The New York Post today is unveiling an overhauled Web site that encompasses columnist blogs, interactive sports features, and a new dating service, among other changes. The online sports page will get a major upgrade through a partnership with sports data company STATS that includes live game updates, game and player stats, and a "Team Tracker" for comprehensive coverage of New York metro teams. Post sports writers and columnists will also launch their own blogs. To get in on the online dating action, the Post has also created a new dating site with Match.com that will allow registered users to upgrade their member profiles for the chance to be featured in the Sunday Post's "Meet Market" section. The revamped version of Page Six online will take direct aim at Gawker Stalker by adding a "Celebrity Sightings" page that invites visitors to post locations where they have spotted celebrities around the city. Page Six's celebrity coverage will also expand online with slide shows and streaming video. In addition to the new content, the Post site will also add widgets such as a list of most e-mailed stories and a navigation bar across the top of every page to make the site more user-friendly. Tickers will also appear on news, business and health pages to provide constant updates. "This web site brings our online users all the great Post content we have in our print publication, in a way that maximizes the online experience like no other New York newspaper does," said Post Editor in Chief Col Allan, in a prepared statement.
Online portal Yahoo has acquired Jumpcut, a San Francisco video-sharing start-up that offers consumers the ability to not only upload clips, but also to edit them online. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Jumpcut, which launched in April, has done promotional deals with several entertainment companies, including Warner Bros., Starz Entertainment, Fox Atomic and New Line Cinema. For the initiatives, studios have made their own videos available and then invited consumers to use Jumpcut's editor to re-mix the clips by incorporating their own videos. For instance, New Line Cinema is sponsoring a contest inviting users to create videos of their own worst nightmare using footage from "Friday the 13th." Because Jumpcut has a flash-based editor, users don't have to leave their browsers to create the mash-ups. Earlier this summer, Jumpcut posted a trailer for the Warner Bros. film "A Scanner Darkly," and then offered users the chance to compete to make the best re-mix. Jumpcut will continue to reside on its own site, Jumpcut.com, but Yahoo also intends to integrate the feature into its other verticals, said Jason Zajac, vice president, general manager of Yahoo's Social Media Group. Jumpcut recently was named one of the 10 best video-sharing sites by Light Reading, a telecom research company. "Like the hip-hop milieu in which its founders probably grew up, Jumpcut encourages users to take the old and the new, the self-made and the borrowed, and mash it all up to create a truly unique digital work," stated Light Reading in a report released last month. Jumpcut founder Mike Folgner will stay with the company, as will the other 13 full-time employees, he said Wednesday. The acquisition demonstrates that large online companies now consider it a priority to draw users that also produce content to their sites, said Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research. "There's almost more competition getting folks who create video than the people who watch video," he said.
Network Live, the company that produced Live 8, has discontinued its relationships with AOL and signed a new distribution deal with MSN to produce live concerts for Webcast. Network Live also has rebranded under the new name Control Room. For the deal, Control Room will provide 36 concerts in the next year, starting with a Webcast of pianist John Legend's upcoming concert in London on Oct. 2. AOL, XM Satellite and live event presenting company AEG previously worked with Network Live to produce Webcasts. That deal was entered into after last year's successful Live 8 Webcast. A spokeswoman for Network Live said that the new partnership with MSN provided global reach in its distribution network, greater than what AOL could offer. Christine Andrews, lead product manager for MSN, said that the deal was part of the portal's push toward offering more original content. "They have the relationships with the labels and the people in the music industry to bring concerts online," she said. "We will be the distribution partners for them, offering the concerts live and on demand." Andrews added that MSN would be responsible for monetizing the live video content with ads, and the company will sell the space through its newly formed Digital Advertising Solutions team. Erik Flannigan, vice president of programming for AOL, said that the deal with Network Live ended because the process of signing multichannel deals with artists was becoming too arduous. "From AOL's perspective, once it got more complicated to consistently book those shows, we started to question whether or not it would be better for us to just go back in-house." Flannigan said that AOL would investigate other ways of getting live content. "We'll be talking to the biggest artists in the world and booking live shows ourselves," he said.
MSN's paid search platform offers marketers appealing targeting capabilities, but still needs to significantly grow its traffic. That was the consensus of search marketing executives Wednesday who met with MSN's director of search strategy, David Jakubowski, for a roundtable discussion in New York. Bill Wise, the CEO of search engine marketing firm Did-It.com, said that the targeting capabilities of adCenter, which are beyond offerings from Google and Yahoo, allow marketers to get a good return on their ad dollar. "Their technology, combined with the quality of their audience, has allowed us to squeeze out a higher ROI." Wise added that improved targeting is increasingly important to search marketers. "Keyword pricing has gotten so high that it's now all about segmentation," he said. But compared to competitors, the traffic at MSN Search "has a tendency to dip," said Steve Jacoby, an executive vice president at Sendtraffic. Wise and David Hughes, CEO of The Search Agency, agreed that despite a solid advertising product, MSN remains somewhat lacking in the traffic department. Jakubowski said that MSN would soon be kicking off a number of initiatives to promote the search engine to consumers, but the company declined to comment further on upcoming campaigns. MSN's search market share has been slipping compared to its main rival, Google. comScore Networks reported that MSN Search garnered a 12.5 percent share of search engine traffic last month, down from 15.8 percent in August 2005. Google retains the largest market share, with 44.1 percent of the traffic last month--up from 37.3 percent in August of last year.
The Web can offer unprecedented insights into how consumers view brands, but marketers still need to learn how to tap into online communities to take advantage of this information, a panel of executives said this week at the OMMA conference in New York. "What we have now is a virtual focus group happening every single day that we can listen in on," said Jeff Montgomery, vice president of sales for Tribal Fusion. "It's up to us as marketers to not fear the conversations--to listen to them." Shervin Pishevar, president of Freewebs, added that brands can't be in control of online conversations without ruining the authenticity of those discussions. "You can't own that conversation--you can't be in control," he said. "But the dividends it can pay are far larger than anything we've seen before." But Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen BuzzMetrics said that brands might have more control than they realize over Web conversations, provided that they can communicate with the most influential consumers. "They simply need more agility with their touchpoints with their consumers," he said. Once a brand enters the conversation, via a blog or an "official" poster on a message board or forum, it's useful to be able to put a face on the company, said Rohit Bhargava, vice president of interactive marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations. "A blog enables an organization to connect their consumers to an individual or individuals within their organization," he said.