Search results matching tag 'Gawker'

It's so bad at Conde Nast: Graydon Carter spotted in the canteen

255762 — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:52:00 GMT

Job elimination experts McKinsey & Co are currently touring Conde Nast's New York office with one of those people zapper phasers. Okay, it’s a spreadsheet really, but the end result is all the same. No job is apparently safe unless you work at the New Yorker magazine.

The New York Observer has a long piece about the McKinsey's visit to Conde Nast's building at 4 Times Square, where the management consultancy firm is reviewing the way the magazine firm does business from top to bottom.

The piece has lots of telling observations and interviews from various editors about how bad things in the once super-glamorous magazine company (hey it must be, they put in two movies*) have got that even Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has been seen, get this, in the staff cafeteria. Seriously. Apparently, he was checking out the stir fry options and looking uncomfortable. Maybe he was wondering if people really ate the food? Just a thought.

"I saw Graydon in the cafeteria this week!” said one business-side insider told the New York Observer. "In all my years here, I’ve never seen him in my life there. He was behind me in the line at checkout with his little swipe card. He was milling around uncomfortably with the commoners."

The reason he was down there could have something to do with the $5.3m interest free loan Conde Nast gave him, according to Gawker, to buy some four-story greek revival townhouse in Greenwich Village. Maybe they asked for it back.

People shouldn't fear too much as it wasn't clear he actually sat down and ate lunch, but apparently the sight of him put the Observer's source into a bit of a panic.

Either that or he could have merely been on a reconnaissance mission. He might return, or maybe he thought that really Conde Nast owed him at least one last splash of an order from the New York restaurant Balthazar where apparently Vanity Fair staffers would order takeouts of sandwiches and cheese plates several times a week.

Now it seems you are more likely to hear Conde Nast staff say things like "Let's go to Pret A Manger instead". Wow they're almost like us. It's scary.

Well not all of them. When it was initially revealed that McKinsey was being brought in, reports said there would be no sacred cows - staff at the recently closed Portfolio magazine and Men.Style.com. However, the New York Observer now says that Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend has told the New Yorker's editor David Remnick that the magazine would be immune. Probably why he hasn’t been spotted in the staff canteen.

*The Devil Wears Prada – based on Conde Nast's Vogue and How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, based on Toby Young's time working for Graydon Carter at Vanity fair.

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You've been blogged: money for nothing and content for free

255762 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:09:00 GMT

The Washington Post has a good natured piece that is well worth a read on the liberties blogs take when swiping other people's content as they distil hours and sometimes days of work into as little 30 minutes.

In his piece 'The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)', Ian Shapira writes about his recent Washington Post piece about a life coach explaining Generation Y to Gens Xers and boomers ('Guru Explains Gens X, Y, Boomer To One Another'), which was taken by Gawker.

He explains that despite his long interview with the coach, his 3,000 words of notes and 1,500 word finished piece he was flattered to have Gawker blog and link to his piece.

But then having spoke to his boss he slowly realised that he'd been had. Or more precisely, he'd been blogged.

"Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered. But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?

"The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) (pension plan) and health insurance.

It is easy to understand why his editor might have taken that view. Gawker took extensive quotes and as with everything in blogosphere it took it for free.

Shapira goes on to say that he spoke to the Gawker blogger (who spent 30 minutes blogging the WaPo piece) and finally how he spoke to Gawker boss Nick Denton, who, smart guy that he is, knew just how the reporter felt and that he too felt the pain of people taking his content, saying he would "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint Gawker's stories.

Oh yeah, but as for that WaPo piece in particular? "That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," Denton said.

I thought about calling this blog post "How I spent hours writing this feature and all I got were a few lazy blog posts" because that seems to highlight the core idea in this debate about the worth of content. The Washington Post invested resources, time and money in that piece. Gawker did little, but scored traffic and income on the back of it.

It's a big debate, some want to stop blogs taking so much for free. Its outcome will impact on the future of newspapers and play a role in any plans they have to charge for content.

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Blog profits, the apocalypse is off

255762 — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:52:00 GMT

In the UK last week blogging outfit Shiny Media went into administration, but across the pond Nick Denton's Gawker is in rude health despite his apocalyptic predictions.

Last Autumn Denton grabbed a few headlines when he said we should be preparing for a decline of up to 40% in advertising revenues. What he actually said was: "Anyone who isn't prepared for ads to go down 40% is crazy."

Well there has certainly been a lot of craziness since. Today Denton reveals the good news. First-half revenues at Gawker were up 45% as its ad growth continues pretty much uninterrupted. Nice work.

He's even updated his apocalyptic chart. Awesome, you have to respect someone who takes time out from the apocalypse (I mean there's all that Evian, cans of Heinz baked beans and flashlights to stock up on and that takes time) and updates the chart.

Obviously, Denton didn't sit around waiting for the apocalypse, he took steps. Were they apocalyptic steps? He cut staff and closed sites as Gawker reduced the number of blogs it publishes from 15 to nine. This included the axing of Defamer.com and incorporating it into Gawker.

But it wasn't the cuts alone that paid off. As Denton puts it:

"The plunge has already been pretty terrifying for a range of companies from Yahoo and IAC to the newspapers. But I was wrong in one respect: a few premium internet brands, Gawker's among them, have withstood the advertising apocalypse."

"Sometimes there's consolation to be found in congenital pessimism; I'd rather be wrong and thriving than right and dead."

As for Shiny Media, the sites (like Shiny Shiny) are gathering digital dust despite talk they might be bought. Interesting blog post here, however, by a former Shiny Media staffer who says one of the problems was the errrm lack of traffic and ads.

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Blogs are big business…just not here

255762 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:50:00 GMT

With Shiny Media going into administration yesterday there is a timely piece in the FT today on blogs. Yes, they're big business in the US (its like the FT just noticed), but here start-ups have struggled to replicate the success of the Huffington Post and Gawker. Is the UK simply too small?

We wrote about Shiny Media's fall last night and Lisa Devaney has blogged about it here as well. A real shame to see it fail. Maybe its strategy wasn't all there, it certainly had missteps along the way (like its move into football that resulted in Who Ate All The Pies being put up for sale), but I think the people at Shiny produced some very good work and ultimately it appears to have been a small publisher hit by the recession.

Its woes (I'm guessing) were no different to any other online publisher. There is not enough revenue out there. Not as much as anyone would like to support such a business.

What's clear is that while blogs like the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, The Business Insider, Gawker and quite a few more do good business in the US, the UK market appears too small to sustain even quite a compact firm like Shiny.

This is a shame as I often think that media owners don't do blogs very well (The Guardian and a couple of others aside), but there doesn't seem enough advertising oxygen to do them independently and make a living.

Shiny is, of course, not the first UK blog start-up to go down. Glitterdtich closed last year. I don't know what Shiny was getting for its online advertising, but I doubt it was achieving the levels that newspapers are or anything like it.

In the US, as the FT notes, US blogs have hit the level where they are able to charge about what a big US newspaper charges for online advertising. The Business Insider's rate card for instance is up to $30 per 1,000 impressions. Gawker has a rate card CPM of around $50 (of course, it doesn't mean it gets that).

They are also pulling in millions of dollars in venture capital, but here the story is different. The Shiny Media was variously reported to have attracted $4.5m in funding in 2007 from Bright Station Ventures, but apparently the veracity of those reports is not 100%. With co-founder Katie Lee (who left earlier this year) saying: “It was incorrectly reported in the press and we were told to stick with the story. Was mortified.”

Shiny Media's blogs will no doubt continue as the company gets snapped up by someone (at least I hope it does), but it looks unlikely that anyone in the UK is going to be using blogging as a launch pad for anything major any time soon with the way the market is.

But it would be nice to try. It all comes down to the ideas.

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When blogs grow up: HuffPo invests, but niggling questions remain

255762 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:51:00 GMT

Big news at the Huffington Post with a $1.75m investment in investigative reporting signalling the continued expansion of blogs beyond linking and comment, but some are also wondering if this is at all connected to the thorny issue of content scraping and possible legal action?

Content scraping is where blogs take an excerpt, usually not toooo much, and link to the original post, but some blogs have recently been accused of whole sale content theft. That's taking not just the odd paragraph, but the the whole article. The Huffington Post is one of those blogs in the firing line.

MinnPost.com for one thinks the $1.75m fund for investigative reporting is window dressing for a site that could be sued for "oversharing others' work".

Oversharing is such a polite way of putting it. You have to wonder how much investigative reporting these ten people will do when some are freelancers and their job description will include short breaking news stories as well as longer pieces?

The alternative weekly the Chicago Reader was one of several papers to recently complain about the Huffington Post's practice of "oversharing".

"The Huffington Post's local 'aggregation wing straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission ('read the whole article'? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here's a screen shot since we're obviously about to ask them to take it down."

Film critic Roger Ebert was also a little hacked off with the Huffington Post and vocalised his discontent beneath the offending article:

"I would like to point out that this article rips off my actual article about the incident at rogerebert.com, and by adding all those 'he saids,' destroys the rhythm and form of my prose. Nor does the article even have the decency to link to mine, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to see that HuffPost stole it from me. Nor does it even say where I 'said' these things, but implies I said them to HuffPost. Arriana, I love ya, but this practice is immoral, and HuffPost practices it shamelessly."

Arriana Huffington said in the press release about the investigative fund that it would provide "work and a platform for seasoned journalists downsized by major media outlets", which is all well and good, but Gawker wonders how much experience these people will have in a post headlined 'Arianna Huffington Seeks Young Flunkies' where it reprinted a job ad for a managing editor, which is looking for two years experience in online news and a degree.

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Would you buy a failing newspaper?

255762 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:54:00 GMT

Serious question as there is more talk about saving US newspapers and turning some of them into non-profit foundations. Staff at the San Francisco Chronicle are talking of a foundation bid for the paper (sort of like the Guardian) in an effort to save it with names like Craig Newmark floated as buyers/investors.

News of the San Francisco Chronicle follows similar talk earlier this week from philanthropist Eli Broad about the Los Angeles Times, whose owner Tribune is in trouble.

Broad said that the US can't afford to lose good newspaper journalism, but added a caveat which was that he wasn't sure that the Los Angeles Times could "be a national paper, or have the same aspirations it once had".

Basically Broad is talking about reduced circumstances. About once great newspapers no longer being so great; local rather than national, which will certainly be the case with the Chronicle or any other paper that someone tried to save.

Broad also said (and it is a stumbling block for all) that "no one has figured out a good business model as of yet. Newspapers ought to be owned by foundations, not look for great financial returns. If several foundations are involved there is likely to be journalistic freedom".

Let's face it, the same thing could happen in the UK to the Independent. You could imagine people trying (and sadly failing) to save it in the not too distant future.

The Indy of all papers is in serious trouble. Sales of the Independent News & Media title were down 18.41% year on year to around 205,964 copies,

San Francisco Chronicle journalists are trying to talk investors into buying the foundering daily newspaper and restructuring it as a non-profit, according to the SF Appeal.

Apparently journalists would invest some of their own cash, a California Media Workers Guild representative at the San Francisco Chronicle told the Appeal, but even after a heavy write down from Hearst's 2000 price of $660m they would need some serious money.

Gawker took at guess at who might buy the paper:

Old San Francisco money: if anyone is going to put cash into a hemorrhaging newspaper it is local billionaires.

New dotcom money: Seems a long shot, but maybe in a crazy moment of retroness those rich Google types might go for it. Maybe not.

Craig Newmark: is another the gossip site raises. The San Francisco-based Craigslist founder is a bit more altruistic than many of his Web 2.0 generation. Besides, with Craigslist he helped kill the newspaper market, so let's face it he owes them. But even with his many millions he would need help from fellow multi millionaires. Craigslist makes around $100m a year, but the Chronicle is losing $50m.

Maybe predictably Gawker concluded that the outcome is more likely to be "it makes little sense to invest in fixing the old problems of a dying industry when you can net much more glory or profit starting from scratch".

But who would enter a dying industry from scratch when the problem appears to have been is in the basic maths?

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"The layoff will be blogged" – blogging the downturn

255762 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:23:00 GMT

Good piece in the New York Times today on how "the layoff will be blogged". It picks up on how this downturn is more public than any before it with bloggers covering not only each other's but their own departures as well.

Oddly, and dispiritingly, some people are even reading about their own layoffs on blogs. The paper reports on Elon Musk, chief executive of the electric-car company Tesla Motors in San Carlos, Calif., who said (get this) "he had no choice other than to blog about the Oct. 15 layoffs at the closely watched company — even though some employees had not yet been told they were losing their jobs".

The Gawker Media Valleywag blog gets a mention (you know the one that said blogging is dead. Lol), which is publishing a lot of the job losses in Silicon Valley where the geekstream is broadcasting departures as they happen via blogs, sites like Techcrunch and Twitter feeds.

The papers says that the tendency to blog layoffs is one that is going to spread to companies of all sizes and in all industries. It quotes Rusty (love the name) Rueff, a former human resources executive at Electronic Arts and PepsiCo, saying "whatever you say inside of a company will end up on a blog. That is kind of scary, not to mention a little dangerous for those still in employment (so I can't tell you about the secret memo I just got, sorry). So you have a choice as a company — you can either be proactive and take the offensive and say, 'Here’s what's going on', or you can let someone else write the story for you".

One company more than most has learnt this the hard way – USA Today-owner Gannett. When it told staff it was laying off 10% one journalists, Jim Hopkins, set up an unofficial Gannett Blog, which has since been writing daily about the rise and fall of Gannett since August.

Gannett doesn't have a company blog. No shocker there as many companies do not. Who gives them advice? Oh right PR firms many of whom still don’t get it. Yet.

It also mentions Steven Carpenter, chief executive of a two-year-old investing advice site, Cake Financial, who blogged the night before he laid off 30% of staff and directly after he met them.

"It let them know what we were up to in real time, so they didn’t get nervous about what was going on," he said.

Okay so some of this is new, but some people sure have short memories. Having sat through the dotcom boom and bust does no one remember Fucked Company? Fucked Company reported many thousand job lost in the last Dotcom boom bust circa 2001. Although, Fucked Company, as its homepage tells you, has long been frakked itself like many of the sites and companies it reported on.

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Why blogging is far from dead

255762 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You had better stop reading this as blogging is dead. Seriously, I just read it. Some wag at Wired says there is too much social media, and blogging is, like, so 2004. What rubbish.

According to Paul Boutin, who writes for Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag, writing a blog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago as the blogosphere, "once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge".

Tsunami of paid-for bilge? It was worth reading the piece for that alone. I laughed out loud, as this rant was clearly marked "paid bilge" as someone hit the publish button.

He goes on to say that "cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths" and it is almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers.

His line is why bother? – you are better off expressing yourself on Facebook, Flickr or Twitter.

His argument seems to be those folksy blogs where people wrote about their humdrum day to day lives or, ahem, subjects such as politics or dating have been replaced by impersonal professional sites.

You mean like Valleyway? The site he writes for that is part of Nick Denton's media blog empire Gawker. Do you think he is talking at all about himself when he writes about "cut-rate journalists"? I'm emailing him right now. I'm just going to say this: does the phrase "pot kettle, kettle black" mean nothing to you? Try it out and take it for a spin. I think you might like it.

Swipes aside, on one level he has a point. The world is full of professional blogs in 2008 and marketers have entered the fray. The medium has grown and matured. New players and types of blog have entered the market. In places it has got professional, there are powerful blogs out there like the Huffington Post, and that is to be applauded for what it has brought us.

Newspapers like the Guardian have also thrived with sites like Comment is Free. All good news I say. Who wants to see the blogging wither and die? Not me for one. I enjoy this too much.

A lot of those early bloggers got bored and moved on as the novelty of writing an online came and went. My first blog ran for a few years and virtually all of the links that I had on my blogroll have died, but not all.

Yes social media, micro blogging and multi media sites are all the rage, but there is a place for all here. I use Facebook, Twitter and have flirted with a bunch of other social media sites but not, errr, committed. Blogging offered, and still does, a space to put down a sentence and a link or 500 words. Whatever caught your fancy that day. He complains in the piece that text-based sites aren't where the buzz is anymore, which is true but the buzz moves on and what it leaves behind is the substance.

For B2B sites like Brand Republic, blogging is very important. We've built up, and continue to do so, a network of bloggers with a variety of things to say. Some might post a picture, a piece of video or like me they might type for a good while before stopping.

Blogging is alive and kicking. Okay, I need to let me fellow Twitters know what I've been doing in the long form.

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Is the advertising industry homophobic?

255762 — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:02:00 GMT

It's the question of the year. Today there is a guy with a funny walk being shot at by Mr T in a 4x4. Before that it was Nike and its Dunkin' ad. Bob Garfield has got so fired up he wrote a letter about it to John Wren. Is it a storm in a tea-cup?

Today we are talking about the Mr T Ad who shoots Snicker bars at a guy speed walking through suburban America.

Is it gay bashing? OK, he has a funny walk, but really it is difficult to speed walk without wiggling your hips a bit. It doesn't mean you're gay or that gay people walk funny. It just means you are a speed walker.

Mr T attacks him because he is walking and not pounding the streets like a runner. He says he pities him and that he is a disgrace to the man race? See nothing much to get worked up about. Besides Mr T is a solid wall of testosterone. It was the Mekong Delta that made him that way.

The campaign is jokey and some might say cruel and violent. It could also be seen to encouraging bullying, but I don't think it is.

The scenario depicted in the AMV London ad is clearly humorous and is part of a long-running campaign that, from its conception, has put humour at its heart, delivered via the booming megaphone voice of mockery that is Mr T. It is knockabout fun, it really is. How can something that fires chocolate bars be anything else?

Bob Garfield at Advertising Age got himself worked into a huge lather and took it upon himself to write an open letter to Omnicom CEO John Wren. He argued that the latest Snickers ad follows a trend coming out of Omnicom-owned agencies that is essentially gay bashing.

In the case for the prosecution he begins by citing a two year old ad from BBDO Detroit for Dodge Caliber, which featured a tough guy snorting the words "silly little fairy" at a Tinkerbell-like pixie. It was part of a long running "Anything but cute campaign".

Again it is funny and the pixie gets the last laugh. I liked it, I liked the focus group one as well.

The pixie in the ad I hasten to mention is not a lipstick ***, just a stand-up, run-of-the-mill, Lord of the Rings-type pixie who wants to turn the world into a toy box wonderland land, which means there is no place for the secret service-like black suburban vehicle.

Garfield then cites another Omnicom spot, this time from TBWA, New York. It is also for Snickers and was its Super Bowl spot. In this one, two mechanics chew on the opposite ends of a Snickers bar until their lips meet in an accidental kiss.

"Quick do something manly" and they both rip chest hair from their bodies. It's quite funny. It isn't laugh-out-loud funny as you can see the joke coming a mile away, because the set-up is lame playing on the general dislike straight Anglo Saxon men have for kissing other men. I mean that's fair enough, we're not French. Bob should get that.

Garfield even admitted the ad while "wasn't exactly homophobic" he said it was about homophobia and "men's deepest sexual fears about themselves".

Worse, Garfield said, was the Mr T ad. "The sentiment behind it is simply sick. John [Wren]: three Omnicom agencies, three outrages. It is time for you to intervene".

He goes on in his open letter to Wren to ask how he can be "so insensitive, how could you be so shallow, and how could you be so mean?

"Stop the dehumanizing stereotypes. Stop the jokey violence. There is no place in advertising for cruelty. Pull the campaign. Do it now. Then tell your agencies how to behave. Or else."

I think Wren will be resting easy. The ads Garfield talks about are mixed humour wise, but homophobic they are not. The Garfield Gaybashometer needs to be retuned and to get a sense of humour. No one was hurt in the making of those ads, not even the little pixie. Her message was don't mess with me as I will turn you into a preppie. That's a harsh punishment to deal on anyone. So don't mess with the pixie/fairy. Whatever.

Coincidentally the criticism of these ads comes as Nike pulls an ad that has been accused of sending out anti-gay messages.

The controversy broke last week when ads for Nike's new Hyperdunk basketball shoes broke and someone at Nick Denton's New York media blog gawker.com asked the question: does "Nike hate gays? Or do gays hate basketball.

The ads concerned as you can see features basketball players getting dunked in apparently what is considered the worst way possible with the dunker dangling off the rim and his undercarriage in the face of the dunkee.

I'll have to take Gawker's word for it that this is bad as I know nothing about the world of basketball.

The Gawker piece strikes me of being guilty of the same thing that Garfield is guilty of and that is reading too much into the ad. The blogger concerned even writes leaving aside my unrelated general hatred of Nike". Well, I'm not sure we can.

In the case of the Nike ad sport is a fast, sweaty and occasionally painful business. Bodies crash into one another and like all things in life someone always ends up on top whether you are dunkin a basket ball, sliding into home or scoring a goal. It's a sweaty scramble. Anti gay? Well I wouldn't want to have someone's balls in my face, but then I don't get a hard on thinking about scoring a basket. No hoop dreams here.

Gawker argues that the campaign with its lines "That Aint right" is based on the implacable homophobia of straight jocks. "That can't be denied".

No probably not, but that isn't the point. Who, gay or straight, wants someone else's balls in their face?

IAB launches overview of UGC/social media and advertising

255762 — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:15:18 GMT

The Interactive Advertising Bureau in the US has released a major report ahead of a conference on user generated content and social media advertising. It kicks off with a claim that shows how radically the online landscape has changed this last two years when it says that if you're not on a social networking site then you're not on the internet -- and that is as true for advertisers as it for consumers.

Its 'User Generated Content and Social Networks Advertising Overview’ looks at all areas of the one thing everyone wants to know how to crack. These last few weeks, it has been Twitter again and it will be interesting to see where that goes and how it develops and grows.

The report puts social media sites like Twitter at the centre of the user generated content, which began almost a decade ago with Open Diary. The first blogs became tipping points for this social media ground swell where "social networking is the ultimate manifestation of user generated content, and as such, holds more potential for growth than any other form of content on the web today".

Part of that is down to how it changes the dynamics of web relationships (to a degree) and puts content creation into the hands of the many rather than the few because of the proliferation of cheap, quality and easy to use technology.

However, the report is right when it says that while this has led to a growth in content from individuals and groups, what it hasn't done is filtered through to brands and agencies whose fears and unanswered questions keep them from taking full advantage of this changing dynamic.

And there is a lot to take advantage of. In 2006 UGC sites attracted 69m users in the US alone, and in 2007 generated $1bn in advertising revenue. That is just the thin end of the wedge. By 2011, UGC sites are projected to attract 101m users in the US and earn $4.3bn in ad revenue. Still, obstacles remain that prevent advertisers from taking advantage of this dynamic new medium. In the UK as well the numbers are good, such is the fervour and interest in social networking.

The report shows how relevant UGC is at all levels, demonstrating why brands should care. It isn't all about geeks on Twitter and kids on Bebo. At the very sharp end of consumer interaction some of the most popular and successful (and obvious as well for that matter) UGC social media sites are review sites where consumers share their brand experiences, which is something that extends across about every area you can think of and is set to extend further still.

In October 2007 a Nielsen study found that consumer recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising around the world. Over three quarters of respondents from 47 markets across the world rated recommendations from consumers as a trusted form of advertising. Compare that to 63% for newspapers, 56% for TV and magazines, and 34% for search engine ads2. Review sites are frequently where consumers go to find those recommendations, making them an important place for marketers to have a voice.

The report looks at some of the biggest sites on the web for this kind of thing, namely electronics site CNet and automotive site Edmunds.com.

CNet and Edmunds are both a decade plus old and include a lot of content from professional editors, but alongside those are the consumer or user reviews that you'll find on any number of other sites like Amazon or Reviewcentre.com.

Another good example the IAB gives is Conde Nast's food and wine site Epicurious.com. According to CondeNet, of almost 100,000 recipes in Epicurious.com's database, 92% have ratings and/or comments. In addition to these reviews, over half of the recipes in the Epicurious database are user submitted.

These sites are good models as they're long established and they have already progressed a long way through the learning curve. They have established what is dubbed "user agreements" that ensures that the user reviews on the site are a high standard and don't contain any defamation, profanity, threats, illegal or inappropriate content.

That seems to work as Edmunds says that less than 1/10 of 1% of all user comments are deleted, and only a small percentage of those are for profane or derogatory language (most are the result of salespeople posing as customers).

So while review sites by nature foster an honest, consumer-led discussion about product and service experiences, they are not the “wild, wild west”. While advertisers cannot be guaranteed they won't be advertising alongside a negative comment about their brand, they can reasonably assume their ad will not sit next to profane or defamatory content.

On the blogging front the HuffingtonPost and Gawker network gets credit for showing where that particular side of social media can go and how blogs in particular could develop into news businesses combining professional salaried teams with UGC.

The change in the online landscape has had a major impact on where the ad dollar goes --- namely that the dollar is being spread among an increasing number of vertical sites.

The IAB cites Avenue A/Razorfish as saying that in 2007 adspend was distributed across 1,832 websites, more than double the 863 properties on which the agency purchased media in 2006. More importantly UGC sites, predominantly blogs and "owned and operated" sites, were playing an important role in niche ad networks such as Glam Media, iVillage's Sugar Network, and MarthaStewart's Lifestyle Network.

As AvenueA/Razorfish's 2008 Digital Outlook Report says: "One related area to watch closely is the growth of vertical ad networks. Martha Stewart Living's lifestyle network and Forbes' Audience Network are two recent examples of strong brands extending their reach by building out ad networks. It is a reasonable extension for brands and helps the smaller sites and blogs within a vertical network gain needed exposure with large advertisers. Look for more vertical ad networks in the year ahead."

What all that points to is the change in mindset that advertisers need to make and the issues that need to be thought about.

For instance, traditionally advertisers would take space, place it exactly where they wanted and have some control over the context. That is no longer the case and as the IAB puts it, "that lack of control can be a source of great anxiety for marketers. But it also represents an unrivalled opportunity.

"Advertising in UGC requires marketers to alter their approach. Instead of broadcasting one-way messages at their audiences, advertisers are compelled to engage in a conversation. Doing so carries risks, but failure to do so carries more."

And conversations can be risky and requires "those marketers to behave differently, or risk what can be very vocal disapproval from those consumers".

The IAB Leadership Forum on User-Generated Content and Social Media takes place in New York on June.

You can download 'User Generated Content and Social Media Advertising Overview' on the IAB.

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