Bronte Media

Tantalized by a presentation from Friendster President Kent Lindstrom, I donned a suit and caught a few of the morning sessions yesterday at the Bear Stearns Tech/Telecom/Internet conference.

Usually these types of conferences offer juicy quantitative tidbits (rather than “we see strength in online advertising” type remarks). But it was not to be for Kent.

He did reveal something quite interesting in that Google, who they signed on with a short while ago, were experimenting with behavioral advertising rather than contextually targeted advertising on Friendster.

I don’t believe Google had ever mentioned this, even though it’s blindingly obvious in a social networking context (i.e. where on page elements offer little help in targeting).

He seemed to suggest that it was triggered by internal Friendster user events (the example he gave was when a user searched for a motorcycle in the classifieds section getting an auto ad elsewhere).

No mention of whether there is any cross-network goodness, or the holy grail of them all – Google’s search history – fueling the targeting.

Here are some other notes I took on the two other panels I sat in on (online ad networks and video).

Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan:
Again not specific to Tacoda but Dave described in decent depth a softening of the higher end CPMs of display advertising. i.e. MSN Finance and Yahoo Auto type inventory under CPM pressure in the first quarter of this year and continuing in the second quarter (you could almost see the blackberries in the room light up in a symphony instructing unknown recipients to sell YHOO).

I really think that this is and will be a consequence of behavioral targeting – i.e. you can target and reach the same user for $0.10 on MySpace instead of $12 CPM on Yahoo Finance. The latter is obviously a hugely more valuable CPM but I don’t think 120x the value.

Gurbaksh Chahal, the CEO of BlueLithium
Gurbaksh gave a great overview of the ad network space and what spots were vulnerable and weak (repping medium sites that get bigger and ditch the ad network at that point) and which weren’t (basically owning data about users and ‘trading’ on that information).

Seemed like a really smart guy but didn’t really mention any numbers besides from the fact that they raised ~$12m and have never spent a cent of it. He seemed proud of that. I thought it begged the question why he raised the money in the first place and gave away 20-50% of his company). Nonetheless a very interesting company and seemed poised to become another Nextag (i.e. a billion dollar company you don’t hear about.

JumpTV
I was hoping to see Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, who is the company’s president and star of the excellent Startup.com documentary but Scott Paterson, the CEO and Chairman was the presenter.

They have a very interesting business model, in that they have signed Internet-rights syndication deals with hundreds of television channels around the world.

They raised a ton of cash through the Toronto Stock Exchange and London AIM and are burning through it, seemingly using Kaliel’s Documentary as a how-to guide. Last year they earned $2m in revenue and generated a loss of $26m.

They have about 35,000 subs paying roughly $11/mo to access a series of channels but it looks like their subscriber acquisition costs are about $40 and the quarterly churn for Q4 was about 26%.

Still, it seems now they are headed in a different direction. AOL Video just signed on as a distribution partner and consumers can watch 60 of the channels for free now. See a selection of the channels here, like Lebanese soccer.

Also, you can watch the video on their site Jump.tv. They are also hoping to distribute through smaller niche sites and have started their own properties, like this one about sport.

Very interesting company to watch nonetheless.

Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake
Announced the company will launch a Joost competitor later in the year with contextual ads in video. Example given was of latest James Bond trailer, which pans to the Bahamaas, red button appears in the top right corner, consumer clicks and opens up a browser window with Expedia travel deals to Nassau, Bahamas. You can also click on his Sunglasses. The dream still lives on for the fantasy of buying the clothes/accessories of whatever the actor or actress is wearing (anybody remember iTV?). Ugh. I think consumers have answered enough times that they don’t want to do this. But it looks cool in a demo anyway.