April 3rd, 2006

Message From Michael (image placeholder)
April 3, 2006

• DEMANDING ON LINE VIDEO




• BILLION DOLLAR COLLEGE SOPHOMORES


• THE NEXT BILLION DOLLAR DEAL


• SEX, DRUGS, TAXES AND MORALITY


• COCKTAIL CHATTER

• DEMANDING ON LINE VIDEO: More are. At least according to a report by the Online Publishers Association which says that online video viewing is a routine practice for most web users. While humor gets the buzz, says the report, news and current events is the most frequently viewed online video. The study, done in partnership with Frank N. Magid and Associates, says one in four web users access video at least once a week and half at least once a month. Even better from the advertisers point of view, consumers are ‘spurred to action’ by online video. Two other developments worth noting in this area is that 68% of active Internet users had broadband as of February, according to Nielsen/ Net Ratings. That translates to 95.5 Million users, a 28% increase from a year ago. Even more critical Nielsen Media Research announced that by the end of the year it will begin measuring TV viewed on the Internet. (Anybody seen AOL.com’s In2TV?)On a related note, web researcher eMarketer projects that in three years time, more than 36 million people will be watching video on their phones. Right now ‘only’ 3 million do, and of those, about 300,000 to 400,000 have adopted paid services with premium content. The number of paid users is expected to max out at about 10 million. An article in Business Week predicts that mobile phone advertising will reach $600 million by 2009.


• BILLION DOLLAR COLLEGE SOPHOMORES: The owners of facebook.com have reportedly turned down an offer of $750 Million for the popular college-focused website. They want $2 Billion. Not bad for a couple of Harvard sophomores, as BusinessWeek points out. Meanwhile Fortune magazine notes that Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Myspace.com for $580 Million last July may be one of the best buys ever, even though a year before the purchase it was only valued at $33 Million. As big as facebook.com is, myspace.com is even bigger with 66 million members and 250,000 new ones signing up each day. However, other articles have noted that both sites face problems. Myspace has been the subject of several reports about questionable content with advertisers expressing reluctance about being alongside some of the material. The same for facebook which colleges and high schools reportedly are monitoring for possible disciplinary actions. That said, here is a figure to keep in mind – the homepage for myspace which used to sell for a whopping $100,000 a day is now going up to a whop-whopping $750,000 a day.


• THE NEXT BILLION DOLLAR DEAL: Okay, so you want to know where the next billion-dollar site will come from? Heck if I know, but here are a couple of places, that you may not have heard of, but that are making noise. Youtube.com, which we’ve mentioned before in MfM simply headlines itself as broadcast yourself. Many observers see the site which was created by two guys out of their garage in San Francisco challenging myspace.com, especially with those users into creating their own media. In fact it proved so popular that at one point myspace.com reportedly edited out references to it. Gather.com is described by one writer as myspace with an NPR edge, or as the site says, “where informed, engaged people share perspectives on everything from politics to parenting.” Heavy.com which offers animations, music, video games, grainy home videos and models in bikinis is aimed at men in the 18 to 34 demographic. Viacom-owned website, the-n.com, targets teenage and tween-age girls with stories about Paige and Liberty and Aubrey Graham (and no, I don’t know who they are either). Or try dave.tv which is a P2P site “facilitating the connection between producers and consumers of digital media in a way that benefits everyone.” Anyway, the point is… the dot-com bubble is re-inflating. BusinessWeek Online has a series of articles about the net’s new age at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060313_860688.htm/


• SEX, DRUGS, TAXES AND MORALITY: Cheating on your taxes is almost as bad as cheating on your spouse. Having an abortion and homosexual behavior are equally wrong. Drinking excessively is worse than smoking marijuana. So says the American public, according to the Pew Research Center. The center listed ten issues and asked people whether the behavior was morally wrong, morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all. The worst of the ten was married people having an affair… deemed morally wrong by 88% of those surveyed with only 3% saying it was morally acceptable. To put the response in perspective, the Pew Center report notes a National Science Foundation survey that found 15% of married Americans admit having had sex outside marriage. In a similar vein, the survey says 79% believe that not reporting all income on your taxes is morally wrong, although 14% say it is not a moral issue. The Internal Revenue Service reports a non-compliance rate of 16%. A majority of Republicans say seven of the ten behaviors are morally wrong while a majority of Democrats say three of the behaviors are morally wrong. Southerners are more likely than people living in the Northeast or West and ‘slightly’ more likely than people living in the Midwest to describe the ten behaviors as morally wrong. So, in order, the third highest ‘morally wrong’ behavior was drinking excessively which was deemed morally wrong by 61%, with 5% saying it’s morally acceptable and 31% saying it is not a moral issue. Having an abortion was considered morally wrong by 52% with 12% saying it is morally acceptable and 23% saying it is not a moral issue. After that: Smoking marijuana (50% - wrong; 10% - acceptable; 35% - not an issue); homosexual behavior (50% - W, 12% - A, 33% - N); Telling a lie to spare someone’s feelings (43% - 23% - 26%); Sex between unmarried adults (35% - 22% - 37%); Gambling (35% - 17% - 42%). Overeating came in tenth with 32% saying it is morally wrong while 6% say it is morally acceptable and 58% saying it is not a moral issue.


• COCKTAIL CHATTER: Buena Vista Games (a subsidiary of Walt Disney Co., which also owns ABC) plans to release a PC video game based on the popular ABC TV program Desperate Housewives. (You know, sometimes you can’t even make this stuff up.) As long as we’re talking about Disney, former chairman Michael Eisner bombed as a talk show host. The debut of his CNBC show brought in just 95,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. And that was off a lead-in of 518,000 from a repeat of Deal Or No Deal. You may have heard about the website, firedavidgregory.com, which is an online petition drive to fire NBC’s Chief White House correspondent David Gregory after a confrontational exchange with White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Now, thanks to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, we know who’s behind the move – Ian Schwarz, an 18-year-old college student in Baltimore whose other website is Expose The Left. A Virginia-based company (picturepaper.com) is offering personalized gift wrapping paper for those people who want their birthday, anniversary, baby shower or ‘whatever’ celebration a little different. You simply select a design, upload a picture and enter your order. For under $4,000, you can buy a modern-day windmill that will generate as much as a fifth of your home electrical needs. Global trendspotting site, SpringWise, says for a little under $40,000 you can buy one that will not only generate enough electricity for your home, but enough to actually sell back to your local electric company. Both are British companies – stealthgen.com and quietrevolution.co.uk. Finally, a follow-up to an earlier MfM report about Rolling Stone magazine debuting in China. It did. And it’s done. Chinese authorities have shut it down for “not following procedures.” Of course, as the Los Angeles Times points out, doing a story about a rock star associated with the Tiananmen Square protest was not exactly a smart idea.


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