Fixations on Facebook

If your company is facing tight margins and low profitability, as many are now, then how can you accept any work distractions that drain your overall productivity?

- Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research for Nucleus Research, an internet technology research firm

In Sharon Gaudin, "Facebook Use Cuts Productivity at Work," Computerworld, July 22, 2009

In a survey of 237 employees of companies that don't restrict Facebook in the workplace, Nucleus found that 77% do in fact use it during work hours. 87% of those said they had no clear business reason for using the site. Separately, an Ohio State University found that "college students who use Facebook spend less time studying and have lower grades than students who don't use the popular social networking site."

You would think that these findings along with Nielsen’s assertion that “people spend more time on Facebook than any on other Web site” would make Facebook by far the wealthiest place on the web (maybe on the planet) from advertising money. That spot still belongs to Google, for interesting reasons. One of them is that advertisers worry that people are blind to ads when using social media. In that connection, an advertising executive at a conference asked rhetorically why anyone would want to see an ad when she was composing a note breaking up with her boyfriend.

The Rise of Web Video

[B]roadcast mode is dead. Now is the time for co-creation, user distribution and a true democratization of video content.

Tom Smith, managing director of Trendstream

In Gavin O'Malley, "Report: Online Video Fastest-Growing Medium In The History Of The World," Online Media Daily, May 29, 2009

Trendstream is a social media research consultancy, and so it has a vested interest in highlighting the popularity of the rapid growth taking place in the sharing of online video. The major broadcast and cable networks would dismiss Smith's comment. They would point out that the viewing of broadcast and cable television still takes up substantially over 95% of Americans' time with video. Nevertheless, Trendstream is using its findings from a survey (carried our by research firm Lighstream) of 1,000 "active web users" to point to the quick growth of watching clips online. The company claims that "with 72% of US Web users watching clips online, Web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading 'social media platform.'"

In recent months Hulu and other sites for network-quality video have gotten much news, but Trendstream notes that most of what goes on around video is the downloading and uploading of short clips. Moreover, "users of all ages now generate far more content than traditional broadcasters and collectively contribute the majority of video content to the Web."

It's Relatively Hard for Google to Sell Ads on YouTube

It takes longer to bring in a YouTube dollar than it does to bring in a search dollar.

-Tim Armstrong, Google's top U.S. ad-sales executive

He was conceding that selling space on Google-owned YouTube is more labor-intensive for a variety of reasons than selling space on Google's famous search engine. Some of the reasons are logistical (display ad-selling is difficult to automate) and some relate to advertisers' fears of placing ads next to amateur videos created by amateurs that may embarrass the advertisers.

In Jon Fine, "YouTube's Buried Treasure," BusinessWeek, April 24, 2008.

This "problem" of advertisers' fear of being near unpredictable amateur videos has created a nascent market for technologies that scan videos to vet content before placing ads next to them. Google and MySpace have also been allowing advertisers to set up special zones for themselves. The problem with such zones is that people may not want to go to areas just to see marketing messages. So Google has been experimenting with placing popular, vetted videos in those zones as magnets in the hope that searches for the videos will bring in the right kinds of visitors.

The undervaluing of social-media sites by marketers and media firms' attempts to fix the problem so they can charge higher prices for ads is not a totally new development. It recalls the structural influence that sponsors have historically exerted on newspaper, magazine, radio and television content.

Morgan: The Challenges of "People Networks"

[Online] people networks will create a number of new challenges and opportunities for the providers of content, commerce and communication. Among other things, networks will create incremental value less from adding “sticky” services to their pages to try to make users stay put, than from leveraging the usage and the people-centric data to deliver more value in their core services — and to seamlessly link those users out to other relevant services when and where they need them, even if they didn’t know that they did.


-Dave Morgan, "The Future: People Networks," Online Spin, February 7, 2008.