People who love sports...

Milestones in August for Bonds & Active Athlete

This past week I've gotten to be a part of two major milestones: 1) Barry Bonds becoming the home run leader in MLB history; and 2) Active Athlete breaking the top 10 (number #9) list of comScore's Web sports sites/networks.

Congratulations to my entire team at Active Athlete for this major accomplishment. As you all know I've been pretty disappointed with how comScore measures our publishers. In January we were ranked #71; today we are #9. It's been a long hard fight. But they can't argue our growth in new publishers (170+) and millions of unique visitors.  According to comScore our monthly uniques currently total 8.5 million unique visitors but our own systems indicate that number to total more than 17.7 million uniques for the month of July.

Advertisers now have the ability to reach active consumers in their passion areas with scale! 

Advertisers see it too, as eMarketer cited in July - "Marketers will spend some $727 million on paid search and rich media ads on sports web sites in the U.S. next year -- up almost 33% from this year." They also cited that this trend will continue with revenues topping $1 Billion by 2011.

                                       New HR Kings!

More Validation!

More and more people are starting to see how valueable audience is. Check out Jermey Liew from Lightspeed Venture Partners with their post about the value of synthetic channels. They sight some great examples.


http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/ad-networks-synthetic-channels/

Also check us out on TechCrunch. Very Cool.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/10/active-athlete-media-advertising-for-sport-related-sites/#comments

Validation!

This morning I saw this great article by Cory Treffiletti on Media Post -  http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1050 talking about the value of vertically focused solutions like Jump Start, Real Girls, Active Athlete and others.

I really liked his post, here's a great quote:

"All of these models signal the shift away from large aggregate audiences towards the development of solutions to reach the long tail and provide advertisers with the ability to go deeper into the lives of their audience."

Cory is right on with the article. One thing to add is that unduplicated reach is a critical piece of the puzzle. Being able to offer advertisers complete transparency and access to audience they otherwise couldn't get is really valueable.

 

Convo with the Good Folks at Gartner

Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Allen Weiner, Van Baker and Andrew Frank from the Gartner Group (http://blog.gartner.com/blog/media.php. In addition to dishing about Internet media in general, we talked a lot about the ever-increasing spotlight on ad networks and exchanges. On that topic, I believe that although traditional ad networks and exchanges may benefit the community by encouraging innovation, they potentially de-value their respective audiences. 

By essentially becoming commodities, the business model promotes reach rather than the quality of the people within that reach. Advertisers have told us they feel better served by (non-traditional) business models that sell people rather than pages. This is in sync with a basic principle engrained in me long ago by Dave Morgan at Tacoda. Staying true to this principle, Active Athlete Media doesn’t arbitrage inventory (buy at one price and sell at another), thus aligning the interests of our partners and advertisers with our purest view of audience.