Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler
Catching Up In Prague
I am in Prague at the CEPIC trade show for the stock photo industry. Prague is a delightful city --- but I think I am more of a fan of Budapest (where I was earlier in the week). If you ever get a chance, visit both of these wonderful cities and make the drive from one to the other.
Lots of meetings for our Images business have taken place the last few days. Readers know that Jupitermedia has become a stock photo powerhouse in the two years since we acquired ArtToday.com in June 2003. We purchased 6 companies and several photo collections in this timeframe and have become the largest owner of digitized royalty free photos in the world.
My business day might be involved with Images in Prague, but I try to keep up with all phases of the Net while on the road.
I noticed that Gannett (publisher of USA Today and other newspapers) spent $100 million buying a company that was new to me --- Point Roll. Point Roll has something called mouse over mini-site technology that allows advertisers to receive measurable impact from ad campaigns. I have no idea about the viability of the product but one has to be impressed that old line newspaper company Gannett is laying out $100 million big ones for Internet ad technology!
And when does somebody buy Doug Stevenson's VibrantMedia? I saw Doug the other day in New York City. He just moved his operations from San Francisco to the Big Apple (but far away from his native Scotland). Vibrant is on a roll (not a roll point!) as the previous year has seen the company grow from a roster of 100 publishing deals to more than 550. Vibrant's contextual ad product is serving, according to Doug, about 5 billion user-initiated links every quarter. It will be interesting to see how long Vibrant can remain independent?
And back to Dr. Weil. I posted the other day about my inability to get DrWeil.com from sending me their daily email newsletter. Finally I protested to every editor linked on the site, and now I no longer receive the newsletter. I am glad that I finally scored with the DrWeil team.
These big newspaper publishers don't get the online world. That's obvious.
I hope that Point Roll purchase pays off for Gannett, although I can't see how it will over the long term. Why? Because they are essentially buying technology that delivers hi-tech pop-up ads. I think it's pretty clear what users think about ads that block content and navigation. Example: I used to go to weather.com to check the latest forecast. I no longer visit the site because of it's liberal use of pop-ups, pop-unders and Point Roll ads. Same goes with certain areas of Yahoo.
In short, I can't see how overlaying ads on top of content can possibly be a winning strategy over the long term. There's a reason why Google does billions in ad sales, and it's not because they are using formats to "get a user's attention".
Speaking of stock photos, is the business of stock video being developed? The still image will always be significant, but streaming footage will likely become the primary content more and more in many realms in the years to come.
I am working with a group of Elon University students this fall to try to put together a multimedia addition to the popular "Imagining the Internet" predictions site (http://www.elon.edu/predictions), which was funded by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
These seniors in broadcast and film would like to find still photos and video clips of internet pioneers to use to make a short film for the site - preferably video clips of people such as Alan Meckler, Bill Gates, Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Bell and the like making prescient statements that we could add to this non-p-profit, history site.
If anyone knows a way for us to track down free snippets of predictive footage or free still photos on which we could superimpose predictors' statements, we'd be thankful for their help.
And, by the way, the stock video business is going to be booming big-time as soon as broadband becomes cheaper and faster.