As the desire for content control continues to increase and the cost of internet-connected TVs continues to decline, penetration of Smart TVs is predicted to reach nearly half of American households by the end of the holiday season. Just in time for the growing adoption of the new technology, LG is teaming up with online video advertising network YuMe to bring advertising to TV sets in a new way. Without needing a separate device such as a Roku or Boxee, people who own LG internet-connected TVs will see ads not only while watching programs, but also while searching for programs to watch.

Toyota Motor Sales USA will be the first sponsor, but we expect to see more as companies like Samsung, Panasonic and LG are beginning to develop partnerships with YuMe and/or Tremor Video. Spreading use of the technology, plus consumers’ shifting tastes to over-the-top video options with more control and substantially less advertising, challenges marketers to reach and engage this audience without annoying them.

Advertisers must remember the importance of providing ads that are interesting and relevant to the consumer. The new technology conveniently lends itself to this objective, something LG and YuMe intend to capitalize on. The application providers will also get a cut of the revenue, as well as approval of the ads that will air while their product is loading. Ad networks, TV manufacturers and content publishers working together to make internet-connected TV ads contextually relevant for the consumer means that everyone wins, including the advertisers gutsy enough to take a chance with new technology.

Continued from Voyurl Part 1 – Watching Yourself Browse

I’ve officially been a member of Voyurl for nearly 2 months now and I have to say that I like what I’m seeing so far in terms of what information is available. I’m told that I have visited 4,337 web pages and spent 3 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes browsing in that time (2,698 sites and 1 day, 6 hours and 26 minutes in the last month alone). Other fun facts Voyurl has shared with me include:

Voyurl also provides a variety of different ways to look at the breakdown of visited categories. The visual presentation is enticing and made even better with the ability to hover over any section to get the detailed information about each category.

I think my favorite graph offered is the browsing patterns among categories. This not only shows the sequence of category visits, but the frequency with which you engage in that pattern. And to make things easier, hovering over a category shows only that category’s patterns, as illustrated in the second graph below. For example, I navigate from a news site to a technology site much more often than I go from news to entertainment.

Like any new online company in the beta testing phase, Voyurl has some kinks to work out. Some of the charts seem to show incorrect or incomplete information and the zoom functionality on others only works occasionally if at all. My biggest complaint so far is the categorization of some of the web pages. For example, Hulu’s homepage is labeled as Entertainment, but pages that actually stream shows are uncategorized. This miscategorization happens on other websites as well, leaving a large chunk of my browsing unrepresented in all of the category charts.

So far this information serves no other purpose than to be interesting and amusing. Voyurl tells me I have not browsed enough to get some information, including recommended websites. Hopefully I will get enough browsing in soon to continue with Voyurl Part 3…

It’s hard, if not altogether impossible, to make a move online that isn’t being tracked by someone. Companies that want to know what you’re doing with your time in cyberspace can fairly easily find out through cookies, tags or site registrations, and they can then use this data to direct you where they want you to go. Why shouldn’t you make the data work for you too?

That’s the philosophy of the new startup, Voyurl. By registering and installing a browser plug-in, all you have to do is surf the web as usual and the data collection begins. What sets this service apart is that instead of selling your data to someone else, Voyurl simply gives it back to you with colorful charts and fun facts about what you do online. It then recommends websites that it thinks you will like based on other users who behave like you, all without sharing this data with anyone else.

Voyurl’s main goal is all about empowerment, giving you the opportunity to receive benefits by voluntarily sharing your data. How this will specifically happen is unclear, and the site is still in private Beta-testing mode.

In the meantime, I have activated an account and am excited to see what recommendations my browsing yields. Whether or not I’ll end up handing over my data to interested parties will depend on what the proclaimed “benefits” of doing so will be. It’s one thing to know they’re collecting data on me, but it’s another to actively make the decision to help them. If the benefits are good enough and specific enough to my interests, a future of online opt-in only tracking might start to seem more feasible.

Keep watching for Voyurl Part 2 – Fun Facts and Colorful Charts

Talk about a back fire. Only one month into the company split of Netflix (into Netflix – Streaming and Qwikster – DVD’s), the once skyrocketing video entertainment powerhouse has lost over 1 million subscribers. Also, they have employed a more than backwards business strategy. Netflix CEO is effectively eliminating his core business prospects from the funnel, making it more difficult to convert new users. If Netflix remained as just Netflix, cross selling opportunities or possibily upselling opportunities would have remained from DVD to Streaming. Now, a user of Netflix DVD is automatically enrolled in Qwikster DVD, not only losing brand loyalists, but also making it more complex to be signed up for both services. Two companies. Two contracts. Too many issues. Without the brand Netflix for the DVD business, there is an increased concerned that users will become brand agnostic and switch to a different provider.

Check out the articles here

Many online publishers have made it easy to share their content via the social web.   Some argue that publishers who focus on bleeding site content to the social web may incur a decrease in core metrics, and ought to focus on keeping consumers engaged within their domain.  While I do believe there is value in keeping consumers engaged within the walls of a site,  I feel that sharing content through the social web is a great way for a publisher to extend its reach.  Can it be detrimental for a publisher to focus on sharing their content via the social web?  This is a difficult question to answer, and answers would vary depending on the type of publisher and a lot of other factors.  But, just for fun, let’s take a look at a study conducted by Outbrain, which explored how people on the web interact with a publisher’s content.

After pulling a sample data set of 100 million sessions across more than 100 of Outbrain’s top publishers, data showed that showed that traffic coming from social media sources has the highest tendency to bounce.  In addition, they discovered that two-thirds of traffic to sites still comes from users directly visiting a content site or jumping from page to page within that site.  The other third comes from outside sources such as search and social media.  41% of traffic coming from an outside source, comes from search, and 11% comes from social, 17% comes from portals, and 31% comes from other content sites.   Of course, the breakdown of the source of traffic would vary between publisher type and genre.  For example,  Outbrain found that 42% of traffic referrals for news sites arrive from a social media site and less than 5% of sports sites’ traffic arrive from social media.  These are some pretty interesting findings.  Do you believe that by bleeding content to the social web, some sites’ core metrics suffer?  Let us know what you think!

Last month the UN humanitarian agencies declared a famine in Somalia. A two year long drought in the Horn of Africa has left an estimated 12.4 million people in need of humanitarian aid. The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has begun airlifting food to affected areas, and has raised around $1 billion for the region since November 2010, but UN official Valerie Amos, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, has declared, “It is not enough.”

People across the internet have been taking action in an effort to bring relief to the disaster. Bono, of U2, along with ONE brought 10 bloggers to Africa to connect with mothers in late July where they were exposed to the unfortunate conditions in Kenya. The bloggers are now sharing their experiences ONE’s blog.

iTunes has released George Harrison’s The Concert for Bangladesh and all proceeds will go to the George Harrison fund for UNICEF, benefiting children affected by the drought and famine.

World Vision, a charitable organization, has been fighting hunger in the Horn of Africa for many years. They have provided clean water, education, food and other long-term assistance to communities in need. You can donate to the relief effort through World Vision here.

It’s nice to see people across the internet making an effort to help.

More than any other cable or satellite provider, Netflix now has 22.80 million subscribers, 9 million of whom joined just in the last year. But the problem of how to reach these 23 million people who spend a lot of time in the ad-free Netflix space remains.

Two potential ways have been proposed for marketers to create a presence on the popular website: sponsoring channels and underwriting content with product integration. This could be the future of advertising on Netflix, if it isn’t in fact happening already. It’s easy enough for a cable network; there are plenty of branded Disney, NatGeo, History and PBS programs for consumers to play instantly. For the majority of Netflix members who retain cable and satellite subscriptions, an entire channel of programs similar to what they just watched is only a click of the remote away.

Starz is actually already doing this. There is an entire section on the Netflix website called Starz Play where members can stream approximately 1,000 titles or even a live feed from the premium cable network. The same approach could potentially work for a brand like XM Radio to sponsor the Music channel or for Sprint to reinforce its product placement within the series 24 with a presence on the show’s Netflix page.

Underwriting content and product integration will be a trickier path to sell, but it could still work. Recently, based on a recommendation from Netflix, my roommates and I watched a show describing some undiscovered, aka less publicized, attractions at Disney theme parks. Only after streaming the entire program did we realize that we had essentially watched a 43-minute infomercial. Not only that, but we were engaged with it and enjoyed it.

Netflix has said that they are not keen to offer any advertising inventory on their site, but they also recently took a leap into the original programming arena with the upcoming House of Cards, something else they also said they would not do. Perhaps Netflix is seeing the potential of expansion, and incorporating advertisements may be their next big venture. Now is the time for advertisers to start thinking about how brands can align with or reside within the Netflix landscape.

This is very interesting. France has officially banned the names of the top two social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter, from being mentioned on radio or television…UNLESS, they are part of a news story. Dating back to a 1992 decree that says, “mentioning services by name is an act of advertising,” France has taken a stand against both of the social giants.

As described by Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for France’s Counseil Superieur de l’Audiovisuel (CSA), “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition. This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box– other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

TechCrunch sums this up nicely, “Instead of referring to specific social networking pages, like saying ‘Find us at Facebook.com/Audi’ or follow us on ‘Twitter.com/Pepsi’ brands will have to skirt around the issue, saying things like ‘Find us on social networking sites!,’ or directing viewers to their community pages and hoping that viewers will just pick up on where to go.”

France has a history of trying to regulate language used on air. According to the Toubon Law,  the French government can mandate the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, and in all broadcast audiovisual programs, with some exceptions (most notably, private non-commercial communications).

Some say the French government is going overboard in terms of restricting “the spread of American culture” which some bloggers attribute to traditional French protectionism, similar to how in 2003, the French banned the use of the word “email” in all government communications and publications.

In all, the true nature of the ban is not clear, but Facebook and Twitter are certainly making their way across the globe. Think about the earned media the two companies get every day, in every advertisement featuring one of their “brand pages.”

You never know, maybe France does support smaller social networks…or better yet, maybe France is launching their own social network (unlikely), where you have to be French to partake. Didn’t Facebook start with the promise of exclusivity?

Above is an outtake from 1994 of NBC’s “Today” show which reveals some confusion as to what the “internet” actually is.  We have come a long way since then. Don’t be too hard on them though, folks. Today we are so reliant on the internet to obtain information. We are quick to Google things that we aren’t familiar with. How could they figure out what the internet is without the internet?

The NY Times announced on Thursday that they will begin charging hefty subscription prices to readers who want to get their daily dose of the Times digitally…Starting March 28th visitors to nytimes.com will only be able to read 20 articles a month for free. Once they hit that limit they will be prompted to purchase one of three digital news packages @$15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year), $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year) or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year). All subscribers who take home delivery of the paper will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers.

I for one love me some NY Times…and easily read more than 20 articles a month digitally, but at those prices, not so much…I use to subscribe, but stopped years ago once I could get it for free on the Internet, in fact I made it my homepage. But @ $200 a year, which is still $100 below a paper subscription, I don’t think so. I have too many other items like cell phone and data plans that didn’t exist before.  So I’ll be one of the millions that work around this pay wall and link to the articles that I want to read from Google and other sites.

It will be interesting to watch this play out and see if “The Times” is right and they get the 15% of loyal readers they want to convert…That would be huge for the newspaper industry.  But the cat is out of the bag and I don’t think it’s going back in…