purple motes

YouTube is currently selling ads against less than 3% of its inventory. YouTube's advertising revenue is likely to total about $200 million for 2008. One explanation for YouTube's relatively poor advertising performance is that advertisers are concerned about what appears around their ads:

Some big advertisers, [Sean Muzzy, media director at Neo@Ogilvy, a digital ad agency owned by WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather] says, haven't been comfortable that their ads might appear next to amateur videos. [WSJ]

In at least one major hotel in the DC metro area, CNN is projected onto the mirror in front of the sink in the men's room. That puts persons in the position of watching television ads while they are washing their hands in immediate preparation for leaving. These circumstances don't seem like good positioning for advertising.

Better advertising positioning would be on the inside of toilet-stall doors. Sitting on the toilet is similar to the position and time-relations for traditional television-watching. In the past, television has conceded toilet time to newspapers. In today's highly competitive media market, that doesn't make good business sense. You should expect to see television moving into the toilet.

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The proposed U.S. federal government budget for 2009 cuts funding for the American Time Use Survey. The survey program costs $6 million per year to administer for its full sample design. That seems to me to be a small amount to spend for high-quality, publicly available data very relevant for understanding value generation in the digital economy, long-term changes in media use, and key current issues in the communications industry.

You can sign a letter here to support restoring funding for the American Time Use Survey. Doing so won't take much of your time.

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