to watch movies in 4:3 on a giant hdtv.

In the free HD movies section, all five Rocky's were present. It was a wonderful experience to watch the movies consecutively and it only served to make me want to watch Rocky Balboa.

I don't care what the reviews say, it has to be done.

The point is though, this seems like a great marketing strategy for cable subscribers that have access to the service. ON DEMAND is a pay-per-play service, and since the Rocky movies are so old, it makes sense that they would be made available for free.

But what of newer movies? How about whenever a new Harry Potter movies are available, why not make the older movies free? Of course, those movies are still new enough that people are willing to pay the couple dollars to rent the movie for the day, but why not give a discount or even just have a promotional special for it. It seems reasonable that the movie industries could subsidies or reimburse the cable company to allow those movies to be played for free. It would only help to boost potential viewership of the new movie coming out.

This also works well with the fact that Comcast is now displaying ad banners on the channel guide screen. It would be pretty easy to draw consumers in to watch the older movies, maybe even adding in a trailer to the new one before playing it.

I'm sure this is the intent, so I might be stating the obvious, but maybe it needs to be said.

Wiipidemic over?

Well, Race over at level99comic is becoming more famous. She has recently been featured in an AP article addressing what I already reported weeks ago, the Wiipidemic.

In the actual article, they talk about how people are being over zealous with their Wii's, and their Wii-actions are causing alot of deaths to TVs and in come cases, bodily harm to fellow Wii-players. You can see the actual AP article here.

The best part of the article was reading that nintendo stealth buffed the straps to the wiimotes after issuing a general statement telling everyone to "calm down".

Why I work at Right Media

I was on the train yesterday. This guy sat across from me with this tiny MP3 player. The person next to him couldn't help but ask what it was. He responded, I didn't hear him, but they talked about various players for a while. It turns out that the guy with the MP3 player actually works for a company that was promoting that product. He also confessed that it wasn't as good as an iPod and that if one really wanted to invest in a music player, they should go with Apple. Of course, he said, take it from a guy that promotes this other player and is telling you iPod is better, then, it must be true.

The conversation left me a little awed. Why would a person work for a company where they didn't even believe in the product? I don't think I would stick around. If I didn't have faith that my company's product was the best, I would seriously consider my options.

I work for Right Media. Officially, we are the internet's first open media exchange. In layman's terms, we're the middle man that helps people with ads find websites who want to put up ads, and vice versa. I steer away from using the term "ad network" because our product is one that ad networks could also use. We are also an ad network Remix Media, that uses our own product, the Right Media Exchange.

We have been compared as online advertising's version of eBay, where buyers can find things (places for their ads) for a price they want to pay and sellers can sell their things (ad space) for an amount they want to make.

When I tell this to people, they're a little turned off that I may be helping to proliferate annoying flash animations and seizure inducing banners. I usually follow it up by saying advertising is how every site on the web makes money, including Google, YouTube(now Google), Yahoo!, and Myspace.

This is usually followed by them asking why I don't just work for Google if all these web companies did the same thing. The answer is simply business philosophies. Google (and other ad networks and services) and Right Media are fundamentally different in that ad networks (including Google) just take buyers and sellers and match them up the way they feel everyone should be matched up. In Google's case, AdSense matches ads based on words that are on the actual website. If the site talks about cars a lot, then the ads will have cars. It works well in theory.

Right Media on the other hand will show all the ads to all the websites and all the websites to all the ads. In this sense, they let the buyers and sellers pick exactly what they want and they know exactly what they're going to get. As stated above, it's a lot like eBay. A website targeting children can find and only show ads targeting children. A company that targets a religious audience can be completely sure that their ads are only shown on non-degrading sites.

So as I listened to this man promote a rival's product, I think I would never find myself telling people how great Right Media's competitors are. Sure, Google is a great search engine, that's ok, we're not. YouTube has great videos, that's ok, we don't do that kind of media. Other ad networks can provide the same kinds of services, that's ok, most of the ones you'll find use the Right Media Exchange to do some, if not all of their business.

I'm fine with all of that. I believe that the success of any website or web-based company allows Right Media to grow. That's the beauty of this product. It's just a way for everyone who wants to do advertising business on the internet find each other.

I'm sure I work with individuals who are just as like minded. They scoff at the kind of people who would blatantly lie to people and say their product is great, but turn around in private and confess that it really isn't that great. I'm sure I work with individuals who are confident of their product and go into work every day ready to make Right Media a more well known and successful business.

Because if I didn't believe that was the case, I would seriously be looking at my options.

Advertising standards no good with new tech

Jesse sent me a link to this overly confident man who is claiming that selling ads by impressions will no longer be viable by 2010. Though I cannot whole heartedly agree with him that CPM will be completely dead by his projected time, I am on his side. CPM will no longer be a viable standard as more websites discover AJAX and other dynamic loading websites. Though the site itself will be able to create the proper functionality of tracking page views and even refreshing ads, that power will be taken away from ad networks that used to control what ads would display on who's page and when.

Since an AJAX call does not reload the whole page, if the script to pull an ad from an ad network is outside of the domain of what the AJAX does, it will not reload a new ad. This means that a user who goes to a site might only see one ad for his entire visit there, when before, he may have gotten a new ad every time he clicked to another section.

So it is possible that in the very near future, individual sites will have to be responsible for keeping CPMs up. Obviously, as a source of income for the sites involved, they will either attempt to incorporate this in their AJAX driven site, or take the easy way out and code a normal site that does not use any kind of dynamic interface.

That is of course until an ad network figures out how exactly to work with dynamic technologies and reaps the benefit of new websites. As with any other business, the ones that learn to adapt succeed and the others get merged into microsoft, google or yahoo.

Therefore revenue generated by impressions will never go away. It may be drastically reduced. There may be a panic, but in the end, it will come back.