Opportunities for online advertising

First option:

To develop interactive professional communication actions, introducing elements such as career tests and contests.

Example:

Branchout, a new application for Facebook, in January registered an exponential growth in traffic, from 10,000 to 250,000 monthly visitors.

What is the success of the new service? According to CEO Rick Marini, the main idea stands in "super-connectors", people who have more than 5,000 friends on Facebook, and they see a benefit from the service as a recruiting agency and invite all their friends. After that the application is promoted through viral advertising techniques.

Second option:

To give something for free, and later to introduce a small monthly fee.

Example:

Video webpage Hulu Plus have got one million subscribers in just a year. The portal is a video streaming platform, which allows to watch movies, tv series, tv shows  was launched in 2008, and in mid-2009, partly switched it services to a paid model. For $99 per year subscribers get access to their favorite TV shows and serials.

For 2010, revenues was projected to exceed $600 million, which is more that twice of  2009 result - $263 million.

Third option:

To perform innovative advertising

Google gave a forecast of changes in consumer advertising:

1. Google announced its intention to launch new types of video ads on YouTube and have predicted that half of all media advertising will include videos based on "cost-per-view" system, that users themselves will choose.

2. Half of the audience will watch ads in real time. This means that some elements of advertising will vary depending on location, weather and individual preferences. This new technology promoted by Google was developed by Teracent, a display ad specialist which was acquired by Google in 2009.

3. Google has been talking about the priority of mobile technologies for a long time and forecasts  that phone screens will become the number 1 channel Internet traffic by 2015. For media advertising this means engagement of phones to connect magazine advertising and online advertising. Google Goggles application already allows users to photo shoot real things or places and immediately search them in Google.

5. 75% of all advertising will be socially-integrated: all users will have opportunities to share, comment and assess any advertisement. Instead of one-sided ad messages from advertisers to consumers, will be developed a bilateral contact between brand and consumers.

By the way, Ed Mushinsky wrote about these tendencies 4 years ago on his blog:

Forecast