MEDIABLITZ

Om Malik is very concerned because page views and unique users declined in the last month. He thinks they should have gone up because kids went back to school but a) the explosive growth in the Facebook audience comes from folks who don't go to school and b) hopefully most people use Facebook in their leisure time which they probably had more of in August. I think there is also a burn out period, when people first get into something they spend a lot of time setting up their profile and adding friends and then ease into a maintenance period where they spend less time at the site and primarily go there when they get a notice that someone wrote them a message, wrote on their wall, super poked them, blah, blah, blah. When you're talking about such big numbers of unique users (rounding) the Compete data says 34 Million in August and 31 Million in September, it's not such a big variance. And to be fair Om calls it a small dip, but his headline says "Traffic Tanks". ...

Bob Pittman's Pilot Ware, which owns DailyCandy.com , Thrillist.com , and the "light green" Ideal Brite, is sticking with it's core email strategy. Apparently Daily Candy gets a $250 CPM for it's Dedicated eMail product. Here is an example of one for Nike . Daily Candy and it's various city-specific offshoots has a subscription base of 2 million and cost Pittman $35 million in 2003. Thrillist, a Daily Candy for men was purchased for $250,000 in 2005 and currently has 110,000 subscribers. Last year Pittman tried to sell Daily Candy for $100 million but had no takers and the product is currently not for sale. While Pilot Ware focuses it's investments on affiliate TV stations it is also investing in some other online products such as music blog Stereogum and Facebook's popular social-music application iLike . from Adage

Facebook isn't a news source, it is a social networking tool and it is debatable on how differentiated advertisements need to be from the user generated content. Facebook is a multimedia tool with video and music but the majority of its content is text. If the company employed journalistic Editors there would be a big wall separating the business side from the editorial side. The business side would push for anything that made the ad more effective and the editorial side would push back to insure editorial integrity by completely differentiating advertising from content. Most Editors take this very seriously and don't want there to be a hint of conflict of interest. Above is a screen shot of the news feed I receive from my friends on my Facebook account. The Army ad I circled is troublesome. It does not look different at all from the messages that I get from my friends which is accented by the fact that its from a very controversial advertiser. Should social web sites be...

PlayboyU announced the launch of a college only community on Ning . Owen Thomas of Valleywag told CNBC doesn't think the bunny has any bounce, but I disagree. Basically because there is a need for "gated communities" online especially among students as everyone essentially invades their Myspaces and Facebooks. The front page successfully conveys the sense of an exclusive club and Mashable has screenshots of inside pages which look very robust and uniquely designed. The front page also stresses that the visitor is "not allowed" and you have to apply with an ".edu" email address to get in. People respond well to being told that they can't have something, it makes them want it. And the fact that you have to be in college (or at least have an .edu email) makes it prone to socially desirables. Myspace and the dating sites have gotten so big that it's essentially impossible to trust the people you meet there and Facebook is being invaded by o...