This should finally change next year. People familiar with Microsoft’s (MSFT) plans say the company intends to open the exchange, which will allow online ad buyers and sellers to match up in real time, in January. That will put it several months behind Google (GOOG), which turned on its real-time ad exchange in September.

But on the plus side, AdECN will offer lots of intriguing inventory from the get-go: It will sell space on Microsoft’s giant MSN network, as well as inventory on sites the company reps, like Facebook, Digg and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox Sports.

Here’s Microsoft’s formal statement about AdECN’s the timeline:

AdECN and Microsoft remain fully committed to the AdECN Exchange and exchange business.  AdECN has been running a Pilot of its Federated, real-time bidding technology within Microsoft for the past several months and will be rolling that product out to a select group of participants in the coming months.

Real-time ad exchanges are a big deal for people trying to automate advertising buying and selling. They differ from older ad exchanges, like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Right Media, in that they’re supposed to let buyers and sellers negotiate a price within milliseconds on specific pieces of inventory.

But it’s not clear that buyers and sellers will embrace real-time exchanges. In order to use them, for instance, they’ll have to build, buy or rent technology that allows them to make and process orders at lightning speed.

AdECN manager Jeff Green left Microsoft earlier this month without explaining what he intended to do next. Jed Nahum, Microsoft’s director of network strategy and planning, is running the unit in the interim.

(Disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

[Image credit: rednuht]

In fact, co-founder Ivan Kirigin’s first day at Facebook was last Monday–four days before he and his wife, Abby, announced that they are shuttering their start-up.

Confused? You should be: This is one of the odder M&A stories I’ve seen in a while. Not surprisingly, the tale differs depending on who’s telling it.

Some basic, undisputed facts: Sometime this spring, TipJoy, a year old start-up that lets Web surfers “tip” bloggers and publishers, shopped the service to multiple parties, including Twitter and Facebook. By July, Facebook had offered, via a term sheet, to buy the company. Facebook then pulled its offer, and shortly after, offered Ivan a job. Now he and his wife are shutting TipJoy down and returning what’s left of the $1 million they had raised to their investors.

Also undisputed: No one has accused anyone of violating any laws, or contracts. Facebook’s offer was nonbinding and nonexclusive. And it’s not unheard of for companies to walk away from an M&A deal late in the process. That’s what happened, for instance, when Google (GOOG) bailed out after deep talks with Digg a year ago.

You could see why some of TipJoy’s backers, which include BetaWorks, the Accelerator Group, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and the Y Combinator start-up factory, might cry  foul. The argument would be that Facebook’s actions effectively prevented the company from finding another buyer. But even if that was true, it doesn’t mean that Ivan Kirigin had to accept Facebook’s job offer and/or shutter his company.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, but offered this statement via email: “We take pride in operating in a transparent and ethical manner. We can’t offer any specifics here, but to suggest anything untoward occurred on our part simply ignores the facts.”

I’ve sent the Kirigins repeated requests for comment but haven’t heard back. Their statement announcing the decision to close their company doesn’t mention Ivan’s new job. But it does hint, obliquely, at their future plans:

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party….the only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments–then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

UPDATE: Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, commenting on this story on his Hacker News site, says Facebook hired Ivan at his urging:

Facebook didn’t do anything wrong. Tipjoy was out of money. They’d been talking to several potential acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all fell through. So the Tipjoys were going to have to get jobs somewhere. Since they were worried about money and Ivan admired the hackers at Facebook, I asked FB if they’d offer him a job, and they did.

It doesn’t portend anything for the future of startups, as this story seems to imply. If your startup tanks, you have to get a job somewhere, and lots of hackers get jobs at Facebook. There are several other YC alumni working there.

Ivan Kirigin also weighs in within the same comments section, and says that my report “completely doesn’t tell the whole story.” Ivan, I’m all ears, so either drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Note: I’m assuming that the commenters identifying themselves as Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin in the comments section are indeed Paul Graham and Ivan Kirigin. But I’ve sent emails to both men so I can verify that. Update: That is indeed Paul Graham.

So says video-tracking service TubeMogul, which reports that Twitter users who click on a referral link to a Web video are likely to stay longer than people who get to the video from Facebook or Digg. Tubemogul has a handy chart to make its case here:

Tubemogul thinks this is surprising data, but the results make perfect sense to me. Digg users race in and out of Web pages with amazing speed, and the bigger Facebook gets, the less meaningful your “friends” list becomes, which means you’re more likely to be steered to something you really don’t care about.

But since you’re self-selecting the people you pay attention to on Twitter, their referrals should be more meaningful. This is where the Twitterati’s praise of the “passed link” as a new currency has some real meaning.

Tubemogul’s data come from a three-month survey of video links from the three services, totaling more than 6.7 billion video views. TubeMogul notes that it can’t say which services it tracks, but simple math makes it an awfully good bet that one of them is Google’s (GOOG) YouTube.

All-righty. Time to put Tubemogul’s data to the test. I just asked my Twitter pals to send me the best YouTube clip they’ve seen all day, and these are the first three responses I got (thanks @smalera, @laceyhaines and @derekbrookmeyer). See if they hold your attention (Warning! One of these is a clip of Kubrick’s adaptation of a Nabokov novel, and no one falls down, gets hit in the head or explodes at any point. Just so you know.)

Pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to commend the gents at IAC’s (IACI) video factory for:

1. Trying to broaden their demo to include theater people, as well as parents of theater people and parents of College Humor fans. And…
2. Using some SEO savvy. Name-checking Twitter, Facebook, Evite, eHarmony, Pandora and other Web favorites should help make up some ground this will lose on Digg. Where I assume most users will be bemused, at best.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090629/sharks-jets-page-views-web-site-story/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090327/reddits-ad-experiment-is-good-news-for-conde-nast-maybe-for-digg-too/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090327/reddits-ad-experiment-is-good-news-for-conde-nast-maybe-for-digg-too/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:30:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5709 How do you sell ads on a user-generated content site frequented by people who love technology and hate ads?

Sell ads that look exactly like the content itself.

That’s the strategy that Condé Nast is taking–cautiously–with Reddit, the Digg-like news aggregator it bought a couple of years ago. And it might be working.

So says Josh Stinchcomb, who runs sales and marketing for the “business” group of Condé’s digital properties, which also includes Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Web sites for the likes of The New Yorker and Portfolio. About three months ago, Stinchcomb began running ads that look exactly like the story headlines Reddit users submit and vote on.

The only difference: They sit at the top of the site’s homepage and carry a “sponsored link” tag. Like this (click to enlarge):

The results have made Condé “cautiously optimistic,” says Stinchcomb. You can measure that two ways: Click-through rates for the ads are running at about five percent, which is several times more than the industry average. And readers haven’t revolted.

The latter is a real possibility at a site like Reddit, whose users are fiercely protective of the community they’ve built, and antagonistic toward advertising in general. Stinchcomb says about 20 percent of Reddit’s users have installed ad-blocking software on their Web browsers.

If Condé keeps using the ads–they’ve run them from three sponsors so far and are tinkering with a self-service version that would allow marketers to submit ads on their own–it won’t create a torrent of cash. Right now the ads are priced at a $7 CPM (that’s $7 for every 1,000 eyeballs Condé gets in front of the ads), and Stinchcomb says he’ll probably have to knock that rate down. (He says he may also consider changing ad pricing to a cost-per-click/performance model, which would be a first for Condé).

But even a little bit of money would be a plus for Reddit, which has remained more or less a revenue-free property for Condé, even though traffic has shot up since the acquisition. Stinchcomb says Reddit now attracts five million uniques visitors a month, up from 1.5 million when the publisher bought the site (per usual, third-party traffic meausurements are much smaller).

Just as important, if it works for Reddit, it could have big implications for Digg, which has a significantly bigger audience, but faces the same problems selling ads.

Digg has raised $40 million so far, at a very high valuation, but revenues have been paltry. The site is reportedly planning to start selling ads that will look and feel a lot like the ones Reddit is already trying. High time to start experimenting.

[Note to Techmeme's Gabe Rivera: Yup, you have sponsored content, too. In fact, we've seen versions of this model for as long as we've had mass media. I think this iteration is particularly interesting, though.]

Last month, Web video studio/distributor Revision3 said the plummeting economy had caused it to cut staff and stop making and distributing some of its shows. Today, the company has a different message it wants to get out: Things are great!

The company, which is best known as a side project of Digg masterminds Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, has put out a press release that is largely information-free. It dutifully lists the company’s accomplishments: six million show views per month, 60 ad partners, 140 million “minutes of engagement” per month, etc.

The one metric the company really should be boasting about isn’t included in the release: Revision3 will have tripled its revenues, to $3 million, by the end of 2008, a person familiar with the company tells me. Even better, ad sales ticked up significantly in the fourth quarter, even as the Web ad market began sputtering. Revision3 is on track to book more than $1 million in the last three months of 2008, I’m told.

Those results alone won’t be enough to keep Revision3 afloat: Web video remains a novelty for many advertisers, and the stuff that Revision3 makes–podcasts designed to be downloaded and watched on your PC or iPhone later on–are particularly challenging for advertisers to get their heads around.

A marketer who pays for an ad impression on Hulu, for instance, can be reasonably sure that someone actually watched it. That’s because the joint venture between GE’s NBC (GE) and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox only offers up video for on-demand streaming, and doesn’t allow you to fast-forward past ads. But if you download an episode of Diggnation, the company’s flagship show, from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, there’s no guarantee you’ll actually see Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht endorse something called Brain Toniq.

But so far, at least, the pitch seems to be working. Here’s an example of what Revision3 advertisers are actually buying–a typical example of Diggnation, in which Rose and Albrecht sit on a couch, drink beer and talk about nerd things they like (Twitter) and things they don’t (Star Wars games).

But, for the record, here’s another winner: YouTube. This has nothing to do with the fact that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt stumped for Obama, but with the fact that YouTube users are furiously uploading versions of Obama’s Tuesday evening victory speech.

Video tracking service Visible Measures says it has tracked more than 500 versions of the clip embedded below (primarily on YouTube), which had generated some 6.8 million views by this morning. At least two million of those are coming from Obama’s official channel.

But as Obama bumps go, this one is relatively small. As of this afternoon, the speech had yet to crack YouTube’s most popular videos of the month page, which is where we learned that a new video of a nearly-naked Britney Spears has been viewed more than nine million times.