So Here's What People Do On The Internet All Day

As if we didn't know already:

People in the U.S. who go online spend more time on average perusing social networks than watching online video. But what else is eating up time: email.

GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau conducted an online survey in the U.S. as part of a digital-video report ahead of the advertising “upfronts” and the web video “NewFronts.”  Statista created the chart from the report’s data, which was published in April.

People surveyed said they spent about an average of 37 minutes a day on social networks like Facebook and Twitter in 2013, according to the survey. Emailing clocked in at a robust 29 minutes, while watching online video — everything from TV shows and movies to amateur video and shorter professionally produced clips — was 23 minutes.

The report found that while people doubled the amount of time they spent watching online video over the past four years, the overall percentage of their online time spent watching video slipped to 12% in 2013 from 13% the year before. (Overall time online is rising, largely driven by mobile.)  The average number of minutes watching video, emailing and reading newspapers online all slipped. What are people doing more of? Reading blogs, gaming and listening to the radio all saw increases

Article by Brian R. Fitzgerald from the WSJ

Dissecting a proper media kit

We have already talked about how to work on online advertising deals on CPM or CPA basis and even discussed working as an affiliate. What are the next steps? How do you move forward with actually launching an online marketing campaign?

Well the first step is to identify the best websites to advertise on and in order to do that you will need to make an informed decision on which websites are best. That't where a website's Media Kit comes into play. Mind you that a good Media Kit is also important to website owners and publishers as this is what they will use in order to justify the amount of money they are asking advertisers to pay in their rate cards, so regardless if you are buying or selling online advertising ... pay attention below :)

So what is a Media Kit?

A Media Kit is a document or presentation that contains all of the the key information you will need in order to buy advertising on that website. This includes (but is not limited to) information on available media, banner ad sizes, total number of visitors, hits, page views, impressions as well as demographic and geographical information about the website audience and traffic. It also usually contains information about ad specifications like file size, dimensions, submission guidelines and any possible limitations etc.

A quick breakdown of the above and why these are important:

• Available media: Well this is an easy one, basically lists out all the available advertising formats, sizes and spots that the publisher has available to sell. This will include the page on the site that the media will be displayed, the number of impressions the media usually gets, how much inventory is still available for sale, etc. Some types of media are Run Of Site (ROS) which basically means that the same ad type/size appears randomly throughout the site and not just on specific pages of your choosing (quick note: ROS ads are usually cheaper than page specific ads). 
• Demographic: Information regarding the size and characteristics of a the audience of the website such as their age, sex, income, education, size of household, disposable income, etc.
• Geographical: Information on the geographical distribution of the audience of the website. It usually offers a breakdown of the audience numbers by county or for local websites by city, state or even area code. This can sometimes include information on preferred language of communication.
• Impressions: The number of times a banner ad was requested and presumably seen by users.
• Unique Visitors: A term used to describe the total number of visitors to a website over a certain time period. Not to be confused with visits as a unique visitor can generate multiple visits over the specified time period.
• Pageviews: The number of pages the average users (or visitor) will view on the website during a standard session.
• Web Analytics information: With today's web analytics software you can get very detailed analysis about user behavior on websites and as such more and more publishers seem to share a lot more data on what they think advertisers might like to know about their audience. In some cases you may even request specific data that is only important to you to be included.
• Rate card: This is a very important bit of information that is usually included in media kits, as the name suggests, these are the rates that the publisher will ask you to pay in order to advertise on the various spots available on their website.

Reviewing the above information should provide you with all the information you require to make a well informed, educated, decision on whether or not advertising on a particular website is a good idea or not. It will help you judge if you can reach your target audience, in your target market and also give you an idea of what would be the most cost effective way to deliver your ad that audience. This makes planning and budgeting much easier. Last thing to remember about buying media after reviewing a media kit is that you should never pay Rate Card prices. Always negotiate and always push the publisher down on advertising rates. This is not only expected, but it has become so common that most rate cards are bloated just for the sake of accommodating discounts.

Why its good to be Google!

Here's a look at net revenue per user for a basket of big internet sites from digital media analyst Ian Maude. 

As you can see, it's good to be Google! It has a magic money machine called search that drums up more money per user than anyone else. That's why the next two biggest sites on the chart, Yandex and Baidu, are also search engines. 

This is why Microsoft tried so hard to make Bing a dominant search engine. It's also part of the reason Facebook keeps flirting with search.

Chart via Statista. Original article via Businessinsider 

The only chart you need to see to know what is Alibaba and why its IPO will be huge

Chinese internet juggernaut Alibaba has filed for an IPO. It had net income of $2.9 billion on revenues of $6.5 billion for the nine month period ending December 2012.

This chart from Quartz is the easiest way to fully understand the size and scope of Alibaba. As you can see, Alibaba is a sprawling company that does a lot of stuff.

Information for this post from Business Insider and Quartz.