I visited SF for a meeting today and listened to some podcasts from Ad:tech SF on the train. The main focus on several of the podcasts was how businesses could advertise or make money off of video and user generated content (UGC). Several of the points that the presenters at Ad:tech made were echoed in an article on WebGuild.

In an article called “Turning the Long Tail Into the Big Tail”, Jean-Marie Le Ray echoes what executives at the video advertising networks have seen. Advertisers are looking to target groups of users (for example, men ages 20-35) and just want to buy a spread of ads across many networks. It is great if they are concentrated in just a few sites, but it does not really matter. If the advertisers can reach the same group without having to pay big bucks to advertise next to premium content, they will do it. They are less concerned about being able to brag that they have advertised on the latest iTunes downloads of “Lost” than being able to show that for the same cash spread among 50 sites, they reached a higher number of people with a better response.

The part that I found most interesting in the article is

the first ad server that creates the RELEVANT mix to match advertisers’ needs on one side with the legitimate monetization expectations of content creators on the other side (matching the inventory of the latter based on the message of the former), will win the jackpot. Even if there are still a few unknowns.

Basically advertisers are interested more in well-rounded campaigns managed by an ad platform to reach their target audience. Meanwhile if anyone can figure out the magic formula for making money off of UGC, you will have their ad money.

The first submission date of the Google Android Challenge has offically closed. After looking in depth at the Android SDK, I can say that Android is very interesting code, but it still needs a bit of work. There have already been three different releases of the SDK in just the few months that it was first released by Google. You really get the feeling that it was not ready for prime time when you release that the Android site did not have a central area for bug reports and the challenge submission program did not inform users that their application was accepted. Over time the Android team did add on these bits and pieces to the site, but it seems strange that they were afterthoughts. After all, you would expect that Google’s programmers would be familiar with other open source efforts and would be aware of tools to allow outside developers to report the errors that they found in their programming and testing of Android. That was the whole point to releasing the SDK with the Challenge.

While the SDK and what Android can do is somewhat impressive, the really impressive part is if it really works as advertised across a range of devices. Android is often compared to the iPhone, but the comparison is not really fair. The iPhone is a tightly controlled device with a small number of variations. Important pieces like memory, screen size, user interface, and usable media file formats are well known for the iPhone. Not so with other mobile devices. Android removes most of this messy complexity from the programmer. It will be great to see if the Android SDK will actually work in the real world on real devices.

 One aspect of the Android SDK docs and support that surprised me was the way that the Android team spent a huge amount of their example programs on various elements of the UI but completely ignored the MediaPlayer. Maybe it is because media is such a large part of the Geogad site and the Internet is continually becoming more video oriented, but I would have thought that playing media files and including example files for this would have been top priority. Example files were put on the Android message boards after developers begged for them. Since Google spent $1.7B on YouTube, you would have thought that video and audio examples would have been included from the beginning. 

 Either the Android team was rushed to release the SDK before they were really ready to (a likely bet since Google probably was getting tired of hearing about the iPhone and press speculation on Google buying 700MHz spectrum from the FCC), or Google is focusing on the text delivered via mobile for pairing with their text AdWords. I really think that Google will have to get a focus on serving video ads for mobile devices. Reading these small screens, even one as lovely to read as the iPhone, just increases my ADD and my speed reading abilities. I doubt that I will have much interest in reading text ads that take up my limited and valuable mobile screen space. If any company can handle successful video ad delivery, I am sure that Goggle and Geogad, of course, will do it out.

Technorati tags: Google, Android, Challenge, video, MediaPlayer