Toluu : A VC

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC

Whither 2009 Online Ad Budgets?Today

From where I sit, it appears that the online advertising business has not yet fallen off a cliff. But what happens when ad buyers start spending 2009 ad budgets instead of working off the end of 2008 ad budgets that were set in a different economic environment? That's a question I've been pondering for months and have mentioned once or twice on this blog.

Yesterday, I saw my friend Andy Monfried, founder and CEO of social ad network Lotame, had done a quick twitter poll on the subject. I decided to follow his lead and do the same:

twitterpoll: agency, mktg & ad sales ppl replies only pls: will ONLINE ad budgets in 2009 be flat, up, or down from 2008? tag w/ #2009budget

I got 16 responses that were tagged #2009budget and a few more replies directly to me. Here's the summary of the replies.

I Guess It's Boxee Day at AVCYesterday

I knew Boxee was going to announce Netflix support this week and I guess I should have waited and written one post instead of two, but the timing didn't work out.

So in addition to the video of Avner's interview that I posted this morning, here's the Netflix news:

you can now access Netflix on boxee, get your Instant Queue and Recommendations, browse Recently Added and Most Popular, sift through the entire Netflix Watch Instantly selection by Genre and Search.

This is a fast running small company trying to give the users what they want as rapidly as possible and so Netflix isn't working everywhere yet:

the bad news: we could not make it run on Apple TV ☹ . we tried real hard. vulkanr was almost able to tame it, but he was bucked by the Apple TV’s 1Gz processor. it screamed back at him in thick Scots brogue, “I can’t do it captain, I just don’t have the power!” we’re still working on it, but don’t have a solution, yet.. also there is no

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen On Boxee, Raising Money, and Competing With Big CompaniesYesterday

Boxee's CEO Avner Ronen sat down with Tech Confidential this week and answered some interesting questions about his company Boxee, how he raised money in this environment (from Union Square Ventures and Spark), and how he plans to compete with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and others. The video is about 5 1/2 mins long and if you don't have that much time, fast forward to 5:15 to see the answer to the last question. I think he nailed it.

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CBS Is Quietly Building An Internet Radio PowerhouseDecember 3

I've had a ringside seat for a number of reasons and it's been fun to watch the team at CBS Radio quietly putting together a streaming audio powerhouse. Earlier this year, CBS acquired the rights to operate AOL Radio and yesterday they announced that they had done the same with Yahoo!'s internet radio business.

If you combine the audio streams that CBS' owned and operated radio stations (like 1010 WINS, WFAN, KROCK, etc) generate with the AOL and Yahoo! streams, you'll realize that they are a bigger streamer than almost anyone on the web, with the exception of YouTube.

As Tameeka Kee of Paid Content points out in the blog post I linked to above:

They’ve made the investment in the infrastructure, the platform and the sales force to operate in a sustainable way.”

CBS Radio’s ad sales expertise is a big plus: it has a 1,600-member sales team, can sell ads on national and local levels, and has a vested interest in TargetSpot, the ad technology firm that can serve hypertargeted ads into various types of streaming media. CBS also has experience with a partnership of this size, as it

And Now, A Note From Our SponsorsDecember 2

Verizon is running an interesting campaign for their new Blackberry Storm and this blog is carrying the ad banners right now (right sidebar). You can click on a link in the banner and turn the banner into a video on the new Blackberry Storm.

This is interesting to me for several reasons. First, it's running for two days, yesterday and today, and I believe for these two days, it's the only campaign running on this blog. Second, it's generating a nice chunk of change to a good cause because all the ad revenue on this blog goes to charity. And third, it's running on a blog that was openly critical of the Storm just last week. In fact, that post which is critical of the Storm is still on the front page of this blog where the ad is running. And this blog has been no friend to wireless carriers and their abusive business models like demanding exclusives from device manufacturers.

Conversational media and conversational marketing is coming of age. Marketers are understanding that you have to b