Heading out tomorrow to NYC for ad-tech, so I will see you there. Contact me at rob (at) fynbosgroup.com if you want to meet up at or around the event. It’s going to be fun-tacular, I can just tell.

Saw an ad for AdReady.com on my blog — which I guess makes sense. Very interesting services (making ads for you quickly and easily), worth checking out. If I had time to actually build a real readership for this blog I might actually spend some time figuring out what would be interesting ads on the site. I did spend a bit of time creating some advertising archaeology (kind of a web 0.5 arts and crafts project if you would) over on my Facebook Better-ads group. Check out my Facebook profile for details.

Ah, I wish you could leave comments on the Jupiter analyst weblog pages, this excellent entry from David Card would get quite a few. Bravo, sir - I can hear it in your voice too which makes it even cooler.

I have a lot more to say on this one, but due to time constraints you’ll have to make do with this rambling incoherent comment I made elsewhere.

Any of the sponsored reports touted in press releases like this one, that makes claims about improvements in conversion for running display ads alongside search campaigns, should be readily available for scrutiny by industry participants and members of the public (I’m speaking specifically about the Yahoo! comscore piece). Why? Because it’s complete BS to put out a report that makes claims such as this that are going to be SO dependent on methodology. I think that there are holes when you look at a single publisher (Yahoo!), well-known (”Fortune 1000″) brands and so on… we don’t know the details so how is it possible to look at their assertions and assign any value to them? It’s worse than a tease — it might be subtracting our knowledge about these effects.

I’m contacting the Yahoo! contact in the press release to see if I can get a copy of the study - unless I missed where it is readily available (it doesn’t seem to be). I’ve been on the other end of doing studies like these, and I still feel especially today that the research companies and the sponsors of the study should see these things as ways to get their name out there at the same time allow for objective examination and criticism of their work.

From YouTube - this is the intro video that my former and long-time employer Jupiter Communications played before the start of its conferences back in 1999. “Will you be disintermediated”? Brings a tear to the eye — fun(ny) stuff.

James Van Dyke and I used to work together at Jupiter Research here in San Francisco. Since those days over the last few years he has started and grown his own research and consulting firm, Javelin Strategy and Research and I wanted to give a shout out to him and his team. The articles available via feed on his site are great, and do a great job covering a variety of payments, banking, authentication and online financial services topics.

With the name change to JupiterKagan following its acquisition (Alan Meckler blog), it appears that the Jupiter brandname lives on and thrives. This year marks the 20th anniversary since the founding of Jupiter Communications in 1986, and since then the brand has morphed into Jupiter Media Metrix (after the merger with Media Metrix in 2000) then back to just Jupiter Research when that business was acquired by INT Media Group in 2002. INT Media Group then changed its name to Jupitermedia Corporation in Autumn of 2002 and adopted the Jupiter brand across its products like Jupiterweb, Jupiterimages etc.

Now we have JupiterKagan. Congratulations to Alan Meckler on a great investment ($250k - $10mm in 4 years ain’t bad) and to the many of my former colleagues who remain there on their hard work and continuing to believe in and build a great business. I hope it will go from strength to strength and continue to offer good value to its clients (and perhaps they’ll write a few reports about online lead generation some time soon!).

According to the Economist [sub], some in the industry are saying that MySpace’s traffic numbers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be… most specifically, Nate Elliott at Jupiter:

Another attack on MySpace has come from Jupiter Research. One of its analysts, Nate Elliott, has said that one of the website’s favourite statistics, its 55m or so registered users, is a ?mirage?. Half of people who sign up to social networks stop visiting after a month or so, he says. And although MySpace’s unique user and page view numbers are impressive, he says, the likelihood is that a small share of its visitors generates most of the page views. Advertisers would not want to pay as much to reach the same smallish group of people thousands of times a month.

Mr Levinsohn says that Jupiter has no data to support its claim. Because what Mr Elliott is saying is potentially damaging to MySpace’s business, he adds, he has made a call to the firm’s chief executive to demand an explanation.

Now, I would love to see if there is indeed data to back this up — but what I can say is that with Jupiter Research being sold last week and now being “JupiterKagan” they’ll probably have to make inquiries of a different chief executive. Congratulations BTW to my former boss David Schatsky on his promotion to President of the combined JupiterKagan entity!

Gary Stein recently left Jupiter Research where he was (rightly so) a reknowned and distinguished online advertising and search analyst. [random thought: would love to create a "where are they now" page for ex-jupiter analysts -- what does a market research analyst become when they grow up?] Where did Gary go - well many people will have heard the buzz that he joined BuzzMetrics who appears to be doing some very cool stuff — so much so that another of my old employers, VNU, decided to buy them and Intelliseek and make them Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Tiny world. But anyway, added his new blog to my blogroll as well and it can be found here or tell your friends to go to steinblog.com.