Comments | no_lj_ads: Various Six Apart Related Media

foxfirefey in no_lj_ads

Various Six Apart Related Media

Nov 02, 2006 00:57

There’s Still Room for More and Better Social Networking: An Interview with SixApart’s Andrew Anker -- LJ advertising malcontents even get a short mention: "Some people felt burnt, though, when LiveJournal recently introduced sponsored communities and features." There's another post on TechCrunch about Vox's launch: Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love ( Read more... )

vox, sixapart, the press

Comments 44

schnee November 2 2006, 09:42:09 UTC

And he even lies through his teeth again: "The easiest example we have is our own Live Journal, which has 11 million registered users [...]" I can't believe that this guy doesn't know the difference between a user and an account, so if stupidity isn't the reason why he said this, we are forced to conclude that he's intentionally misleading people (advertisers, most likely) about the service. Not that LJ doesn't have a lot of users, of course, but it's nowhere near 11 million.

Also, it's a pity that he doesn't actually answer that part about how people feel about advertising and "sponsored" stuff, other than with a general "we're only in it for the money".

Oh well. I guess you can't expect more from someone with the words "executive VP" in his title.

foxfirefey November 2 2006, 09:45:52 UTC

Again? The previous interview with Clickz.com was with Barak, and many of the inaccuracies in the article were the fault of Clickz.com and not Barak, as matgb pointed out.

This is actually the first I've really heard of this Anker guy.

But you're right. LJ doesn't have anywhere near 11 million registered users, let alone active registered users. However, now that ads are on the site, I guess unique visitors with their page views become an important growth metric. Plenty of people end up on LJ pages without having an account, and those people will see the ads on the Plus accounts, assuming they don't have ad blocking on.

schnee November 2 2006, 09:50:37 UTC

"again" referred to 6A's drones in general, not him specifically. ;)

foxfirefey November 2 2006, 10:43:33 UTC

Ooooh, hahaha, you should've used "they" then!

Thread 18

deerfold November 2 2006, 09:48:04 UTC

Once again the latter post mentions livejournal's mostly teen userbase. I see little evidence of this on this site. Most youngsters I know in real life (who use a social networking or blogging site) use myspace, most twenty and thirtysomwthings I know who do, use livejournal.

Survey taken around 2006-09-10 foxfirefey November 2 2006, 10:37:59 UTC

Well, I did a statistical survey and I made a few stats with accompanying graphs out of it. Please, however, make sure to read this thread so you know to take these numbers with salt licks! Further caveats for birthdays only might be that people who
display their birthdays are self selecting--older OR younger users could be proportionately less likely to put their full birthday up, and that would skew the calculations, for sure.

Total # people with birthdays set ( ... )

(The comment has been removed)

Re: Survey taken around 2006-09-10 foxfirefey November 2 2006, 12:17:24 UTC

Exactly. I even only included people who had their full birthday on display! I guess I could just go by year, that might increase the sample size some at the cost of a bit of accuracy.

tallblue November 2 2006, 16:57:10 UTC

Is it just me or the new themes from Vox that are here and are coming seem to be aimed towards the "teen" age group? It might just be me because I am not in a target group.

matgb November 2 2006, 17:10:25 UTC

See, that's what bothers me, all the Vox themes look 'teen' to me, but they say the target audience is parents/grandparents.

I mean, they're very good (and technically well put together), but they scream 'teen' to me, which makes no sense.

ex_uniquewo November 2 2006, 18:31:53 UTC

I don't completely agree. A lot of Vox themes do look 'teen' - mostly because they use drawings and 'cheery' colors - but you have some themes that are different such as Modernist, Weston, Unity and Trees. Even Cycling or Fleur do not look particularly 'teen' to me. But it's true that a lot of Vox themes look 'cute' and it seems to me that Vox cultivates a certain idea of youthfulness. The impression I get from Vox is that it's supposed to be 'fun' and not really... serious. Do you see what I mean? Now, it's just an impression, it doesn't mean that's it's true. I haven't been on Vox often enough to see what's there. I think the same could be said about LJ though, if there weren't communities. OTOH, LJ has themes - official and unofficial - that look more... sophisticated and, I dunno, sharp maybe.

ex_uniquewo November 3 2006, 01:24:13 UTC

Less funny: http://www.livejournal.com/affiliates.bml

I don't know if this is a new thing. I can find the translation file - it was created 2 weeks ago. Does that mean the page was created 2 weeks ago? Not sure since they're modifying the translation system.

foxfirefey November 3 2006, 01:26:19 UTC

I've always wondered whether or not they'd ever make any use of that referral thing in the user info.

Want me to post on it?

ex_uniquewo November 3 2006, 01:30:34 UTC

What referral thing?

There has been some stuff at changelog that were related to this only I didn't make a connection at the time. *off to browse*

And yeah, sure.

foxfirefey November 3 2006, 01:32:59 UTC

I swear it used to be there before the user info revision. Something about "Where did you hear about LiveJournal from" or "who did you hear about LiveJournal from" or SOMETHING.

Thread 18

pmmarcov November 3 2006, 04:10:54 UTC

Just FYI on a couple of the more recent pieces mentioning the Vox ad partnership with MRM/IPG...in the interest of full disclosure. This deal is Vox only, not for LJ.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623807
http://www.adweek.com/aw/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003315893

I did the deal with the agency, so if you have any questions, just ask.

Eee trying that again foxfirefey November 3 2006, 04:28:23 UTC

Oh, thank you very much! I guess I just thought that since LJ and Vox belonged to the same parent company, it was very likely that advertising deals that manifested in one would also be leveraged in their other franchises--you know, in sponsored community deals and the like--but I can understand if LJ and the MRM stuff doesn't match like Vox and MRM would--they do have differences. (Which is probably part of the reason why the LJ comm has Google Analytics for 7daysinasentra and the Vox blog doesn't.)

One thing I'm actually curious about are the mechanics of sponsored Voxes--I don't see anything on the 7daysinasentra noting that it is sponsored in some way. I could be missing it! Or I could understand that maybe it would be considered obvious because of all the other Nissan advertising going on around Vox right now, too.

Re: Eee trying that again pmmarcov November 4 2006, 19:20:02 UTC

Some of the ad/sponsor deals and programs we put together are sold into both LJ and Vox (especially when we were in the preview version of Vox) and there will most likely continue to be advertisers that want to reach both audiences at the same time, but the MRM/IPG partnership was specifically around Vox ( ... )

Re: Eee trying that again foxfirefey November 5 2006, 02:30:30 UTC

As to why Google Analytics on LJ and not on Vox, it's because on Vox we are using HitBox throughout the site as one way to measure our audience and traffic and on Vox we can get reporting data from that system to share with the advertiser about their sponsorship. The implement of Hitbox that we are using on LJ doesn't lend itself to using it for LJ Sponsored Communities, so we implemented Google Analytics. For some silly reason, people want to see reports and data to justify their marketing investments! ;-)

The Google Analytics is on LJ *and* the Typepad blog, so I was wondering if maybe they'd want all their info in one place.

HitBox in LJ kind of led to a bit of a debacle, so I'm sure there are very, very, VERY good reasons why HitBox on LJ doesn't lend itself to being used on LJ communities. There's a post here talking about the lack of communication behind the whole HitBox thing. Well, it's happening again with the third party tracking of sponsored communities. Sure, you guys really have spent the time communicating with us, ( ... )