2010 has barely started and every tech blogger or blogress are quick to give us their prediction for the new year and decade. “10 new technologies to follow”, “10 most promising startups”, “10 new trends in social media”. Give me a break, will ya? How accurate were you for 2009?

Sure social media “will be big”. Sure cloud computing “is it”. Sure Apple will “definitely” release a tablet. Those are no predictions. It is just yesterday’s news. Then again, since the temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to fools and children.

Happy New Year!

We’ve received a sneak peak of the new bjjjjjjd device, rumoured to hit the shelves in time for this holiday season. At only $199 and a two year contract (or $499 unlocked) this is the ultimate clipping machine for real men (a lady’s version is scheduled for Valentine’s day).

The bjjjjjjd comes loaded with tons of cool features: a newly designed ergonomic profile (12), micro-adjustable length filters (16) and razor-sharp titanium teeth (36) to name a few. For further information or to order head out to www.bjjjjjjd.com.

Just read an interesting article on AdAge today, which talks about a sharp decline in CTR of online display ads. Couple this with recent numbers on online ad spend decline and you’ve got yourself a pretty scary picture of the state of content monetization. But is it really?

Semi, or unrelated display ads, are not like other links on the page. They usually bring no utility or immediate value to users; more like “content high jacking” than “content monetization”. It’s no surprise then that people are fed up with this noise. We do still click on things  – to get to more relevant content -so CTR is not dead, just getting smarter.

I think it’s got something to do with the packaging. When we visit web pages we very easily separate between “content” and “noise”.  The former is what we came in for, while the latter is what we have to put up with because we are not willing to pay for the real content. We’re obviously less likely to click on the “noise” which drives its price down, making it even more difficult for good content providers to survive. It’s not the underlying content though, it’s the ineffective way of associating the message with a call-for-action.

One of the main reasons for this, I believe, is the lack of relevance due to weak contextual association. In order to have an effective “participation” from viewers, one has to bring closer the enabler (primary content) and the CFA or ad (secondary content). There are two dimensions to this. The first one is space: if it’s relevant to the content then couple it with the content, don’t just throw it into the same container (page) and expect the two messages to stick. The second is time: most content is fundamentally linear (text you read through, video you watch though, or audio you listen to) and comprises of lots of smaller pieces of information (a sentence, a frame in a video or segment of audio). It is those pieces, rather than the big piece, that could be monetized, just like hypertext links to relevant/contextual content are being followed.

The ultimate goal is to personalize this, to get the right message delivered to the right person at the right time in the right context. Lots of progress is made towards this goals by my company (Overlay.TV) and others.

Click-Through is not dead, it’s just getting smarter.