Oops Patrol - Strip Tease BTYB Bigpond

I saw Bigpond have a sponsorship on Heavy.com - which is sort of an integrated thing.

Problem is - it seems to go across ALL video content on the site. Even strip teases as the screengrab shows.

I wonder if Heavy told Bigpond this was a possibility ...

Excessive: AU Homepages Ad Count

I have voiced my concern with the volume of ads appearing on publisher homepages in the past, and today I thought it'd be an interesting time to see whether ad messages are dominating publisher homepages still.

As an agency guy, I think the less ad units a publisher has on their homepage the better. I think as an advertiser if you're forking out between 50-130k for a homepage execution, it devalues the placement for it to be surrounded by countless text ads for credit cards and debt consolidation.

Plus, I think the user deserves the frontpage to be clean and easy to navigate.

So, effectively, the publishers are failing both their stakeholders.

And you would never see the front page of a newspaper filled with ads.

Anyway - lets look at the totals for Monday 25 August.

Yahoo!7 - 16 total ads
Excessive ad units add more clutter to an already cluttered experience. Overwhelming.

ninemsn - 14 total ads
Biggest positive is that the area above the fold is pretty clean - still, a lot of text placements here.

theage.com.au - 16 total ads
Admittedly, 8 of these placements are Sponsored Links ... and the page is pretty long ... but Fairfax are squeezing every penny out of their eyeballs and advertisers.

smh.com.au - 17 total ads
We have a winner! Optus have a med rec + OTP ... as well as the Sponsored Links placements and the awesome bottom leaderboard. More finance sales pitches than a bank manager.

news.com.au - 8 total ads
Good effort. Marks deducted for news still considering the 468x60 banner to be acceptable as well as two display ad units above the fold.

Bigpond - 4 total ads
Bigpond only have 4 external advertisers on their homepage - not bad. Let down unfortunately by their horrendous Bigpond Shopping page dominant ad.

Google - 0 total ads
And this is Australia's most popular page ... which says to me users enjoy less clutter.

I would like to see a publisher look to place LESS ads on their homepage, but extract more yield from these placements. Both advertisers and users would value less ad clutter and advertisers would be prepared to pay more.

Right now the amount of ads on homepages makes the industry look amateur and greedy in the eyes of most. And excessive ad placements effectively devalue these "premium" placements in the long term.

Telstra's mobile Olympics package a huge success ...

Justin Milne is out and claiming that the Bigpond streaming of the Olympics is a hit.

From the Oz - http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24176832-7582,00.html

The Olympics -- for which Telstra is the official mobile carrier -- would be a watershed moment in the development of the mobile as a content medium, BigPond group general manager Justin Milne predicted yesterday.

Paid Olympics packages on Telstra include live streams of Seven and SBS TV content and cost $9.95 for the Games, or $3.95 for a single day, while a one-off video is 50c to view.

"We don't give out numbers but we're 50 per cent over the targets that we set for ourselves," Mr Milne said.

"We've had huge take-up," he said. "It has the potential to be a bit of a watershed because the Olympics is so mainstream. "

Now, it's very easy to say how awesome and successful and over projections something is if you don't actually give out the numbers.

Problem is I, for one, think that maybe the mobile coverage isn't the big success they are claiming it is.

For one, Seven and Yahoo!7 have been very active in terms of disclosing ratings, traffic for their Olympic coverage. As have other online publishers such as ninemsn and Fairfax.

I wonder why Milne is so reluctant. If the numbers were so good and it was a watershed moment, surely he'd want to let us know how many people have signed up, full streams etc?

Maybe I am a cynic, but I'm dubious on these big claims. Show us the numbers.

AU's worst ad unit?

I'm all for page takeovers when they are clever, but this is ridiculous. (http://www.bigpond.com)

But this is just ugly. Takes away from the page content and also distracts from the advertising. More noise on a page that is already screaming at the user.

And these have been rolled out across afl.com.au as well.

No good.

IAB Australia board gets a boost

According to B&T, the IAB has added some new board members. And they don't come much bigger in the local market.

Tony Faure - CEO, Ninemsn
Rohan Lund - CEO, Yahoo!7
Nick Leeder - COO, News Digital Media
Bill Burton - Bigpond
Nick Cola - Fairfax Digital

Nothing on it on the IAB website funnily enough - http://www.iabaustralia.com.au/