Nearly two-thirds of all emails now spam Firm warns of lasting damage to internet business as spam rates continue to rise Iain Thomson in San Francisco,
vnunet.com 28 Jul 2004

Sixty-five per cent of all emails sent in June 2004 were spam - up from just eight per cent three years ago, according to email monitoring company Brightmail.

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Post-Impression Purchasing: It's Not Just Gravy Anymore
By Tom Hespos
Wednesday, July 27, 2004

We've known there is more value to an online impression than the click for several years now. But with all the excitement in the industry over immediate click-to-buy action centered on media venues like paid search and contextually-targeted text links, it doesn't hurt to be reminded.

A 1998 report issued by the merged-into-non-existence AdKnowledge taught us that we can expect at least as many online ad conversions as the result of an impression as we can the result of immediate ad clicks. "View-through" became part of the lexicon as soon as we figured out how to track it with cookies. Those conversions that came about as the result of the mere ad view, without a click, came to be known as "non-click conversions." Many online advertisers considered any non-click conversions from their campaigns to be gravy - CPC or CPA vendors didn't get paid for them, but the advertiser did benefit from them.

Yesterday, DoubleClick released two separate reports that show the impact of online advertising over time. Apparently, they're coining a new term for view-through-related back end activity - "in-direct response." The major difference between non-click conversions and in-direct response is that in-direct response is measured by comparing the activity of non-clickers exposed to an ad to the activity of a control group. The measurement of the resultant lift neatly isolates the effect of the online advertising, and it gives us a more accurate picture of what online advertising is worth.

Together with Continental Airlines, DoubleClick launched the study to address a question about non-click conversions that clients have been asking for years - how can we be sure that the conversions attributed to people who have seen an ad were the result of viewing the ad? After all, one can't simply take credit for any conversion attributed to someone who had seen an ad up to 30 days prior to the action. How would we know whether or not the person who was exposed to the ad would have purchased anyway, due to offline advertising or pre-existing brand awareness? This question is a big one for companies like Continental Airlines that have strong brands with or without online advertising. DoubleClick's solution was to employ the exposed/control methodology described earlier.

The DoubleClick study found that just over two-thirds (67.5%) of non-click conversion activity is attributable to online advertising. So while we can't take credit for the purchasing behavior of anyone exposed to an ad, we can take credit for a good-sized chunk of it. Of course, not everyone has the established brand awareness of a company like Continental Airlines, so your mileage may vary.

The study, which I urge you to read thoroughly, shows the effects of the online advertising within a 30-day window, which I'm not going to comment on here. To me, the real impact of DoubleClick's release is that we're gaining insight into the value of an ad impression, regardless of whether anyone actually clicks on the ad or not. DoubleClick's 2Q Ad Serving Trends report, also released yesterday, showed that view-through typically accounts for six times more conversions than post-click activity. If you're counting only conversions that are the result of post-click activity, you're getting only a small piece of the picture. For every one post-click purchase, you might be getting six view-through purchases, at least four of which can be attributed back to your online ads, depending on the strength of your brand.

I'd say that's good news.



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Hi Everyone,

This report was posted in "Just An Online Minute" by Media Post on July 28, 2004. It's more proof that online marketing is a tremendous growth area for online publishers and Quikonnex publishers are well poised to benefit from this growing trend. Here's the clip:

More big numbers were forecasted for online advertising by JupiterResearch. The market researcher projected that online advertising will more than double over the next five years, growing from $6.6 billion in 2003 to $16.1 billion in 2009. Paid search is poised to grow 30 percent compounded annually over the next two years, while display advertising and classifieds will each grow more than 25 percent annually.

Jupiter attributes strong growth rates to improved ad targeting technologies and behavioral marketing techniques.

Meanwhile, Time Warner reported reduced profits for the second quarter. The media giant's America Online division posted a 13 percent increase in profits for the quarter, before depreciation and amortization, and saw a 23 percent jump in ad revenues. That's good news for AOL, though the unit continued to lose subscribers-another 668,000 of them during the second quarter versus the first quarter. Overall revenue for AOL during the quarter rose 10 percent to $10.9 billion.





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Online Ad Spending Poised to Surpass Magazines, Yellow Pages
By Ross Fadner
Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 28, 2004

New Jupiter Research numbers say that the total advertising spend online will match that of print magazines by 2007, and then surpass it in 2008.

According to the new Jupiter Research forecast, set to be unveiled this morning at the Jupiter Media Advertising Forum, marketers will spend $8.4 billion on online advertising this year, growing a massive 45 percent over the next three years to $13.8 billion by 2007, and then $15 billion by 2008. Magazine spending will rise at a more modest rate, from $12.2 billion in 2004 to $13.8 billion in 2007, and finally $14.5 billion in 2008.

Across other media, Jupiter forecasts Yellow Pages spending to hit $17.5 billion, and radio to hit $26.5 billion by 2009.

Jupiter Research analyst Niki Scevak said online advertising will continue its rapid growth pattern as it becomes more performance-driven, to the benefit of publishers, advertisers, and their clients. "There is strong growth in the pricing of advertising," Scevak said. He cited paid search as the key driver of performance advertising, and noted that the trend is now spreading to other online ad platforms. "We've seen the CPM beaten down; price-effectiveness is now measured on a direct sales basis. That translates into calculatable ROI."

Scevak said that the proliferation Web analytics platforms play a key role in this. "Once [advertisers] know the measurement framework, they're willing to spend more."

Carat Interactive executive vice president, creative and technology, Karim Sanjabi adds that analytics will be crucial to the increased migration of ad dollars online. Citing Carat's recent win of Proctor & Gamble's coveted account, Sanjabi says that analytics played a "fundamental" role in driving the advertising giant toward the shop's communications planning division. He says that several of Carat's TV clients have also expressed interest in cross media initiatives involving the Web.

The online industry, he said-which got itself into trouble with empty promises in the past-is finally reaching the point of accountability through the development of Web analytics.

According to Sanjabi, the "serious marketers" have put dollars back into the Internet now that the economy has picked up. "The top 100 advertisers are all taking the Internet very seriously," he said. Based on Carat's own growth projections, Sanjabi said that "in the short term the [Jupiter Research] numbers feel good." He said that Carat's interactive unit sees growth across virtually all of its services, especially search, media and creative, affiliate marketing, and Web development services. . Both Scevak and Sanjabi noted that the Internet is starting to feature in the plans of large brand advertisers. "At the top end, we're seeing renewed confidence, [advertisers are] using the Internet as a branding medium, integrating it in the media mix," said Jupiter's Scevak. Sanjabi highlighted the success of a recent creative developed by Carat Interactive for Adidas. He said the feedback Carat received from consumers for the spot, which is still running on MSN and Yahoo!, was 99 percent positive.

According to Jupiter Research, in 2003 users spent 62 percent of their time online at Google, America Online, Yahoo!, or MSN. These properties also accounted for 51 percent of the overall Internet ad spending in 2003. Sanjabi said that advertisers will continue to allocate dollars to these massive Web properties, but the adoption of newer technologies, like contextual marketing and behavioral targeting will enable marketers to vary their spending on granular, specialized audience segments.



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RSS Gains Traction as More Publishers Offer Feeds
By Ross Fadner
Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2004

Content providers are deploying RSS feeds at a rapid pace these days. Industry insiders maintain that the adoption of the technology by major online publishers like The New York Times Digital, The Wall Street Journal Online, and CNET Networks indicates that RSS could have a major impact on media distribution. In fact, just this week, The Online Journal began offering RSS feeds for the first time, while NYTimes.com brought its RSS operations in-house and expanded the number of feeds to 27.

And yet, most Internet users still have no idea what RSS is. Those that do, claim it will transform the way people consume media.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an electronic feed that sends content to recipients who proactively choose to receive it. Users choose the feed they want from content providers, and then receive the information through RSS readers, or aggregators. RSS readers regularly scan sites to receive feeds in real-time, thereby providing continuously updated content from each site.

RSS is separate from the e-mail pipeline, and since it is 100 percent opt-in, there is no way for a user to receive an RSS feed he or she did not request.

"From a business perspective it's a way of enhancing and expanding communication with your customers," said Michael Gartenberg, VP-Research Director, Jupiter Research. He added that it's a great way to monitor a company, by essentially "subscribing" to its Web site.

Royal Farros, chairman and CEO of MessageCast, a marketing solutions company specializing in real-time networks, adds that RSS is really "a triggering mechanism," a frequently updated file that waits for people to reach out and read.

"Before the end of the year, every major content site will deploy an RSS feed," said Tom Barnes, CEO of Mediathink. "RSS equals more efficiency and less work." That means less work for programmers, less work for content providers, and less work for consumers. But as Barnes noted, it will probably mean more work for marketers.

RSS poses the biggest threat to e-mail marketers. Both Farros and Barnes note that RSS feeds eliminate the need for blacklists and spam filters because users have total control over which messages they receive. "Once you get into the RSS world, you don't have direct control over marketing to your customer-the thing marketers are most afraid of," said MessageCast's Farros.

Jupiter's Gartenberg said that RSS represents an opportunity for marketers, but he too, notes a downside, "right now it's only a one-way communication."

According to Farros, the industry is spending too much time looking for answers to a problem (spam), that is taking years to fix and one that, to date, has largely affected the efforts of legitimate e-mail marketers. He adds that people expect e-mail to work as seamlessly as a telephone conversation, but nearly 40 percent of all in-house lists are blocked. "Today, more and more people are saying, 'I'm just not getting your message,'" he said.

For Farros, RSS and other platforms that use real-time networks are a logical alternative to e-mail marketing. "Here we have a near ubiquitous network that can handle all traffic in a totally authenticated, opt-in, anonymous manner," he said.

However, Mediathink's Barnes believes that the marketing implications of RSS will move beyond e-mail marketing, once the technology reaches critical mass. The first step for marketers, he says, will be to make sure their ads show up when RSS readers download their publishing partners' content feeds.

Barnes adds marketers will need to heavily invest in generating more content themselves, without piggybacking on their content provider partners. In order to retain customers in an RSS world, advertisers may have to produce their own content and send it out via feeds. This will require marketers to refine their tracking technologies and get even more granular, with a better understanding of each individual consumer. Should there be an RSS revolution, he said that it will inevitably require more research on the part of advertisers.

Soon, Barnes says advertisers may need to figure out a way to advertise on RSS readers via interstitials that appear before content is loaded after users click-through to available headlines.

RSS remains in its infancy. In fact, according to the Radio Community Server, which measures the Top 100 Most-Subscribed to RSS Feeds, Wired News is the most subscribed-to feed with a mere 3,128 subscribers.

Several challenges loom for the RSS industry, including resolving how people will pay for RSS feeds. There are also questions about bandwidth. RSS readers continuously troll sites for updated information, and for smaller publishers that don't have several servers, this can cause information to slow down or crash.

According to Farros, the RSS revolution will evolve as consumers continue to take control of their media choices and environments. "Its kind of like Napster, only legal," he said. But even Napster took a little while to catch on.



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NYTimes.com, Other Web Publishers Increase RSS Adoption
By Kate Kaye
Contributing Writer
Thursday, July 22, 2004

As content consumption continues to fragment and 24/7 news cycles are par for the course, more mainstream Internet media outlets are syndicating headlines via RSS, an automated distribution and publishing technology. The New York Times Co.'s NYTimes.com this week broadened its RSS feed offering to 27 categories in the hopes of driving more site traffic, increasing customization and user retention, and building its database of registered users.

"RSS is fairly low cost to implement so we decided to expand the number of feeds," said Christine Mohan, NYTimes.com's associate director of product development. According to Mohan, the RSS feeds generate over one million page views to the site each month.

RSS, an acronym for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, allows lists of information or feeds to be published and distributed to subscribers automatically. There are several RSS aggregators or news reader tools available for use on multiple platforms including Windows, Apple, Linux, and Palm. In February, MarketingSherpa estimated that a quarter of a million users worldwide have downloaded news reader software.

Through RSS technology, users accessing news reader applications can link to regularly updated Times content, and site publishers can add Times headlines and summaries to their own site content. New Times feed categories include Editorials/Op-Ed, Most E-mailed Articles, Magazine and Multimedia, as well as Campaign 2004 and Times on the Trail political coverage. Visitors can now download any and all feeds listed through the RSS section of NYTimes.com or at the bottom of each site page. The feeds will also be promoted at the upper right hand corner of site pages.

Popular sites including The Christian Science Monitor's csmonitor.com, Salon.com, BBC News, MSN Slate Magazine, CBS MarketWatch, Time.com, Wired News, and CNETNews.com all offer RSS feeds of their headlines. NYTimes.com's sister site, Boston.com also began offering RSS news feeds for Logan International Airport's new WiFi service in June.

WashingtonPost.com launched RSS feeds last fall, and while traffic propelled through the feeds continues to grow, the offering remains in the testing phase. "We're really just watching it right now," explained Eric Easter, Senior Manager of Communications at WashingtonPost.com. The publisher plans to promote its feeds through a contest inviting readers to choose the best political blogs; the contest will involve outreach to bloggers credentialed to cover the National Democratic and Republican Conventions.

Still, the term RSS remains gibberish to many of those outside the tech community and so-called blogosphere, where RSS feeds gained popularity by enabling readers of blogs to keep up with the latest posts to their favorite blog sites. Installing newsreader programs is one obstacle for the less tech savvy. And perhaps a more formidable barrier to RSS adoption cited by insiders is a lack of comprehensive directories of RSS feeds. Some, however, do exist, including BlogStreet, a site that lists and categorizes close to 2,000 blog sites enabling RSS feeds, and Syndic8.com, a warehouse for RSS and Atom feeds (a similar technology) that counts 7,725 registered users and 128,647 total feeds. Among Syndic8.com's top most viewed feeds are news headline aggregation site Moreover, techie favorite Slashdot, and Wired News.

In addition to providing feeds of its news content, Yahoo! is currently testing a My Yahoo! feature that enables users to display RSS feed headlines on their personalized My Yahoo! pages. The latest version of the Opera Web browser also now supports RSS feeds in its built-in e-mail client.

"The adoption profile of RSS technology is substantial," Tom Barnes indicated, CEO at Mediathink, a marketing services firm that recently published a white paper entitled "RSS-The Next Big Thing Online." He believes no matter how frequently publishers update their content, they need to think about deploying RSS because they will "have to generate more content to maintain people's attention and maintain meaning."



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ISPs Selected By Spam Control Effectiveness

New survey results presented At the Gartner IT Security Summit 2004 show that despite the effort and expense that Internet service providers (ISPs) are devoting to anti-spam measures, consumers still receive tremendous amounts of unsolicited online content. According to the survey, approximately one of every three online households reported that 75 percent or more of their e-mail was spam. Betsy Burton, research vice president for Gartner, said "Consumer concern about spam is a significant factor in consumers' choice of an ISP. If another ISP could do a better job of stopping spam at the same price as their current ISP, 11 percent of online households said they would switch to the ISP that was better. Another 42 percent... said they would be more likely to switch than not."

According to the survey:

23 percent of online households believe that their ISP is not at all successful (in controlling spam effectively) 7 percent believe that their ISP is extremely successful. Enterprises that use e-mail marketing or list management for mass mailings online are often viewed negatively, as spammers:

when their e-mails are not solicited by recipients recipients are not members of a clearly defined target group that matches the e-mail content. You can find out more HERE.



The above article was found in the July 21, 2004 issue of Research Brief by the Center for Media Research. It is reprinted here based on permissions at the end of that email newsletter issue, which are as follows:
We welcome and appreciate forwarding of our newsletters in their entirety or in part with proper attribution. ©2004 MediaPost Communications, 16 W. 19th St., New York, NY 10011

Some news on the spam front.

New York's anti-spam attorney general Eliot Spitzer announced a settlement with Scott Richter and his company, OptInRealBig.com. Richter, known as the "spam king," will pay $50,000 in fines and abstain from using fraudulent headers and deceptive routing and domain practices. The settlement calls for Richter to provide the attorney general's office with customer data and purchase records and copies of his company's e-mail ads.

The case is a landmark and is sure to be used as an example for other state attorney generals going after spammers.

The suit, filed in December 2003, charged Richter and his clients with sending unsolicited e-mails including phony headers and subject lines. Richter got off easily some contend, as he had been facing a $20 million fine.

In addition, a federal judge in California awarded Microsoft $4 million after finding that David Khoshnood and Pointcom violated laws against used deceptive e-mail and Web addresses. Khoshnood and Pointcom can no longer use domain names such as "hottmail.com," "wwwwindows.com," and "microsoftc.com," among other Microsoft terms. The Seattle-based computer giant has initiated some 60 lawsuits against spammers in recent months and has achieved several legal victories.

Tobi Elkin
Executive Editor
MediaPost Communications

Are You Losing Sales Because Of Your Email Link?
©Copyright 2004 Steve Shaw

I don't know about you, but I get dozens of emails daily with completely blank subject lines. The vast majority contain viruses or spam messages, and due to an overloaded inbox and the impracticality of going through each message individually, I tend to delete these suspects automatically en masse, in the same way that I delete other messages containing subject lines that scream spam.

This practice has in the past cost me sales as occasionally I missed important messages from prospects. If a prospect was taking the time to email me, they were likely to be very interested in purchasing the software - the last thing I wanted to do was miss their message when it arrived. Not only did I miss a possible initial sale, it also left them with a bad impression and they would be likely to steer clear of my products in the future.

Also, existing customers would sometimes send me emails with a blank subject line requesting support - the consequent lack of response at my end because of the blank subject line could lead to requests for refunds that could have been avoided had I seen their email and responded in my usual way. This also led to the loss of potential future sales of other products that they might have otherwise been interested in.

All in all, important missed emails like this can be very costly.

I have therefore since implemented a very simple strategy on my web site to reduce this risk, and help to ensure that these important messages reach me and actually get opened and responded to in my usual quick way.

It involves a simple adjustment of HTML that takes just seconds.

After looking around several other web sites marketing products and services, it's likely that they could benefit from the same easy-to-implement strategy.

Here is what I used to have in place.

On my web site, I include an email address where prospects and customers can reach me. It's a clickable email address, i.e. when the email address link is clicked, it opens an empty email ready to send to me - to achieve this, the anchor tag previously contained the following HTML:
href="mailto:support@popupmaster.com"

The only problem was that prospects, and perhaps customers, would click this link, enter their message, and send the email without ever filling in the subject line.

I have since implemented a very simple change, that makes it a lot easier for them, and helps to ensure that I respond to their message when it arrives in my inbox. All I did was adjust the HTML code for the email link so that an specific subject line is automatically inserted into the email. I can now easily recognize the email when it arrives, and ensure it is filtered correctly.

Here is an example of the replacement code that I now use in my email anchor tags:
href="mailto:support@popupmaster.com?subject=PopUpMaster_que stion"

This simple adjustment prefills the subject line and ensures there will be little chance I will miss their email when it arrives. Consequently my prospects and customers are happier, and my business gains in strength.

By including a suitable subject in the mailto: links on your web site, you can achieve the same positive effect for your own business.

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Steve Shaw develops software and systems for effective e-marketing. His PopUpMaster Pro software at http://popupmaster.com
www.eCommerceHomeBiz.com

creates popups that beat the popup blockers and which are compatible with Google Adwords.

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