How Apple Plans to Make You Watch Ads With Cheap TV Shows [Apple]

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/Wa0AKAq9UtE/how-apple-plans-to-make-you-watch-ads-with-cheap-tv-shows

An Apple patent worth gawking at, given its grander ambitions for advertising, iTunes and TV subscriptions: It details a way to make you watch ads embedded into video content, like say, a free or cheap TV show.

Conceptually, it's not too dissimilar from what you see with Hulu, actually—essentially, in order to unlock further segments of the video, you have to watch an ad. You know, just like real TV worked, before DVRs!

The patent goes in-depth about how ads would be embedded with content that could be downloaded to multiple devices—like an iPhone or iPad—how it'd react to trying to jump ahead of the ad, and gathering statistics about how the ad was viewed or interacted with.

The reason it's interesting, primarily, is that Apple's reportedly been heavily pitching networks both on selling TV shows for cheap—99 cents—and signing on to an iTunes TV subscription service that would bundle a selection of TV shows from major networks for 30 bucks a month, like say, Gossip Girl from CBS. The networks have been cool to both suggestions, given that TV's expensive to produce and stuff.

Ads, especially ones with detailed usage statistics (and maybe demographics), would help make up the revenue lost by offering shows for a buck, and make $30 subscription a lot more palatable, and possibly even offset the screams of cable operators watching content dance out the door and maybe onto the cloud.

The retrenchment of the old timeline model of television with interstitial advertising in the age of the DVRs, where we can create any timeline we want as we watch, is one of the more curious developments of networks groping for new ways to make money off of old media on new devices. What's old is new is old again, apparently.

Oh, and Apple's patent illustrators apparently like Charlie from Lost. [Patently Apple via 9to5Mac]

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The Wait Is Almost Over: iPad Sales Start April 3, Pre-Orders Start March 12 (AAPL)

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Steve Jobs iPad iPhone MacBook

Get in line now kiddies, Apple's wi-fi version of the iPad is hitting U.S. stores on Saturday, April 3, the company relayed today.

If you're not the line-waiting type, you can pre-order the iPad starting in one week, on March 12. Then you'll be able to saunter into an Apple store and just pick it up.

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Bing’s Facebook Page Gets 400,000 New Fans in a Day Through Ad Offer in Farmville

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InsideFacebook/~3/476aK0c7Hjk/

In the latest example of brand advertising integrated into social games, Microsoft ran an advertising offer for Bing within Zynga’s hit game FarmVille on Tuesday. If users became a fan of Bing’s Facebook Page by clicking on a sponsored ad on the bottom right of the FarmVille main page, they’d receive 3 Farm Cash (FarmVille’s virtual currency). The effort was apparently successful, as Bing’s page went from slightly more than 100,000 fans on Monday to more than 500,000 as of earlier today.

FarmVille has 83.1 million monthly active users, and 28.7 million daily active users on Tuesday, according to AppData. So only about 1.5% of all FarmVille users participated in the 24 hours that the campaign ran. This engagement number is pretty good, especially if you’re a page administrator looking for a quick way to get more fans, or, say, a search engine trying to educate the public about your alternative to Google.

Bing also made an effort to make the action relevant to the game’s players. The sponsored ad (here), which used SocialVibe’s brand engagement ad service, directed users to become fans of the Page, mentioning that “whether you want to buy a horse or a tree, Bing can help you decide!” Bing also posted a status update to its Page earlier today, reiterating the message — “Any FarmVille fans out there? Try using Bing to get the most out of your crops and animals.” It linked to Bing search results for “farmville animals,” encouraging players who wanted to look for more information about the game would use it instead of Google. As most Bing Facebook fans today came in through FarmVille, the update was heavily commented and liked.

Other forms of advertising within games have typically run within offer walls, which include direct payment options for virtual currency as well as advertising offers. The number of users who do any sort of payment or offer is generally low, from 1% up. But that stat typically reflects the portion of users over the lifetime of a game. This was just for one day.

It appears that users do in fact appreciate advertising, and offers in particular, when they’re easy to find and clearly valuable. FarmVille-focused blog FarmVille Freak noted the Bing campaign in a post yesterday, and polled its readers to see what they thought. The question was: “Will you be clicking the Bing FarmVille Sponsored Link?” The possible answers were “Yes, I love Farm Cash!,” “No, I hate Bing! Long live Google!” and “Maybe, would like the Farm Cash, not Bing!” So far, 68% of respondents, or more than 3,500 people, have vote for the first option. Granted, readers of a blog about a social game are probably more interested in Farm Cash than the average player, but still an interesting data point.

In any case, expect many more ads that integrate a brand goal into an incentivized action in a game. SocialVibe has already been running branded engagement ads in Zynga games, as we’ve covered; it’s currently providing all of the offers in PetVille’s offer wall, for example. Other companies are getting into providing branded offers, too, from established offer companies like TrialPay to newer ones like gWallet to traditional in-game advertising companies like WildTangent.

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Google Launching New System To Index Content In Real Time

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Power of Now

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.

Last Fall we were told by Google's Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years. Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.

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REVEALED: Facebook's 2009 Revenue Breakdown

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Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Photos

Facebook's revenue came in at $650 million last year, and is expected to reach $1.1 billion by the end of this year, Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook reports.

How is the company doing it? Eldon breaks it out:

  • $225 million from brand ads
  • $50 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft
  • $10 million from virtual goods
  • $350 million from performance ads.

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Watch Out, iPhone Devs: One-Man Android App Nets $13K Monthly

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To all those companies and developers focused exclusively on iPhone apps: Watch your back. The Android platform is catching up, and none too slowly.

As Android's growth continues to explode since the release of the Droid, only the most foolish of app shops are not planning to expand beyond Apple's walled garden. One developer, in fact, wrote that his app, which was showing modest, double-digit daily sales late last year, now reports that his app is making $13,000 a month.

When that kind of opportunity exists for a single app, why would developers put all their eggs in one basket, a.k.a. the "Jesus phone"?

Sponsor

A few weeks ago, we told you, "As of December 2009[...] 4 percent of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200 percent since the previous survey released in September.

"Respondents were also asked about their plans to purchase a smartphone in the future. Among those who planned to purchase within the next 90 days, 21 percent said they would now choose Android."

It's this growth that helped fuel the success of Eddie Kim's app, Car Locator.

In a blog post today, the developer revealed that his Android app "started as a little side-project while I was vacationing with my family, turned into a few extra bucks for lunch money every day[...] has continued its upward trend and is now beyond my wildest fantasy of what could have been possible. "

Car Locator is a pretty simple application: Users save their location when they park their cars, and the app navigates them back to their cars later. The app was available in free and paid versions with varying feature sets. The paid version originally sold for $1.99, and the price was later increased to $3.99. Kim has done no marketing for the app, but it did win third place in Google's Android Developer Challenge 2.

When Motorola's Droid was released, Kim saw his first major spike in sales:

android app

"In the first 2 months, the app saw sales of about $5-6/day. Nothing too fancy," he wrote. "But starting November 7, there's been a significant uptick in sales, peaking on November 9, where the app saw $44 in sales. Sales have since settled to about $20/day, but it's probably too early to tell if this will hold."

Little did Kim realize that his sales had just begun. To date, the free app has been downloaded 70,000 times, with paid app sales at about 10 percent of that figure.

"The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine's Day. Too bad I didn't have a Valentine's date this year - we would've gone somewhere real special!" (Catch that, ladies?)

Kim also stands by the Android platform, saying, "Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands[...] However, I still think that Android is only a fraction of what it will eventually become. Each release of a new Android handset gets me excited, as it means a wider reach for the Marketplace."

Folks, if you've been longing for a much-hyped app to make its way to the Android Market, forward this article to the developers and marketers in charge. There's money to be made there, and the userbase is only getting bigger.

Discuss

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Google Awarded Broad Patent For Location-Based Advertising

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/FUBbJMO3yqw/Google-Awarded-Broad-Patent-For-Location-Based-Advertising

Mashable has a report of a patent that just issued (6-1/2 years after filing) — apparently Google now has a lock on location-based advertising. It's not clear that the search company intends to assert the patent against any other companies (such as emerging rival Apple), but it's useful as leverage. Here is the patent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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