Entries Tagged 'Advertising Market' ↓

ComScore, a leading Web statistics provider, has joined with Flurry Analytics to provide a more complete picture on the who, what, when, where and how of our use of mobile media. Founded just over a year ago, Flurry has grown immensely and this move will only serve to boost its popularity.

Flurry announced the partnership on the heels of its merger with Pinch Media last month. The service boasts a nearly ubiquitous presence in the mobile market and will add a host of real-time data to comScore's reports.

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"Flurry collects mobile application data from approximately two out of every three iPhone and Android devices. Each month, the company aggregates application usage data from over 1 billion end-user sessions across more than 50 million unique handsets from more than 200 countries. Over 10,000 developers have chosen to integrate Flurry Analytics within their applications."

That's 9,700 more developers than the company started with just a year ago.

Using Flurry's data, comScore will add "real-time consumption data, including frequency of use, length of use, user geographic location, new vs. repeat usage and Wi-Fi vs. carrier network usage" to its mobile application data.

Flurry provides a variety of information including what types of applications users are most likely to continue using over time and return to frequently, as shown in the following graphic. This data can then be used by companies to lure potential advertisers or by advertisers looking for potential targets.

In a market that's only going to see growth, some, like Om Malik, are already predicting Flurry's acquisition by a big-time player in the near future. Analytics remains hot, as evidenced further by this morning's news of a $27.5 million investment in comScore-competitor Quantcast by Cisco and Polaris Ventures.

Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser. Augmented Reality (AR) is a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate listings to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. It is available for Android phones and was available on the iPhone until it was withdrawn from the marketplace last week due to excessive crashes.

The Brightkite ads appear to be just for electronics retailer BestBuy so far, and are displayed as unique markers in your field of view when pointed towards one of the stores.

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Big round circles have been added to Brightkite camera-view annotations, designating the location of nearby BestBuy stores. The circles join the clearly different annotations for text messages and photos posted by nearby users. The ads are relatively unobtrusive for now.

These ads appear in all search results pages, whether they are relevant or not. For example, no one has posted on Brightkite about "pizza" within miles of me for the last three days, but a search for pizza displays a number of search results on my phone's radar. It turns out those are the BestBuys in my area. The same results appear in searches for "love" and "flatulence" - it's all BestBuy. If advertising proliferates on platforms like this then it's going to have to become contextual.

These are the early days in mobile Augmented Reality advertising, but the field is expected to be big. AR has been become increasingly common in recent months as a gimmick in print ads that can be held up to a webcam to display a 3D image, but we're unaware of previous experiments like what Brightkite is doing on Layar.

Is the advertising industry excited about mobile AR advertising? Blake Robinson, director of research and measurement at social media marketing firm Attention, says he is. "If the question is whether or not money will be pumped into mobile AR advertising," he says,"I'd say it's not a question of if, but when - and I'd say soon.

"For the first time in a long time local businesses could be given opportunities by advertisers to reach not just potential patrons but people who are literally at their doorsteps. There is a lot of potential for good here, a lot of potential for irritation too, but I'm more excited than daunted."

Will consumers find the ads more useful than invasive? That's an age-old question in the relationship between advertisers and consumers.

Microsoft is taking aim at malvertising in an effort to curb the phenomenon. The Redmond company filed five civil law suits in King County Superior Court this morning after finding that a number of online advertisers were delivering malicious code to users. In the past ReadWriteWeb has covered a number of malvertising scams including the Facebook Fan Check virus' scareware scam. As was the case with Fan Check, the 5 companies are being accused of mimicking Windows security updates and tricking users into running fake programs.

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Over the weekend, the New York Times was hacked and scareware advertisements appeared in the banner feed. Readers were warned not to click on the ad and to restart their web browsers. This influx of scareware has Microsoft livid.

Says Microsoft Associate General Counsel Tim Cranton in a recent blog post, "Although we don't yet know the names of the specific individuals behind these acts, we are filing these cases to help uncover the people responsible and prevent them from continuing their exploits."Those involved in the current lawsuit include Soft Solutions, Direct Ad, qiweoqw, ITmeter INC, and ote2008.

In addition to this current civil suit, Microsoft is actively pursuing actions against a number of instant messaging spammers and bot-powered click frauders. It will be interesting to see if the public education campaigns for web security can keep up with the influx of ad delivered trojan horse viruses. The public is directed to the Microsoft Online Safety page for more information.

Photo Credit: Dirk Heuer

Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal - until Twitter promptly said the word "sponsored" was only appearing on the site in error. Now the "sponsored definitions" of certain Twitter "concepts" have appeared on the site again - and they sure look legit this time.

These first ads probably aren't going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It's funny - the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a few small, alert blogs has written about them. It was big news three months ago and we believe it's still important.

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So far the only two sponsored links we've seen cycle through our sidebars have been to the ad network Federated Media's Microsoft microsite ExecTweets.com (aggregating Twitter messages from corporate executives) and Universal Studios' CinemaTweets.com, promoting the allegedly offensive forthcoming gay-face movie Bruno. The ads only appear on the home page of Twitter when a user is logged in, not when looking at another user's profile page. Also included in the cycle is a link to a joint Twitter and Threadless.com microsite where visitors can buy Threadless t-shirts about Twitter. Apparently that doesn't constitute a sponsored link, but presumably money is changing hands somewhere. The whole world of Twitter is a green-field when it comes to rules of disclosure.

Perhaps these sources of revenue will help Twitter remain a viable company long enough for all kinds of questions about this brand new medium to be explored.

Dave Winer argued this Spring that people want to know how Twitter is going to make money because they might not like it. He told a story about learning while in college that Domino's Pizza used profits to fight Planned Parenthood. With all the time, energy and content people are investing in Twitter - many want to know how the company will monetize so they can decide whether it's an organization they want to continue investing in.

And so it has begun. There are ads on Twitter. What do you think?

Disclosure: Federated Media is also the ad network for ReadWriteWeb.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.