"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
The excellent Tom Slee (aka. Whimsley) has been on my blogroll for some time. Tom writes longish posts about a range of interesting topics – at the moment he’s in the middle of a dissertation about whether Amazon’s recommendation service really does help unknown authors to find an audience and side-step the ‘evil’ publishing business … Read more
Now if that headline doesn’t get me some search ranking juice, nothing will – though my contextual ads (left) are likely to be less impressed. I was going to post this earlier in the week, but Eric Peterson’s swashbuckling defense of cookies (and my hand-wringing response) intervened. As it turns out, though, that debate is … Read more
Eric Peterson has an impassioned post on his blog in which he defends the Obama Administration’s decision to use persistent cookies for tracking behavior on the Whitehouse.gov site. He directs particular ire at an article by Chris Soghoian at CNET from November which questioned whether it was a smart move for the (then) Obama Transition … Read more
Chatter is building on the interwebs about Omniture’s recent (and ongoing) latency woes. Looks like both SiteCatalyst and Discover are days behind in processing data (according to messages on Twitter, up to around 5 – 7 days in some cases). And it looks like the situation is still getting worse, rather than better. I have … Read more
As if we weren’t all feeling gloomy enough already, PubMatic has just released its Q4 2008 Ad Price Index report, which makes for sobering reading. For those of you not familiar with PubMatic, they provide “multi-network optimization” for publishers who are looking to maximize the yield on their remnant ad inventory (i.e. the inventory the … Read more
I was checking my blog stats last week and noticed and noticed that I had a sudden spike in traffic in the week of Thanksgiving (yes, I know, I should check my numbers more often, but I have a day job): A quick glance at my favorite web analytics tool revealed that the culprit … Read more
Those smarty-smart smart people at Stanford (which gave us Sergey and Larry, Sun, and, ahem, Jerry) have developed some software to make it possible to insert dynamic images or videos inside the environment of another video. I’m not talking about pre-rolls, post-rolls or overlays here; the inserted images/movies (which could of course be ads) are … Read more
After his breathless article last year, proclaiming Google Analytics to be something like a cross between the second coming and Barack Obama, Brandt Dainow seems to have soured on the big G, proclaiming this week that GA contains ‘disturbing inaccuracies’: Google Analytics is different from other products in that it has been intentionally designed by … Read more
Yes, it’s time for another Online Ad Business 101 post. This post deals with one of the players that I left out of my first post about the online advertising value chain: Ad Exchanges. If you don’t know what an ad exchange is, now’s the time to learn, since these little-known companies (most of which … Read more
Ok, it’s not quite Omniture acquiring TouchClarity, but I was delighted to read yesterday that my old pals at Foviance have secured the services of none other than Neil Mason through the acquisition of his company, Applied Insights. Neil (whose ClickZ column you should read) has been flying the flag for web analytics – especially … Read more