With the launch of the Spotify App for the iPhone interest for streaming music is higher than ever. There seems to be no limit for its reach, with new users streaming free music every day, changing the way people think about ownership of music forever. And it’s spreading.
Monday morning we all woke up the news that Kraft Foods had
made a £10bn bid for Cadbury, a bid which Cadbury quickly rejected the offer as
it ‘undervalues the company’. Who says
no to a takeover bid with a 31%
premium on top of share price? – A brand which knows it can get a lot more.
There may once have been a time when a Yahoo! product launch, even if it is a sneak-it-out-the-back-door Beta style event, would have been a hot topic for discussion so it says a lot that many readers may not even have heard of Yahoo! Meme, their attempt to move into the world of Twitter and Tumblr. As Yahoo’s first move into proper user-generated content creation for some time (ignoring purchases and Yahoo Answers) you would think they have spent their time coming up with something worthwhile – unfortunately it’s a little difficult to avoid the feeling that this is a rushed job.
Amidst all the excited talk of Spotify iPhone apps and Apple tablet devices this week you just might have missed some interesting news from our friends at Google (and no, I’m not referring to the fire in their London office)…
On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls - Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers: http://www.3am.co.uk/.
Rupert Murdoch seems to think that you will.
After the huge financial losses just announced by News Corp, Murdoch has decreed that, possibly from as soon as next year, he will charge for all his newspaper websites including The Times and The Sun. It isn’t clear whether this will extend to broadcast news websites such as Sky News.
Some hot debate about the importance, or not, of the click
has been had this week. We’ve been mulling over why when no other advertising
medium expects consumers to leave what they are happily doing in that moment to
interact with a brand, online continues to value the click as the key sign of
success. When you watch a TV ad you can still catch the second half of
Coronation Street without the media agency or client feeling that the ad spot
has been wasted. How then, within what is hailed as the most measurable of
media channels, can we make sure we are measuring the right things?
So, Amazon won’t pay commission to affiliates who use links
within Twitter to drive traffic. Is this fair? Is their policy right?
There are many different ways of looking at this problem.
Let’s take a look at Amazon’s position. They are paying commission to
affiliates who drive new customers through to their site. As part of this
process, they ask affiliates to agree to their terms & conditions of use
and these, at least from a legal perspective state that the traffic is related
to “Your Site”, referring to where the traffic comes from.
The last few weeks have seen polar opposites in terms of luck for Phorm, the personalisation technology company. On one hand it appears as though both BT and TalkTalk have put their plans to implement their technology on hold (I say on hold as apparently the contracts are still in place). Yet on the other, they received yet another cash injection of £15M to help support their trials in other markets.
The recent Brand Republic article about the influx of silver surfers signing up to Facebook paired with an exodus of younger users suggests that another platform could be about to follow the likes of MySpace and Friends Reunited onto the list of social media fads.
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