Optimize & Prophesize – @jonathanmendez
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The Decade of Display That Wasn’t 2007 – 2017
Act I: Crank That The year was 2007. Ten years ago. Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6.3B. Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1B. Yahoo bought Right Media for $680M. Display was poised to take massive amounts of advertising dollars from television over the next decade and become the dominant form of advertising. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo were…
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Autumn for Digital Publishers…and Everything After
The digital media world was a rocked yesterday by news that Buzzfeed is going to miss revenue targets by 20% and Mashable was sold for $50M when its valuation last year was $250M. What is going on? The short answer is a lot. Buzzfeed is actually right in their statement where they put blame on…
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Snap Revenues in Perspective. And What it Means.
Snap announced revenues yesterday and the stock got hammered. The miss was about 15% off projected but the company still did half the revenue it did all last year in one quarter. Pretty solid. What matters is not what Snap did last quarter but the overall potential of Snap as a company that sells media.…
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The New Google Era
Something has been happening on the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It is the very thing that the FTC just closed the case on. It is the delivery on the promise that Larry and Sergey made from the beginning. That Google would organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The keywords (pun…
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End of the CPM Experiment
The flag bearer of display advertising was always Yahoo. Their massive sales force stoked 15 years of equity into “the web banner.” Yahoo arguably had the greatest hand in providing the economic foundation for the entire web for many of its formative years. That is why nothing better symbolizes the collapse of that foundation better…
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Defending the Future of Mobile Ads
The first time I read Fred Wilson’s Mobile is Where the Growth Is I was disturbed. I commented. Not what I really wanted to say but I said something. The second time I read it I had to write a blog response. Now I agree there’s a shift happening. But… This is unknown. Foursquare hasn’t…
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Talkin’ 2011 Publisher Revenue Blues
"Well, I finally started thinkin' straightWhen I run outta things to investigate." -Bob Dylan It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Optimize and Prophesize and even longer since I posted regularly. As has been the tradition here in all but my first year blogging in 2006, I provide a yearly recap of my…
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Yieldbot Begins Empowering Publishers with Intent Data
“If you think about the [advertising technology] stack there’s lots of necessary elements but it seems to me the meat in the sandwich is the intelligence layer. It’s the engine that figures out, if-this-then-this. If you think about what the most important part is that seems to me to be at the nucleus.” -Terrence Kawaja,…
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Harvesting Networked Intent
The keywords and links that we use as proxies for intent are the currency of the web. Search has shown how truly valuable they are but intent does not begin and end in Search. People don’t go to Google and figure out what their intent is – they arrive there with it. Often driven…
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Building the Greenfields of Display
1990 marked 1 million cellular phones in the U.S. (there are over 300 million today). To support these phones the first cellular networks were created using very tall towers to operate. The purpose was to transmit large “cells” that could cover as wide an area as possible so subscribers could connect with the network. But…
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Ad Wars 2011: The Publisher Empire Strikes Back
Intent is Timing When you mention the word intent in online advertising circles the first thought is invariably Search. Of course Search has thrived as a destination site for intent but intent is not generated in Search. Intent is generated many other places and is moved to Search. Most of all for advertisers, Search is…
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Algorithmic Search and Discovery
When Rich Skrenta who has been a pioneer in Search with Topix (and just launched Blekko) writes the following, I take notice: “Algorithmic search is sinking. The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category.…
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Ladies and Gentlemen: Search Has Your Attention
"Google has become the remote control for the world; it's the first stop, not TV” – Will Margiloff, CEO of Innovation Interactive Nothing is more realtime than Search. Have a question? Search gets the answer for you right away. Need to find something right now? Search will track it down in less than half a…
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CTR is the Web
My friend Darren Herman has reinitiated a debate about the validity of Click Through Rate (CTR) as an online advertising metric. On his blog he posted a great collection of quotes he obtained on the subject from some brilliant industry people. It's an important read. Interesting to me, of the 9 people asked only 1 was…
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