"Advertisers are expected to spend $21.4 billion online this year," says eMarketer (via B2B). That’s a 25.1% increase over 2006. But wait, it gets better. They projected spending to continue increasing over the next few years, hitting $42 billion by 2011.

Now, I may have been taught advanced math by an Eastern European T.A. with limited communication skills, but let me tell you, that’s APPROXIMATELY DOUBLE our current figure.

An English major might make the mistake of saying, "nearly" or the more colorful, "just shy of." I’ll stick with approximately, for now.

Now let’s pose a question: How much of that money is going to go to Facebook?

The keynote at ad:tech NY this week addressed this very issue. "Is the trend towards platforms important or is it just a fad? What will
the relationship be between platforms, agencies and publishers?" The conclusion, according to Lee Odden, was that there is no doubt that platforms can help agencies, through data mining. And they’re obviously good for users, because they help build communities and encourage widespread interaction. And publishers, said Arianna Huffington, can learn to become more like platforms by offering users these same tools.

Then what do the platforms get out of it? Well, collect revenue from "social advertising" on their valuable inventory, apparently, and try to shame everyone else by pointing out the flaws in their own models. Old-fashioned, I bet we’ll be called. Sticks and stones.

Be careful, Facebook. Let brands build their pages, but please don’t trick users into unknowingly becoming Brand Advocates and sending out ads to all of their closest family and friends. There are enough of them out there already, searching for the ultimate product, and passing on the good news.

But I’m so glad that Mark is so eager to share his social graph with us. Something tells me that he and my T.A. would get along just fine.

I take it back.
Maka-Maka is not the worst Web name to date. It’s Android.

If you don’t
know what that is, well, as Roudy the last living American cowboy would say,
“god bless ya’.”

Google’s big
announcement about their open mobile service platform that will be implemented
in the second half of 2008 was definitely the big news of yesterday, and it was
splashed all over the news. And I’m not going to honor it much by talking about
it here. Not even a link, mind you! You can find it yourself.

The only thing I
have to say about it is I’m not surprised. Let’s recap, shall we?
Apple =
products.
Google = services.
Why would they make a G-phone when real telephone
companies, like Motorola and Samsung, have already jumped onboard and started
creating competition for the iPhone?

So, instead of
creating more print about a platform with such a displeasing name and quest for
world domination global presence,
I’m going instead to talk about something completely different.

Duck, duck,
duck, goose. Macro, macro, macro, micro.

Maybe you
thought microsites were just a fad. A product of an overactive imagination that
would fade. Well, think again. Used in the right way, they can be extremely
beneficial. Paul Smith wrote a brief
article that outlined some of the ways you can use them “for fun and
profit.”

1. Explore new technologies. In other words, play around without screwing up your whole website.
2. Smaller, but better, faster. Quickly put in place, so you can be on top of trends. Also, room to experiment with creative that you might not want to use on your website itself.
3. Targeting. Take, for example, MTV’s 300 microsites for specific shows. Imagine the measurement you can get from that. “A focused message can mean a focused audience,” says Paul. Video-ad microsites, I think, will also emerge as a trend this year.

And with the
holiday season looming, many marketers are going to be throwing microsites on
the table as possibilities for offline campaigns, as a way of bringing people
to the Web. The New York Times article Movies,
TV, and Magazines Work Together in Web Campaign details some of these
methods, noting that “the taste in the marketplace is strong” for campaigns with
significant online presences. Being careful, of course, not to “litter the
world” with too many of them.

Don’t know how we missed this the first time around, but second time’s the charm. Right? It’s an interview with YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen by Wired Editor Chris Anderson, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

It’s mildly interesting to hear issues like scalability & advertising models discussed now, in the wake of recent reports on the future of online video.  And it’s more-than-mildly interesting to hear them field questions on copyright wars and how Google changed everything, in the wake of all this social media madness. And what about competition? Sure, we’ve now got a crop of Others (like MetaCafe and Joost) out there now, all trying to be the next YouTube? Maybe, but preferably without all the lawsuits.

Take Hulu, for example. Hyped up? Perhaps. But what a, what a, NAME!

From the Hulu Blog:

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and
rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun
name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our
hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending
mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier
content when, where and how you want it.

Sounds scary. But YouTube’s not going to roll over and die. After all, they’ve just signed Oprah. And we’re forgetting that TV and video are, in fact, two different things. YouTube is, and always will be, video. Leave the challenge of putting television online to everyone else; Chad and Steve can then retire in peace.

Jon Leibowitz of the FTC had a bit of a showdown with online advertisers in Washington, reports the New York Times. At a two-day behavioral marketing forum, when everyone was patting each other on the back about new tracking techniques and the (soon-to-be-introduced) ad platforms for SN sites, this was like a tall glass of ice-cold lemonade on a hot day — poured down their backs. Not a pleasant wake-up call.

"But, hey," says the innocent bystander. "I thought the FTC had their hands full with other stuff." Or, "isn’t that personal information voluntarily given?" And, if all else fails, "But there’s a privacy policy! I read it myself!" Let’s not even get into The Small Print. They’re horrible. (I should know, I write them.)

So the debate rages on. It’s like a tennis match. "Regulate." "Don’t regulate." Or, as it gets a little nastier, "Stop spying!" and "Keep your filthy paws off our industry."

Surely, the FTC didn’t come with us all on their own. PIRG and the
Center for Digital Democracy fired the first shot, saying that
"social-networking
sites…are increasingly "exploiting
behavioral targeting and other advanced micro-marketing techniques" and
that soon

 instead of online communities supported by advertising, they are…becoming marketing vehicles that host communications

                                                                                    Source: the CNET news blog

Isn’t that what we all are?

***Here’s an interesting point, though — call it an afterthought. Yes, we are aware that behavioral targeting exists, but we don’t really notice it. Case in point: Google will throw ads at you based on keywords in the emails you write, correct? But they’re peripheral, like parsley on your burger plate. The only time you would notice the parsley, unless it jumped up and bit you –banner ads don’t yet have that capability. they will. would be if you were madly allergic, or if it covered the whole plate. "Umm, Waiter?"

But you also would notice if it wasn’t parsley. If it was, say, lemongrass, or a teeny weeny slice of Spam. Then you might realize that it is out of place — like Google serving me text ads in Dutch. I realize that it is because my account was used by a very cute Belgian to send some mails home, and so I don’t freak out. But it brings the point home that behavioral targeting makes sense. Spam doesn’t. 

You’ve got to wonder how many hours the mad G-scientists were holed up in their cubbyholes working on the new project that is going to be released soon – you know, the one that made them go "ha, ha, IF YOU ONLY KNEW" when the news came out about Microsoft taking a stake of Facebook. And roll their eyes when the Economist reported last week that "the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities." What? smaller is better?

Back to Maka Maka. It’s only a rumor, the first stage of which (OpenSocial) is merely not-yet-live link,  but already the project has been declared, in the usual dramatic fashion, a "major assault on the social networking scene," with a call for API’s that will "out-open" Facebook.

From TechCruch:

The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services
through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on
how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything
together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader.
Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google
Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your
search history.

Over time, Google will connect all of these together in
different ways, along with data about you from other social services
across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying
all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google
is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google
app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve
joined yet another social network.

You also have to wonder how many hours the Namers (because there MUST be an in-house person whose job is just to come up with ridiculous names for these things) spent trying to figure out what to call it.

Might this be their reference? I’d prefer it over the real one. The Unofficial Facebook blog has this to say:

When you say a guy made a ‘maka’ in Israel, it means that he made a
great deal and earned a lot of money, really fast.” Looks like Google
is trying to prepare the Facebook knock out.

But, as they do point out, it’s not quite ready. We’ll cross our fingers. Though, as-seen-in-SFGate, "…keep in mind that there’s a Google rumor per week these days and
the company, although dominant in search, has a track record of
releasing new products that fail to live up to the inevitable hype."

OUCH!