The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Advertising

Gervais Podcast

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I’m completely behind Fred’s view on the Ricky Gervais podcast. I love love love the podcast. I haven’t been a huge adopter of podcasts, having lost my iPod on a trip last year, but we often listen to Ricky Gervais (and pals) on the computer or on our stereo via TiVo’s functionality. “Monkey News” has become a catchphrase around our household. (Could it be the first podcast-spawned media meme?) But still, I’m not willing to pay. Put advertising on it and make it free, will you? Or at least make that an option. They’ve already been doing house ads for Gervais-related content properties, and that doesn’t detract from the experience at all.

P.S. Should I get a video iPod? (It’s like I need the blogosphere’s blessing before I take the plunge.) Or maybe just a Nano or Shuffle? Too many iPod choices.

UPDATE: I’ve noticed this blog entry is one of my more popular content items, probably because people are searching for the actual Gervais Podcast. And so, by popular demand, here is a link to where you can access both seasons. The page where you used to be able to access season 1, for free, is apparently no longer making it available. That’s lame. Not only do you have to pay for season 2, but they’re also making you pay for season 1, previously available for free. Yuck.

Testing YPN

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I’ve been invited to participate in the beta for the nascent Yahoo! Publisher Network, so those of you who read this on the site will see the YPN ads to the right. (They seem to get cut off a bit in Firefox, at least, so need to work on the formatting.) The most interesting thing, thus far, is that you have the option of choose what categories of ads appear on your site, so categories are taken into account as well as (or maybe instead of) the context of the page. I chose the professional services/advertising-marketing category, but so far only ads for lowermybills.com and Vonage are showing up. They did say it might take a while. One other thing I found different from Google — if you’re both a YPN publisher and a YSM advertiser, you can take your publisher earnings and transfer them directly into your advertiser account.

I’ll keep you posted if I learn more as things go on.

AOL.com Roundup

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As AOL preps the launch of its new Web portal, a few items of note from folks around our company:

  • David Card – AOL Version N.0: Welcome to the 21st Century, Fellas. Great stuff here especially about RSS support: “Sit down for this. You heard it here first: Shockingly, AOL is positioned to be the leader in RSS among the big portals, search engines, and Internet media companies. Gasp.”
  • Media Buyers Welcome AOL’s New Portal. ClickZ’s Kevin Newcomb surveys media buyers — absolutely critical to the success of AOL’s new strategy — on their first impressions of the new portal.
  • The New AOL: ContentContentMONEYContentSEARCH. Gary Stein weigns in on AOL’s stick-to-it-iveness, or lack therof.
  • AOL Readies New Ad Units for AOL.com Launch. This title speaks for itself.
  • Paid Search a Footnote in AOL.com Push. About the company’s plans for major SEO, and some SEM, as it makes its foray outside the walled garden.

    • Driving me Crazy

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    It’s really getting on my nerves that, since I switched back to Google AdSense, every ad seems to be targeted on the word “blog.” Sure, I mention blogging — and this is a blog, after all — but goodness knows I write about other things, too. Get it together, Google, and crawl these pages, please.