Under the Rotunda

There’s a blog post* somewhere on The Guardian based around the latest Web TV Enterprise survey on video spend.

It talks about the very high percent of advertisers who are planning on increasing their online video spend by very high percentage amounts. As we all know though, of such a tiny base you are always going to get nice, plump % growth figures.

That’s not my problem here though (and besides, it’s hardly like Web TV Ent, or The Guardian, or web video stakeholders are the only ones guilty of that little trick).

The issue I have with articles lately about online video is that when they talk about revenue or profitability, they fail to acknowledge that without the TV networks’ contributions re production costs, the so-called “more profitable” online video would have to incur such massive absolute costs that it would not be able to exist, let alone be profitable.

One of the best examples: from said blog post:

“We are hugely pleased with the numbers for ITV.com on revenue,” ITV’s director of online content, Ben McOwen Wilson, told Reuters at the Edinburgh Television Festival. “We get 8 pence per hour on TV. Online, we are getting more than that.”

Yes, you might make more in “pence per hour” revenue from online video than broadcast video, but last time I looked**, ITV’s online revenues were approx 1.4% of their TV revenues. Let’s take away 98.6% of The X Factor’s budget and see what sort of show Simon Cowell can make with that.

(* Written by one Mercedes Bunz incidentally. Srsly. Not sure if thats a nome de plume or not. )

(** ITV’s interim results for the 6 months to June 2009 - itv.com revenue rather than all of ITV’s online revenue as that included non-VoD activities such as the fantastically successful Friends Reunited)

I’ve got a post brewing on marketers’ selection of creative agencies and the relation to past creative work for existing clients.The first of the two quotes below is of a similar theme.

Both quotes are from a Business Week / CMO Club survey on marketers’ intentions to switch agencies in the near future - the full article can be found here.

“Like any vendor/partner, the key is to seek out, demand and work with the stars in the agency. I am getting my acceptable share of their time so have a strong, strategic relationship.”

(That’s my added emphasis in that one.)

“I will be replacing my agency within the next 6 months. Too much fighting change in media and technology, and not enough insights on true differentiation and customer engagement.”

So this is the iPhone edition of the short snappy tool posts (find Post I and Post II there).

Instapaper - Absolutely indispensable. Lets you mark pages & articles etc in your browser as “Read later”, and then makes these available on your iPhone for portable and offline reading. There’s a free version, but the paid version at something like £3 is definitely worth it - it lets you store more, but more importantly lets you share articles via email, tumblr, twitter etc.

TubeExits - One only for Londoners, this app tells you which carriages to get on to, so you’re closest to the best spot for a line change, or to the destination station exit. Simple idea, backed up lots of good data.

TweetDeck - the iPhone app of the most popular Twitter client. The app is far nicer than the desktop service in fact. I switched from Twhirl to Tweetdeck on the desktop because of this app.

It only took a month after the first tools post, but below are 6 more useful tools:

1. BackTweet - for finding URLs used in tweets - particularly handy because of the URL shorteners (like Bit.ly) that are so heavily used, meaning a normal search in Twitter search won’t pick up a URL string.
2. Bitly - good for shortening your own links into any tweets of your own, but if you ever wanted to see the usage stats behind anyone else’s bit.ly link you can also easily do this: just add “info/” in the URL - eg http://bit.ly/AqQxD becomes http://bit.ly/info/AqQxD. This lets you see number of clicks, location, and importantly the different tweets the link was used in - which can help show propogation and passing around of a tweet/link.
3. BackType - for comments on blogs etc - useful because a lot of the free blog search sites tend to focus mostly, or exclusively, on main blog posts and not any comments made on the posts.
4. Feedburner - for those that know Feedburner, its core use is for simple RSS feed management and measurement. But it can also come in very handy for turning RSS feeds into email subs for those clients, or colleagues, who don’t use RSS readers. Plug the RSS feed of a Twitter search result into Feedburner for example, and send your client the email subscription link from Feedburner.
5. Touchgraph - A great tool for both finding and visualising relationships. There’s versions for Amazon titles, Facebook connections, and Google searches.
6. Chartbeat - One of many emerging offerings revolving around real time site analytics. Literally real-time. View an example here.

The next tools post will probably be all about the best iPhone apps I’ve found.