An Ode to the Web: Masha Geller’s take on the week’s happenings in Interactive.
What a week! A new Pope has been elected, Berlusconi resigned (sort of), Condoleezza Rice spent some time schmoozing with the Russians and NASA moved the launch date of space shuttle Discovery back by a week. The mainstream media is having such a good time covering all these events that reporters seem almost desperate to find one last angle or one last “expert source” to comment on the issues so they can extend their blissful state of “reporting live from [insert beautiful and peaceful location here.]”
For the first time ever, I had the opportunity to watch a major global event -- the “Habemus Papam” announcement -- being covered by every medium except outdoor from the comfort of my living room couch, and it turned out to be a great example of just how far the internet has come as a news source in the last three years or so.
First, at 11:50 a.m., there was smoke coming out of the Sistine Chapel chimney. Half a dozen CNN analysts couldn’t decide if it was black or white, but the crowd was cheering, so the cameras of every news station (except network -- they had soap operas) focused on the bell that would toll in the event of a final decision. The bell started ringing at 12:04 p.m., and that’s when it got interesting.
Not knowing the name of the man the College of Cardinals chose as John Paul II’s successor, cable news stations and news radio filled the next few minutes with speculation from various Vatican experts, as they’ve come to be known, while the web went to work disseminating the news.
CNN was the first to update their website with a full story about the decision at 12:13 p.m. A Reuters News Alert came into my cell phone at 12:15, with an AP News Alert following at 12:16. (Just to be clear, I have no Rain Man tendencies -- I was purposely logging this stuff.) At this point, Fox News and MSNBC websites had scrolling “BREAKING NEWS: White Smoke, Bells Ring in Vatican” alerts over older stories of the cardinals being unable to reach a decision the night before, as did The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. To my surprise, CBSNews.com and ABCNews.com also posted the same alert within about three minutes, as did AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! News and MSN Messenger. What that meant was that just about anybody in the world who was online at this time saw the news almost as it happened.
When the name of Cardinal Ratzinger finally came to light, the reaction of the news sites was almost immediate, and that’s when I noticed that friends I was chatting with who were following the story online knew much more about the new Pope than those who were following the election via TV or radio. Why? The online news sources quickly linked to every bit of Ratzinger background in existence, offering a nearly complete portrait of this new leader. Television and radio followed the announcement with interviews of passersby and panoramic views of St. Peter’s square.
Somehow that made me really proud to be a part of this industry, especially when I thought back to September of 2001 -- when the internet didn’t yet have enough power to inform the world of what was happening, let alone offer background. How far we’ve all come since then!
That completes my Ode to the Web. Let’s move on to actionable information, shall we?
Based on all of the above, it should come as no surprise that newspaper sites are doing quite well. Major newspaper companies, including The New York Times and Knight Ridder, said this week that advertiser demand for their online properties is strong. At the Times, online ad growth actually outpaced the 3.2 percent ad rise for the overall company. Maybe that’ll make Times executives think twice about converting NYTimes Digital to a subscription model, as Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. suggested recently.
It should also come as no surprise that religion was the third-largest gaining category in March, posting gains of 22 percent over February, according to this week’s comScore release.
The next three items are promised updates on things I’ve written about for the last few weeks:
First, it looks like the one-time dotcom darling may have found another buyer after putting itself on the auction block more than five months ago. Reports are flying all over the web that DoubleClick is nearing an agreement to be sold to San Francisco-based buyout firm Hellman & Friedman (which is heavily invested in Young & Rubicam and Digitas, among about 50 others) in a potential deal that could be worth around $1.2 billion. Based on its current stock price, DoubleClick has a market capitalization of $926.45 million and the company is $135 million in debt -- quite a change from 2002, when the company boasted a market cap of $12 billion.
Exact terms of the transaction are unclear as no one is willing to comment. According to all the reports I’ve seen, there is no guarantee that a deal will be reached. Apparently, two other firms -- General Atlantic Partners and Cerberus Capital Management -- could also be interested. We’ll keep you posted. (You can read Roger Park's news coverage of this story here.)
I still say AOL should be watched very closely.
My second update is on the missing cookie saga, started by Jupiter Research a few weeks back. aQuantive's Atlas Institute this week agreed with Jupiter in that 43 percent of web users delete cookies from their computers on a weekly basis. But, that would mean that the lifespan of a cookie on those computers would be about seven days, right? Not so, dear friends! Atlas found that the average lifespan of a cookie on those respondents’ computers is 45 days. Similarly, the 14 percent of survey respondents who told Atlas they erase cookies monthly had cookies living an average of not 30, but 59 days.
Bottom line? The missing cookie problem is not as much of a problem as Jupiter would have us believe. As Young-Bean Song, director of analytics at aQuantive, wrote in the report, "what people say and what they do is often not the same."
And finally, Scot McLernon is back, as we all knew he would be. This week he was named senior vice president of advertising for CBS Digital Media. Welcome back!
Next week: Ad:Tech in San Francisco.
iMedia editor-at-large Masha Geller is the founder of interactive marketing and corporate communications consultancy Geller Public Relations in New York. She has been covering the interactive advertising industry since 1999 as the former editor-in-chief of MediaPost.com, and is a widely published thought leader in the interactive arena.