Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

comScore’s Ad Metrix results for April of 2008 reveal what we may already have known: the top apparel advertiser on the web is American Apparel.

They racked up around 480 million display ad views in the month that led to about 49 million ad-exposed views. Not half bad, huh?

They’ve been at this for a long time. I’ve been seeing the same style American Apparel ads (lo-fi photos bored looking young hipsters not wearing very much) for at least four years now. New stores are popping up all over the place, and I even succumbed and bought a hooded sweatshirt from them a couple of years ago. For the record, it started to fade after about three washes. Too bad, because all of their clothes are American-made, which is really nice to see.
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Microsoft’s new ad push is called the “Mojave Experiment,” and the point is this: due to bad word of mouth, people have poor thoughts about Windows Vista, but when they actually use it (under a different name, Mojave) they think it’s God’s gift to operating systems.

It is true that Vista (which I admit I also have a limited, but largely positive, experience with) gets railed on by a lot of people who aren’t sure why it’s so terrible. But there is a reason for this: when Vista was released and people upgraded their computers from XP, stuff quit working. Hardware, games, everything: kaput.
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Scrabulous, the Facebook app that has over 500,000 users, has been shut down today in the US and Canada by the Indian brothers that created it. Big, evil Hasbro has put the drop on them and now it’s game over.

But not so fast. What really happened here, and is Hasbro really evil for protecting intellectual property?

Undoubtedly, Hasbro could have handled this situation much better. The best course of action would have been to create their own version of Scrabble for Facebook early on and corner the market. All of these old game makers would be smart to get on their horses because there is money to be made. The brothers that created Scrabulous are making a lot of money.
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Peter Kafka at SAI has a good report on the fortunes of MySpace and Fox Interactive Media (FIM).

Growth for MySpace has leveled out while it increases for competitors like Facebook. That is the bad news, certainly. However, engagement by those who are still on the site is going up. What’s the point of having a ton of new users if they don’t spend any time on the site? The fact of the matter is that while Facebook has taken the worldwide unique visitor lead, MySpace is slaughtering them on engagement with about 50% more average minutes per visitor.
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My experiences with Linux are, shall we say, limited, but I thought this piece of news was somewhat interesting.

Canonical distributes open-source Linux products like their operating system, Ubuntu. While the operating system is free of charge, Canonical is going to offer it for sale at Best Buy for $19.95. Now, why would anybody spend money on an operating system that is free of charge?
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