My wife remarked to me that the prices of Blu-Ray players had come down very quickly, more quickly than she remembered for other similar technologies like DVD players. Apparently is it pretty close and bluray might be slightly cheaper but that makes sense - the ability for a technology to get to scale via expanding various distribution channels, outsourced manufacturing that can make it cheaper, faster etc. will make these changes happen ever more quickly.

With digital goods this is probably magnified by an order of magnitude because the costs of reproduction are far lower (even though writing software does take time as we all know!), effectively zero for the copying or redistribution of some digital items.

2010 we are going to see some amazing developments and changes, and the pace will accelerate even further.

There’s always something fun about real-time data, especially when it’s related to money like this map of where Chitika is making money right now in the US.

Apropos of nothing: I saw this movie yesterday, and thought it was great. It certainly vies with “District 9″ as my favorite film of the year - not that this year I have seen that many to be quite fair… nonetheless. Lots of interesting layers to the film and a couple of (what I thought were) good twists. It’s the kind of role Clooney does very well. I’m almost to 1mm miles with American, and don’t travel that much these days but figure I’ll get over that hump soon — why not?

Yahoo! just launched a page where you can manage how they classify your interests based on your search and other activity on the Yahoo! Network.

http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/

Mine was blank, and then I did two searches, one for “powerball” and one for “cars”. These are the categories I am now flagged as being interested in:

Interest Categories:

Automotive

Entertainment

Entertainment > Movies > Animation

Entertainment > Movies > Childrens

So I can see how that the lottery/entertainment categorization could go along with it being a move title etc. But what was odd was then the next list which was “Categories you search:”

At which point I have to say, “huh?” - this is really what I’m searching for with those two keywords? Categorization is dangerous - but it is really difficult to create an ad product that takes keywords as an input because you need tens or hundreds of thousands unless you’re only focusing on the “head” keywords and as we know people don’t only search that way. Fascinating though, now you can do some searches, clear your cookies and start again and see how Yahoo! classifies you. Or opt-out of it all of course.

I’m amazed that a senior executive at a major ad company like The Rubicon Project would write something like this (in their Q3 update):

“Many of these platforms ultimately value all inventory equally, from the New York Times or Sports Illustrated, to a niche Wordpress sports blog,” [JT] Batson [,Rubicon’s EVP of Revenue and Global Development] said. “And for certain ads, that is OK. But publishers correctly argue that a reader seeing an ad against the trusted brand of a well-known site is more valuable than a reader seeing the ad on a site they don’t fully trust.”

Referencing the “agency-backed buying platforms” which presumably encompasses all demand-side aggregators. Any company on the demand side of the display ad business (agency-backed or not) that does value all inventory equally is surely going to fail. Having a set of well-known branded sites in a campaign is certainly going to create more confidence for brand-sensitive advertisers, but that is of course one of many determinants of the value of inventory. Audience, position on page, user frequency, number of other ads on the page — these are all certainly factors in valuing ad inventory.

As I mentioned on CPMa’s blog recently, some very well-known publisher brands appear to be giving themselves liberally to anyone with an ad to show. Those in our business who have real technology and a real understanding of media know that the way we make this business work is to get past the irrational, emotional responses that “nobody cares about my brand” and bring data to the table to support our suppositions.

I was trying to post a comment to this story on Mediapost about newspapers arguing for behavioral targeting online, but it crapped out on me. So i figured I’d post it here:

I believe there should be more disclosure around BT. I also believe if done properly it can provide a lot of lift for advertisers and the ability for publishers to make more money and have a more sustainable business online. There are, however, double standards as applied to online advertising versus what happens in the offline world. When I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times (or most publications), they make money on selling my name and address (PII) and the fact that I’m a subscriber to various third parties. When I get one of these third-party direct mailings sent to me at home based on my address and data-matched to other information about me in various databases out there, I don’t get to find out who gave it up and how.

Consumers already ignore irrelevant mailings offline and irrelevant ads online, and with silicon being cheaper than paper and BT being non-PII, why do we devote so much more attention it seems to this online side of the equation and make it extra hard for the publishers to stay in business?