The web and ways to market on the web continue to evolve at
warp speed - we see some positive and negative changes
occurring - our observations du jour:
1) Publishers are finally starting to charge for branded
content. It's still difficult to do, but we are seeing many
newsletter publishers charging from $30-100 per subscribe per
annum. And, most importantly, many people are finally
starting to accept the need to pay for quality content.
2) Contrary to popular opinion the web's epicenter is not San
Francisco, Tokyo, Washington D.C./northern VA, Seattle, London
or Austin - there is no epicenter, its everywhere. We now
have over 407M (estimated according to Nua) people using the
web and its become a global medium/marketing
venue/information highway.
3) More good news for ecommerce enabled business models, recent
published reports (Boston Consulting Group & eShop) indicate
customer acquisition costs have dropped from $45. per
individual customer in Q- 4 of 2000 to $18. in Q-1 in 2001.
4) Adobe continues to push PDF format as a web standard. Over
32% of corporate web sites today have Acrobat PDF-enabling
their web sites. Why we will never know (?), as it isn't an
HTML standard but was originally developed to facilitate
printing of documents. And, it doesn't work well on many web
sites, especially for those coming in with slow connections
or when you are trying to view more than a couple of pages.
5) Surprise, surprise splash pages are still increasing in
popularity, with an estimated 18% of web sites today
incorporating them. Let's be clear, we think they are really
lame to use a technical marketing term - they slow down the
user experience and cause many people to click away from a
web site in annoyance, no bookmark and no return visit.
6) Opt-in e-mail continues to grow in popularity and to reflect
the web's ability to handle rich media content - the HTML
format is rapidly becoming standard in many e-mail campaigns
and we are starting to see streaming audio and video plug in
components (running in the background) and even integrated
voice mail, as just announced last month by YesMail. But,
watch those conversion rates fall, opt-in e-mail is in danger
of becoming this year's banner advertising.
7) Newsletters have become mainstream ways to communicate with
customers, generate revenue via ad inserts and drive a brand
into the marketplace. Now there are ASP (application service
provider) solutions being brought to market by Microsoft and
many others that enable a small or large company to manage
all aspects of newsletter marketing via a browser.
8) No secret the web is maturing, there's been a media
firestorm the last few weeks about how only four companies
(AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Napster) commanded approximately
50% of the overall traffic on the web. Most disturbing to
those of us not with the aforementioned companies (Sidebar:
I am sure Steve Case and Bob Pittman are very happy), eleven
companies commanded this percentage about a year ago.
9) Traditional media is experiencing the same market downturn
that Interactive ad agencies have been getting - look at your
recent Newsweek, Der Stern, Time, Business 2.0, Upside, Fast
Company, Wired and you'll see they would do Jenny Craig proud
- they've lost a lot of ad weight.
10) Popups, popovers, popunders - whatever the term you want to
use for those annoying interstitial types of ads are still
continuing to be deployed on more and more web sites. We
think they are just bad marketing and are being used by sites
or companies that can't figure out how to generate revenue
with content (see #1) or dare we say real services!
