The Pirate Bay, a directory of pirated software, music and movies say they are expecting the charges being brought against them by the Swedish Government. The funniest part is, they are so sure of themselves that the law is on their side that they haven’t even looked for a lawyer and are letting government-funded lawyers prepare their defense set for a trial later in 2008.
Swedish police raided their company about 2 years ago shutting them down. Funny this raid came right after Swedish officials had been given a warning from US officials concerning the reports of damage being caused by the file sharing on their site. With the laws in Sweden, it didn’t take but a few days for the site to be up and running again.
Pirate Bay officials seem to think that the technicality of copyrighted files being located on computers of other people will keep them out of trouble. They say they provide an index of the BitTorrent files currently available with none of the files actually being on Pirate Bay computers so they don’t seem to be that worried about it.
The effects of Pirate Bay to the Hollywood and Music industry are considerable. Now they are even affecting book sales, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ron Goldman states his family has lost $150,000 from the proceeds to be paid to them from O.J.‘s book “If I Did It” thanks to Pirate Bay who provides any one with internet access a chance to read it. Just imagine how it has affected the industries as a whole.
It will interesting to see what happens after the Swedes bring the charges against them. They could be in for a rude awakening, but I doubt there is any way to get the site shut down completely.
JPMorgan stated in an earlier released report called “Nothing But Net” that Ad Networks are on the rise. They define an ad network as a network who transacts, serves, tracks and reports the distribution of advertiser’s ads to the publisher’s pages. They also enable marketers the ability to advertise on many publisher sites through one central location. Publishers earn money from advertising revenue on ad networks without having to invest in a sales team or have products to sell. Ad networks also vary in the way they target a specific group of people and ways for publishers to earn with CPM, CPC, and CPA. Advertising revenues are determined by revenue share agreements in an ad network.
With that said, here’s there prediction they give for the future of ad networks in general. The global graphical advertising market as a whole will benefit from increased users using the internet to get their information and by the increased RPM’s as targeting a certain audience becomes more clear. This sector of the market is expected to increase by 22% according to the statistics of ComScore and JPMorgan.
More marketers are expected to use ad networks along with their other marketing styles this year than ever. You can see how more marketers who advertise on ad networks benefit the publishing community as a whole as a way to monetize their content contained on websites and blogs.
JPMorgan predicts that with the behavioral targeting methods now being used by the major networks will increase CPM’s and drive volume. Marketers like the idea of being able to target a certain audience and are willing to pay more for it. They say that the development of video-ad’s with contextual advertising will be valued by the ad network space.
We know that Google has been experimenting with the best way to use video ads through YouTube and BlueVerse is interested to see how this plays out over the next year. Video Capabilities certainly raise an interest when trying to target a specific user who is searching for information.
Even a newer idea is the mobile phone advertising industry. JPMorgan is watching for the development of a Google Phone device with a platform to display ads. The iPhone has the capabilities of displaying ads so we’ll watch how the success of mobile display ads develops for existing platforms.
JPMorgan also notes that with the capabilities of behavioral advertising paired up with contextual advertising will add pressure to the ad networks to deliver conversions.
The most successful ad networks will be the ones who have a nice variety of advertising platforms for its marketers with targeting capabilities playing a big role as well.
In a detailed report released this morning from Imran Khan and the North America Equity Research team at JPMorgan, Internet stocks outperformed the S&P 500 by 9% in 2007 and are expected to continue to rise throughout 2008.
JPMorgan is predicting that Internet stocks will have a 34% earnings growth this year while the earnings growth for the S&P 500 is only predicted to grow by 8%.
Why does JPMorgan predict such a rise in Internet Stocks? They have proven that faster internet speeds and the ecommerce boom goes hand in hand. Once people have a reliable connection they can depend on to take care of tasks online, it becomes much easier for people to get used to doing. These same people are the reason that Internet stocks are expected to have such a growth spurt. Once users get used to conducting more and more business online, they become more comfortable ordering their products online. With companies offering such easy ways to purchase products and have them shipped right to your home, it’s no wonder JPMorgan expects such a rise in earnings.
Another reason that earnings are expected to see such increases in 2008 are because of the use of social network sites and blogs to get more interaction out of users and give them a sense of community.
What does this mean to the blogging community as a whole? It means that now more than ever we need to have good content on our blogs so that advertisers will want to target our sites to showcase their products. JPMorgan also shows a decrease in newspaper advertising with a continuing decline throughout the new year. The only reason they give for this is due to online advertising methods, search engine marketing in general. With the possibility of ads to be placed in front of targeted users, why wouldn’t marketers want their ads in front of the people who are looking for their services or products?
You can read the whole “Nothing but Net” report from JPMorgan to get a more detailed explanation of why Internet stocks are expected to continue grow.
Below you will find a neat chart showing what search engines people use the most according to JPMorgan’s research. I thought you might find it interesting to look at.
