Week Eleven

Website Watching

For my final commentary on Yahoo (www.yahoo.com.au) I decided to look more closely at its revenue streams. As discussed in my first blog entry, around 90 percent of Yahoo’s revenue is from advertising. In this vein, I took it upon myself to flick through a number of the categories on the Yahoo site and ascertain which companies have forged an advertising partnership with Yahoo. On the home page, some solid advertising companies include: Samsung (new phone and camera), E-bay, Virgin Blue, Swisse (mulitvitamins), Expedia.com.au (travel and holidays), Seek learning (unis, tafes etc)
Optus, Wesley Mission, World Vision Australia, Commonwealth Bank (video, not static ad), Plan (child sponsorship organisation), Flickr, Fox, Channel 7, Commonwealth Bank, Tiffany and Co and Creative Holidays

On some of the side bar categories there were other ads which were tailored for the genre of the relevant audience. These include:
Diet Coke (lifestyle page), Music downloads (Music page), MacBook (news page), Webstrat (web development on real estate page) and ACER notebook (on real estate page), Webjet (travel page), Australia.com (travel page), and cruise liners (travel page) etc.

Also movie traliers/ads for cinema plus video store ads are popular on Yahoo – as are movie shopping carts as source of revenue. .

In addition to this other money spinners are customer-paid downloadable games. http://au.games.yahoo.com/ This is a MASSIVE section and evidently a big cash cow for Yahoo.

Cross promotions also generate income by way of promoting aligned media business such as magazines – New Idea, Famous, Home Beautiful, Marie Clare, Men’s Health, Spec Savers, Who, Women’s Health and tv station, Channel 7.

On a final note, there are numerous links on Yahoo to various shopping carts for jewellery, technology (iPods, televisions and phone etcs) and eHarmony (an online dating service).

It is clear from the advertising that Yahoo has a diverse audience representing a wide spectrum of ages, demographics, income brackets and leisure activities.

Lovely Links

The ABC’s 7.30 report on May 18 provided a succinct analysis on the current media landscape which is dominated by the likes of Packer, Murdoch and Stokes. The story highlighted that the media moguls, as powerful and rich as they are, may be in for some ‘tough times’ ahead with a tenuous share market leading to big financial losses. Also, with the rise of internet advertising and the gradual demise of newspaper and television advertising the media moguls are losing money in their coiffeurs. The story reiterated what we have been discussing in class and in our readings. For more information go to http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2574058.htm

And a quirky little bit of information the Pope has just got his very own Facebook called Pope2You page to communicate more directly with young people throughout the world. The site was launched on Thursday and enables youth to send virtual postcards with pics of Benedict and excerpts of his quotes. There is also an application for iPhones and iPod Touch devices to provide video and audio news on the Pontiff’s speeches, travels and broader activities within the Catholic Church
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/5588901/vatican-launches-facebook-application/

Group Gossip

This week I will be working on provision of the final content. This will include some further work on downloading the video and then editing it. I have Adobe Premier on my computer which I will have to acquaint myself with to ensure we have some audiovisual content on our website. I did a Digital Storytelling course at ACMI a few years ago so I should be able to work out the basics of editing http://www.acmi.net.au/

Reading Ramblings

This week’s reading focused on some key technical aspects of web design. The first article was by Duyne and was entitled Meaningful error messages. Essentially, this article articulated the need to ‘graciously’ factor in error-messaging into a website design framework for the benefit of one’s audience. The article summarised four key principles to adhere to when scripting a guiding message for the readership. As quoted from the article, they are as follows:
1. Clear statement of the problem
2. Avoidance of humour (as this may cause irritation or cultural collision!)
3. Explanation of how to recover
4. Positioning the message near the problem in easy-to-read fonts and colours

The second article was by Mark Norman Francis and was entitled Validating your htmle. This piece delved a little deeper into the technical side of web construction. In brief, the article provides a few tips on how to ensure that html pages display correctly across a myriad of browsers by implementing the validation of code. Some to the tools which can be used to do this are as follows:
• The W3C MarkUp Validator, The W3C Link Checker and The W3C CSS Validator