Free is always good right? Not necessarily. So there is no free lunch right?  That's not always true either.  So what am I babbling about?

A practice quite common in the online media world is giving out free banner impressions. Publishers do this for various reasons. Sometimes they are not able to sell all banner inventories to advertisers and rather than running self promotion banners, it looks better on the properties if ads from real advertisers are shown. Other times they just like to under promise and over deliver so every time advertisers and agencies think they are getting a good deal.

So what's wrong with this you say?  What's the harm in getting more exposure if it's free?

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I had been watching some of these TED Talks and I notice Seth Godin did one of these in 2003. I am a subscriber to his blogs and am quite impressed by his ideas and volume of posts.

If you have 17:13 minutes to spare, I'd highly recommend watching his presentation.

Last week I was asked what I thought about the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) industry in Asia right now compared to a few years ago.  From the amount of activities such as seminars, workshops, and even advertising in mainstream media (mostly targeting SMEs for Pay-Per-Click services) the market is definitely being educated.  This is a good sign, especially when the rest of the "developed" SEM markets are reporting double digit percentages of their overall media spent being used online while most of APAC is still stuck in single digits, SEM can be a strong driving force in advancing the use of this extremely effective medium. 

I think most online marketers in APAC will agree that compared to the US and Europe, our industry is still in its infancy not because we are technically behind but because consumer demand is simply not there yet.  While we see a staggering increase in online users and stronger growth rates than the rest of the world, online commerce is still not widely (or not as widely) accepted compared to the developed markets.  There are various reasons for the slowly than expected growth - geographic conveniences, language barriers, slow adaptation of medium by sellers, etc. but I think we are at the point where we can expect to see some strong growth in this region in the next few years as the economy keeps marching ahead.

Let's hope advertisers do something creative in the process to spice things up.

One of my ways in keeping up with industry news and trends is to visit trade sites such as Adverblog, Brand Republic, Clickz, and Search Engine Land.  Going through these information centric sites and their newsletters used to be a tremendous chore until RSS came along. 

Now most news site have RSS syndication, so keeping up usually just means browsing through thousands of headlines everyday under one interface (my choice - Google Reader).  It's faster and easier on the fingers (less clicks), but harder on the mind and eyes (more junk to process).  Perhaps what we need is a group of people who would filter those bits and pieces of information and present the relevant ones to us in a easily digestible format. 

But wait, wasn't that the point of having specialty sites in the first place?  (maybe I need a better RSS filter tool…)  

It’s now live! Check it out

Now for something fun and idiotic…

BTW, sorry about the ugly layout, just upgraded Wordpress and had no time to customize.