Last Friday news broke that the Drudge Retort received notice from the Associated Press (AP) to discontinue citing its content because of provisions regarding “fair use” in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The story was met with protest and outrage by the blogging community which felt the AP was unfairly serving the Drudge Retort.

The two issues that drove the discussion are from opposing viewpoints. On the one side, you have the AP who wishes to change how the Drudge Retort posts and possibly pays for AP content. And on the other, the bloggers counter that the AP should consider adhering to its standards of quotation. Many bloggers, including well-known tech blogger Michael Arrington, have called on their peers to boycott the AP’s content in response to the story.

Boycott chart

*updated on June 23, 2008

I first heard about this story last week when it showed up in my Twitter stream. As the day passed, the conversation grew. It was a topic of chatter on Techmeme (an aggregator of tech news), Arrington of TechCrunch proposed a boycott and it was Dugg more than 2,000 times on Digg, another popular news aggregator. Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine (post) wrote a post about the AP and traditional media, urging them to adopt standards of citation put forth by bloggers. But did the outrage and calls to action matter? Would it impact how often the AP is cited or the behavior of millions of bloggers unaware of the issue? As of today, the answer is no, but it’s still early in this story.

AP Chart

* updated on June 23, 2008

As of the June 19^th the discussion of the boycott has dropped off and the buzz is almost back to pre-Friday levels. As one can see from the AP chart there hasn’t been a large impact on AP references in the blogosphere, so the question is; what would it take for a blog boycott? Is calling for the boycott of news too much to ask for a publishing medium that is totally reliant on news? I think the answer today is yes, but we’ll have to see how this story shapes up and what happens to citing in the future.

Now if we could only get those auto-play audio banner ads boycotted…

As a bunch of my loyal readers know (yes Mom, I’m talking to you) I spent about a year running online research for Weather.com and helping out with the cross-media research for the Weather Channel. As many of you also know, Landmark put the Weather properties on the block earlier this year and NBC last week confirmed that it was involved in exclusive negotiations.

If this deal happens, then it makes tons and tons of sense. First, NBC has been struggling over the past couple of years to establish its WeatherPlus brand in the market. This allows them to buy success rather than build it. From an online standpoint, this fits with other trends in the market. NBC has a history of buying online properties (iVilliage most notably) to expand its ad reach. This fits a similar bill, and while it doesn’t provide demos like the iVilliage purchase did, it provides some of the best geo targeting online. It also fits with market trends. CBS’s purchase of CNET earlier this year may have been more ambitious from an online standpoint, but this purchase may in fact bring NBC additional reach/inventory, which they could certainly use.

What does Weather.com get out of this? Well, clarity on its ownership. But more importantly from a market standpoint, it might bring some fresh eyes to a Web 1.0 site that has tons of potential (sorry weather.com guys, I know you’re trying). It also allows them to be part of broader ad packages now that their content can be bundled cross-media with NBC’s huge reach (rather than The Weather Channel’s somewhat smaller reach) and also group the weather.com health/women’s ad packages with iVillage.

Stay tuned to see if congratulations are in order to my buddies at the Weather Channel.

Greetings from the Sports Marketing Conference in beautiful Chicago. I just sat down after my panel where we discussed, yes, you guessed it – online GRPs.

This seemed like an opportune time to pick up on my series discussing the ins and outs of online GRPs. In my last post, I outlined three core reasons why I dislike the concept of online GRPs. Those reasons are:

1. GRPs tell you very little about an actual campaign (Isn’t the net of reach and frequency just impressions?)

2. GRPs do not take into account the efficiencies brought about by Internet delivery (How do I measure waste and make it relevant across media? Targeted rating point, I think not!)

3. GRPs will not be comparable across media (What is the equivalent of a 6 minute qualifier online?)

In part 2 of this series I would like to pick up on the first point, GRPs tell you very little about a campaign, and in fact might be misleading.

GRPs, in their simplest form, are reach multiplied by frequency. So let’s take a hypothetical buy and see what would happen if we flighted it on 6 different sites: MySpace, Weather.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, CNN.com and NYTimes.com. Using May Netview data see what happens:

Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it tell us? Well, it tells us that MySpace has the most inventory right? But we knew that anyway…

Let’s look at this a different way:

What we’ve done here is kept the GRPs standard. If a buyer wants 10 GRPs there are multiple ways for that to be provided. However, we know that the optimal frequency (depending on who you talk to) is somewhere between 2 and 5 – which is the reason why advertisers like frequency caps. Given that, should we be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 7 the same way we should be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 4? Probably not. A typical response is, okay, I’ll just provide GRPs with a frequency cap. We’ll, if that’s the case, you’re basically just selling reach, not GRPs!

Let’s even take this one step further, let’s look at MTV.com streaming audience. They had about 1.6 million streamers in the month of May…

Wait a second, you mean if I buy 10 GRPs I am still buying the same number of impressions no matter what?

If this is the case, what do GRPs in fact tell us that we don’t already know…nothing.

Here’s some data that provides an interesting perspective on the Google/Yahoo deal announced last week.

While this deal does seem to be a pretty clear win for both parties, the audience overlap data below suggests the possibility that we should be wary of the most optimistic incremental revenue scenarios. Given the fact that 77% of Yahoo searchers also search on Google, it is possible that there may be a material number of instances in which a person searches on Yahoo and does not click on a sponsored link, and then searches on Google and clicks on a sponsored link.

With the Yahoo/Google deal in place, this person would not need to execute the second search on Google. This would simplify the experience of the searcher, but would not generate incremental revenue for Google. Yahoo, however, would get a cut of search revenue that it would have otherwise lost. The scope of this behavior in the future may ultimately be what determines whether Yahoo or Google got the better end of the bargain.

Back in March of 2007, Nielsen Online (then BuzzMetrics) sought to bring understanding to a term that was just starting to get traction online – sustainability. My colleague Emily Sobol and I – and a team of fearless analysts – navigated millions of blog posts (227+ million to be precise) to help clients understand whether or not consumers were talking about going green with any substance or vigor, and if so, which brands and marketers might be implicated. Bloggers – by nature an opinionated bunch – gave us all sorts of insights to work with. We were able to advise clients that yes, in fact, this was not a blip on the radar screen (buzz shot up well over 100%). And no matter how left-of-center they thought some of these constituents were, they had a not insignificant following (TreeHugger stood out as a big driver of buzz and inspired considerable follow on).

In early 2008, we wanted to tell a new story. Simply telling clients that green buzz was on the rise seemed not only obvious (buzz continues to climb; up 54% in Q1 2008) but also to trivialize how much the discussion had matured. (For those who still need convincing, check out the chart below.) Instead we wanted to identify and quantify all the underlying tentacles of the online debate. How does discussion of alternative fuels compare to say, fair trade? For anyone who has studied sustainability, you know this is messy stuff. There are few definitions of what does and does not constitute “sustainability” and there is certainly no rubric for quantifying such a nebulous concept online.

Through an exhaustive process that required reading scores of online conversations (fortunately we happen to love what we do) we were able to define sustainability within 25 key topics, covering everything from climate change to packaging to greenwashing. We are certain that the list of 25 will change and we probably got some wrong, so I hope you use this forum to help us refine our approach and integrate new issues that perhaps aren’t as apparent today.

From my viewpoint, sustainability buzz has matured considerably in recent months. Bloggers are no longer only talking about broad issues like global warming. In fact, while global warming constitutes more discussion volume in aggregate than other topics, it is actually trending down. At the same time, buzz about renewable energy and resource conservation (think taking shorter showers) is rising. For every mention of what the government (energy bill), corporate America (greenwashing) or brands (packaging, organics, toxins, and on and on) are up to, there is another that indicates it’s high time for consumers to make some changes of their own. Community Supported Agriculture and the local food movement are just two examples of the measures consumers of all stripes are taking to reduce their footprint.

NOTE: Issues are empirically derived. Top 10 topics are ranked by total message volume among Sustainability bloggers in Q1 ‘08. Buzz*Trend calculated as percentage growth in Q1 ‘08 over previous quarter.

So what does this mean? And how should marketers react?

First, I believe strongly it means this is a long-term trend. Consumers describe being on a journey – a path towards a greener life. Moreover, they recognize – as do many companies who have dipped a toe into these waters – “going green” doesn’t happen overnight.

Any company with a green platform or related messaging needs to be cognizant that the bloggeratti is watching and listening and ready to pounce. Discussion about greenwashing rose significantly in 2007, and is up again another 64% in Q1 2008. It’s not a top 10 topic yet but the groundswell of blog reaction to marketing activity should warrant any marketer to pay close attention.

With recent gas prices nearing $4.50 in some towns, auto manufacturers and their media partners should understand how rising prices are potentially fostering greater interest in alternative fuels, hybrids and electric vehicles. Close analysis of CGM can help to surface some of these insights. Later this month, we’ll be hosting a webinar on how consumers are affected by rising prices at the pump. Details to come.

Social media will continue to play an important role in shaping how the sustainability trend evolves. Trust that we’ll be at the forefront, monitoring the discussion as it does.