Content delivery giant Akamai Technologies on Thursday launched a mapping service that gauges online news consumption in real time. The new Net Usage Index for News clearly tracks aggregate numbers of viewers-per-minute by geography, identifies times of day when viewership peaks by global region, and measures how current consumption levels differ from average levels. Akamai is a back-end provider helping over 100 major news sites--including NBC, BBC, CNN, and Reuters--speed delivery of their content over its networks. It will not, however, be releasing specific traffic levels for any particular news source, nor is it collecting data on individual end users. The index is designed to provide insights into socio-geographic trends by comparing, say, the attention garnered by the Michael Jackson trial versus the Scott Peterson trial, or President Reagan's funeral versus Pope John Paul's funeral. The plainly stated purpose of the free tool--located at www.akamai.com/netusageindex--is to give people a chance to observe the Internet's pervasive role in our day-to-day lives, according to a prepared statement by Paul Sagan, Akamai's president and CEO. While the company is not yet catering to the interests of marketers, it is in a unique position to capitalize as a tracking service if that were its intention, some industry watchers say. "If these guys actually wanted to compete against other data tracking companies, they'd have a huge advantage because they're the ones with their hands on the data," said Jonathan Carson, president and CEO of BuzzMetrics, an online buzz marketing company. But in its existing form, Carson added, the Net Usage Index isn't of much use to marketers because it lacks real depth and detail. Also, marketers are more interested at the moment in tracking online behavior beyond the most popular destinations--also known as the "long tail"--said Carson. "It's elusive, but most people will tell that the real magic happens in the long tail." Bryan Wiener, president and chief operating officer of 360i, a performance marketing firm, said Akamai's index showed real technical prowess, but didn't seem like a compelling tool for marketers. "Breaking news is a non-event for most marketers who usually plan campaigns months in advance," said Wiener. "It doesn't seem like Akamai was trying to build the perfect tracking tool here." It is not clear whether Akamai's new service is alone in its ability to track online news in real time. A spokesman for Web research firm eMarketer suggested a number of services--including the Internet Traffic Report, Netcraft, and Alex--each of which appear to offer some sort of real-time ranking ability.
Jeff Jarvis is not happy with Dell Computer Corp., and he's letting everyone know. Starting last month, in a series of posts entitled "Dell Hell," Jarvis enumerated on his blog, BuzzMachine, his struggles with Dell's customer support service. Jarvis, creator of Entertainment Weekly magazine, wrote at length about Dell's refusal to replace or fix his broken computer. On Wednesday, Jarvis published on his blog an open letter to Dell Chairman Michael Dell and Chief Marketing Officer Michael George, in which he recounted his struggles with customer service and lambasted the company. While BuzzMachine frequently receives more than 5,000 visitors a day, Jarvis' "open letter" was the third most linked-to post on the blogosphere on Thursday, according to Intelliseek's BlogPulse. The post was also either linked to or discussed by at least .01 percent of all blog posts written Wednesday, according to BlogPulse. In the days before the blogosphere, Jarvis might have been just another dissatisfied customer. But today, his widely circulated criticism has triggered dozens of other bloggers and hundreds of commenters to publicly complain about service they've received from Dell's technical support. Now, some marketing experts say that the massive unfavorable publicity--call it a negative viral campaign--illustrates that mainstream corporations, even tech-savvy ones like Dell, still haven't figured out how to cope with consumer complaints on the Web. Public relations consultant Steve Rubel said Dell might have headed off a public relations disaster had it simply tried to help Jarvis from the beginning. "Jeff has a tremendous media presence. That should have them shaking in their boots," he said. "Every company is going to have evangelists and vigilantes in the blogosphere, and they need a group of people focused on influencer relations, who are kind of watching all these different conversations and figuring out how to amplify the evangelists and how to calm the vigilantes." The key problem that Dell--and other companies with call centers for customer services--face is that they are not prepared to handle how their customers can share their experiences virally, said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a buzz monitoring firm. "Most call centers operate in a bit of a vacuum, divorced from the reality that both satisfied and dissatisfied consumers tend to be highly viral and work in vast social networks," he said. "You don't want people to think that you have to wait for the big fish like Jeff Jarvis to do something. Every company should be sensitive to how dissatisfaction is viral, and they have to build that into their financial modeling." In the end, blogged complaints like Jarvis' can do as much damage as a negative advertising campaign. "What's important is that people had exposure to [Jarvis'] nasty-gram to Dell, and that's no different than the way advertising works," Blackshaw said. Dell did not return phone calls for this article.
Online revenues of U.S. newspapers will surge by an estimated 36 percent to $1.4 billion this year, according to a new report by research company eMarketer. What's more, revenues will continue to rise--by 23 percent next year, 16 percent in 2007, and 18 percent in 2008--according to the report, "Online Publishing: Focus on Newspapers." eMarketer based its predictions on newspapers' published financial results and ad spending data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The report, authored by eMarketer Editorial Director Ezra Palmer, points to several factors driving the growth of online newspapers' ad revenues. In addition to benefiting from the stronger economy, the report concludes that newspapers have seen gains because more consumers are going online to read news, and marketers are increasingly placing ads on the Web. "The biggest advertisers are cautiously shifting their budgets online," wrote Palmer in the report. eMarketer also noted that newspaper companies have rallied to recapture online classifieds. "Many publishers seemed blindsided by the rapid rise of online classified sites, but now they appear to be putting up a stronger fight--classified ads make up the majority of online ad revenues at most companies." The report also predicts that the proportion of U.S. ad dollars spent online will climb from 4.6 percent this year--$12.9 billion of the $277.5 billion total media ad spend--to 7.5 percent in 2009, when $22.3 billion will be spent in U.S. online advertising out of a total U.S. ad media spend of $298 billion. Separately, the New York Times Media Group, the New England Media Group, and the Regional Media Group together came up with a 31.8 percent year-over-year increase in online ad revenue in July, according to an earnings statement released on Thursday. The Times Company attributed the increase partially to strong growth in digital advertising and in all classified advertising categories. Reporter Gavin O'Malley contributed to this article.
In the latest example of a big media company acquiring tech-related businesses, U.K.-based publisher United Business Media announced Thursday that it was purchasing a pair of online concerns: publishing and analysis firm Light Reading, Inc. and media platform TechOnLine. Other recent deals include Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. purchase of Scout Media, Media General's buy-out of advergamer Blackdot Inc. and Gannett's purchase of the rich media technology company PointRoll. "Diversified media has a mandate to grow and to own growth businesses, and right now, many of those businesses are digital," says Tolman Geffs, managing director at Jordan, Edmiston, a New York firm that specializes in middle-market merger and acquisition advisory services to the media and information industries. Jordan, Edmiston represented PointRoll, Light Reading Inc., and Informex in their negotiations with the traditional media entities that eventually subsumed them. Jordan, Edmiston also recently released a study indicating that--for the first time--the majority of online acquisitions in recent months had come at the behest of major diversified media companies. "Each of these companies is looking to redeploy some percentage of their capital to high-growth businesses and to reach their audiences and advertisers in newer and more targeted ways," says Geffs. And I think that big media's timing is pretty good--they are paying good prices, but given the growth of these businesses, they are going to look like very good acquisitions in two to three years."