• Old media shouldn’t be written off yet in the New York Post: “According to U.S. audience data compiled by comScore Networks, four so-called “traditional” media companies – Fox Interactive Media, Time Warner Network, Viacom, and Comcast – ranked among the top 10 sites in terms of page views in November.”

What it means: although all these page views are not as well monetized as offline impressions, capturing eyeballs in a network of sites is a critical success factor for the future of any traditional media company.

• “AOL Sees Future in Ad Networks” in Advertising Age: “The ad networks are the next big thing. It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all,” Mr. Palmer said. “Ad networks are going to be hugely important to the way you aggregate all your station affiliates. All that quantity needs to be qualitatively optimized.”

What it means: DoubleClick, RealMedia, Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Federated Media. These are all decentralized ad platforms. But is there a way to revolutionize the ad network? Is there a way to create a decentralized ad network that would result in a destination site?

• The online video market in eMarketer: “over one-third of the total US population ages 3 and older will have viewed video on the Internet at least monthly during 2006. And in only three years, more than half of all Americans will be part of the online video audience. “At this point, nearly 60% of all Internet users watch video regularly, and that share will increase to over 80% by the end of 2010,”.

What it means: to everyone… Are you leveraging video sites? Are you thinking of launching video products? To paraphrase THX, “The audience is watching”.

• The new Just for Laughs video portal in the Toronto Star: “The people behind Just for Laughs, Montreal’s venerable comedy festival, have just launched a high-speed broadband “comedy portal,” with the goals of providing homegrown and international humour, and finding new talent.”

What it means: Just for Laughs, purveyors of fine laughs, clearly realized that people wanted to have fun when watching online videos. Just think of the last few videos you watched on YouTube. To avoid being desintermediated, they needed to own part of that space as it will become more and more important in the future. I believe they will also need to leverage other video sites as
well.