The MPAA cracks down on guerrilla video sites
June 28th, 2007 | Posted by Tara Bartley
The Motion Picture Association of America has filed suit against two guerilla video sites, YouTVpc.com and Peekvid.com, as reported in the WSJ today. Both sites offer menus of all different kinds of video inlcuding television shows and movies. When you find what you’re looking for, you simply click on it and the video plays in the site’s players.
YouTVpc.com claims that they’re not violating any copyright laws because the content is uploaded and stored by others, often outside of the US. One of the site’s co-founders, Mr. Martinez was interviewed for a WSJ article back in April and said that before launching YouTVpc.com, ”he was frustrated that there were few options for watching TV shows and films on the Web….also, TV commercials annoyed him.” It seems to me that there are plenty of options for watching both TV and movies online. And “advertising annoys him”? Does Mr. Martinez understand that both the TV and the movie industry are profitable industries? Where does he think the profits come from?
I recently attended a seminar sponsored by the Online Publisher Association about the results of an online video advertising study that the association had conducted. I’m also certain that it was said during the seminar…”almost all of the participants of this survey understand that there’s always going to be some form of advertising if they’re watching the videos for free”.
Surely Mr. Martinez understands this as well since YouTVpc.com has it’s own advertising.
Advertising gets personal
June 12th, 2007 | Posted by Todd Boes
There are a lot of interesting online ad-related reports being written lately. Today is no exception. Media Post wrote about eMarketer’s recent online advertising report - “Behavorial Targeting: Advertising Gets Personal”. The report predicts that behavorial targeted online advertising will nearly double from $575 million in 2007 to $1 billion in 2008 - and almost quadruple to $3.8 million in 2011. Wow.
The author, eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman, explains that more analytical technologies that go beyond one-to-one relationships are needed. He’s quoted as saying…”Instead of an assumed direct correspondence between consumer actions and preferences, target audiences will be identified based on subtler and more effective extrapolations from behavior to intent.” An example in the report from Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda: “These methods can determine that if you’re looking at reviews of romantic movies, and you live in an urban area, you’re likely to rent a car that weekend.” That’s pretty cool.
The Table of Contents lists that the report discusses Factors that would make online video ads more “pleasurable” according to consumers, which is useful information. It would also be interesting to learn how the more pleasurable online video ads will become behavorially targeted.
