You restate my point.
>The Webcrawler top 50 had 19 sites that are clearly chat related!
>No, it's certainly not a fad. The latest interactive games that AOL
>is bringing on have chat as a built-in feature. Avatars in some.
>Next comes telephony.
Interpersonal communications services (including games) do not lend
themselves to advertising. Prodigy tried it a few years ago and huge
complaint forced it to back off.
AOL itself reported that for thr 9/30 quarter only 27% of useage
was in *content* areas (i,e. conducive to advertising). Evidence
from the AOL Insider is that much of the increased usage since flat
rate is from chat, forums, and downloads -- not content. In other words,
users aren't going where the ads are.
>The ads are on all roads, including those leading to the chat rooms.
>Graffiti everywhere, yet not too objectionable.
But as Ad Age says, increasingly that's not what advertisers want --
certainly not equivalent of billboards on a main highway that users
may glance at while speeding to chat etc. They get awareness from TV.
BTW, advertisers are well aware that the population of business desktops with access to the Internet dwarfs AOL. Add that in, as well as foreign net users, and AOL's `market share' drops by at least half.
Also, it's dangerous to extrapolate from a small base of ad revenue
and presume that advertisers will increase commitment at all linearly.
Much of what they've spent to-date has been in name of R&D. When
it comes to allocating from actual ad budgets for real, the view can
be quite different.
>If the proprietary online business is doomed to be crushed under the
>combined weight of thousands of tiny web footed sites, why does
>Michael Eisner want in?
Who said Disney plan is "proprietary" online model? |
