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The Social Web Economy: Ad Networks & Sales Teams Posted: 16 Oct 2008 11:20 AM CDT This is a continuation in the series “The Social Web Economy“ Ad networks are the primary source of revenue for most of the product companies on the social web. While some companies have their own internal sales team, the majority of the product companies rely on these ad networks to manage most of their sales. They are too small to handle this part of their operations. Smaller media companies also frequently outsource their ad sales to an advertising network. Distribution companies and social web agencies typically have their own in house sales team and as such they are not in need of outsourcing their sales operations. Frequently distribution companies and agencies will build their own advertising networks to manage their advertising distribution. Sales teams are important because they are able to negotiate higher CPMs. For product companies, advertising dollars are redistributed from the advertisers through the sales teams to their companies at lower rates since the ad networks/sales teams have taken a cut. On the social web the majority of companies generate their revenue through advertising. I am regularly critical of the lack of traditional business models on the social web. Regardless, advertisers continue to put advertising dollars into this space. Each product company and platform in the social web economy tends to have their own type of advertising which ultimately conflicts with one another. For example, some chat platforms provide advertisers with the ability measure the conversational impact of an advertising campaign run on their platform. Facebook measures conversations as well in their new video advertising solution. There's feed advertising and other forms as well all which in my own opinion end up confusing the advertiser more. Back in August when I wrote about the state of social advertising, I highlighted the challenges presented by inconsistent offerings among these companies. While social advertising cannot currently compete with search, an increasing amount of advertising dollars continues to pour into this space. A substantial portion of this money is going directly to the sales teams and ad networks. Not such a bad place to be! Next in this series: “The Social Web Economy: Analytics Companies”

As Expected SGN Launches iBaseball Posted: 16 Oct 2008 08:49 AM CDT Earlier this month I wrote that SGN is finding success with their iPhone applications. At the time I mentioned that iBaseball would surely be the next game. Looks like that prediction came true pretty quickly. Today the company announced the release of iBaseball and as with the others, this first version is definitely a basic version of the application. You start off the game by pitching either curveballs or fastballs and attempting to strike out 3 batters (as in normal baseball). The pitch appears to be relatively sensitive to the angle of the phone. The one thing that was annoying was that accidentally clicking the button on the side of the phone ended up pushing the application back to the home screen. Once you finish pitching the ball at insanely fast speeds (I was able to manage pitching at 116 miles per hour), it’s your turn to bat. Batting is pretty straightforward and definitely simple. Just watch the ball come down toward the plate and swing at the appropriate time. While simple, I wasn’t too successful at it. I hit around 6 balls across 3 batters. It’s definitely interesting to see SGN rolling out one Wii-like game after the other, all of which have so far been at least number one on the chart at some point soon after launch. So far iBaseball has not been a hit but I’m guessing within the next 24 hours we’ll see the application move to the top of the charts. If you want to take a shot at beating my fastball speed, go download the iBaseball application.

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