Tuesday 30 September 2008

LinkedIn to launch their own Ad Network

LinkedIn already sells ads against this audience on its own site, targeted by industry, seniority, company size, geography, gender, and number of connections. Now, it will expand that targeting to other partner sites. Publishers will have to apply to become part of the ad network, but LinkedIn will probably try to sign up some of its existing content partners such as the Businessweek, CNBC, and the New York Times... and why not business to business publishers like Wolters Kluwer.

LinkedIn knows it has a valuable audience (see the demographic presentation here), and now wants to sell access to that audience to others. Although LinkedIn will always make more money off the ads it shows on its own site (since it doesn’t have to split those ads three ways with Collective Media and the partner sites). Perhaps LinkedIn realizes that it will never become a big enough site on its own to justify its recent $1 billion valuation. (Although employees can only sell shares at a $500 million valuation). This will create incremental revenues for LinkedIn. And for publishing site partners it offers a potentially more lucrative set of remnant inventory that it can throw ads up against.

Source : Techcrunch France

Wednesday 10 September 2008

And now Chrome...


What to say about this new Google initiative? Chrome is mainly build on the Mozilla basements and they (accidentally?) launched Chrome one week after announcing the sponsoring of the Mozilla foundation for about 57mio USD. I don't believe Google wanted to kick ass in the browser field, the trends is much more deepth than that. They are launching more and more SaaS applications and the browser is becoming the new operating system for the google native generation. Chrome sounds to me like a cement in a strategy to lock user on the "Google Operating System". We'll see what the future will looks like and surely how the hardware will evolve because today google is launching a browser for aPC, tomorrow I don't know what google will launch on a PSP like device :-).

While Google is on the spotlight, Yahoo release it's own desktop

ps: the image was found on rue89