GoogleClick approved in the US

Google's acquisition of DoubleClick has been approved by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. The deal is not yet cleared by the EU.

If the merger is approved in the EU and goes ahead, it will likely affect the market for "remnant" banner advertising more than premium branded banner advertising market. The reason being that Google can better utilize different kinds of intention and behavioral data to improve DART's "remnant" banner ad targeting, but the merger doesn't change the way media buyers buy premium branded advertising.

Facebook's Beacon is evil

Facebook's Beacon program, where Facebook's partner sites automatically report your activity on their sites to your Facebook account, doesn't pass my smell test. What Facebook has built in Beacon is spyware. If Facebook doesn't redesign Beacon and makes it opt-in and far more transparent than today, I will be very surprised if this leads to neither a member backlash nor regulation by lawmakers.

An example of how Beacon works: Click on Play Now and Joost will report your action to Facebook and unless you actively say no, your activity will end up in your newsfeed.

Facebook Applications as organic search results

Niki Scevak on the newsfeed (of Facebook and others) and marketing. I like the way of comparing applications to organic search results and Facebook's ad system to paid search.

YASENR

Time for yet another Sunday evening news roundup (or in short YASENR).

Inside Facebook on Facebook standardizing application invites. Comments from Andrew Chen.

Chris "Long Tail" Anderson: Everything in the music industry is up! (except those plastic discs) And he doesn't take into account the money going to artists because they are brands (endorsements etc).

History might not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. The old privacy discussions surrounding online-offline advertising targeting integration (DoubleClick + Abacus back in the dot.com days) will likely resurface as Acxiom is doing the same thing today.

Martin Jönsson comments on the interesting acquisition made by the cash rich and highly profitable Herenco in the Swedish local newspaper market. Previously Herenco-owned Jönköpings-Posten was the only local newspaper without a news web site. Instead of launching one, they acquired the startup competitor Jnytt

Will there be an advertisement to answer every question?

Beth Comstock at NBC Universal on online business development and business models: "I'm getting to the point where I feel like every answer to every business development pitch is 'We're going to be advertiser supported.' ... There are not going to be enough advertising dollars in the marketplace. No matter how clever we are, no matter what the format is."

Bilddagboken Acquisition Makes Sense For Lunar Group

Lunar Group's/LunarWorks' acquisition of the remaining 60 % of Bilddagboken makes a lot of sense strategically. Acquiring additional sites let Lunar Group use its established sales force to sell premium priced brand advertising to advertisers, even if the number of vistors to LunarStorm declines.

The reason I think it makes strategic sense, especially compared with launching LunarStorm in other countries, is the following:

Before a site/publisher has grown large it is very difficult to sell premium priced brand advertising to, primarily, media agencies. Once entrepreneurs have built a popular a site, they will have to build a sales force that can sell to the media agencies etc. Building the sales fore takes time and often requires additional capital. Selling to an industrial buyer, like Lunar Group, will often make sense.

Lunar Group, and other media companies, can by snapping up sites like Bilddagboken (not that such sites come along that often) add value to an acquisition by accelerating the move from response-based advertising to higher priced branded advertising. It is not a pure financial acquisition, as there are very real synergies. The strategy also lets the media company partly mitigate the risk of a specific site losing popularity by building an organization where advertising sales for a bouquet of sites and smart acquisitions are the core competencies.