Here are some of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured this week:

3/31: The Wall Street Journal: Search for High-Growth Media Leads to Google

It may be time for investors to take a blind taste test.

Consider two stocks. One derives 96% of its revenue from advertising, the other 65%. The first nearly doubled revenue since 2007 and is expected to increase the top line 24% this year. The second’s revenue has been flat over that period and is expected to rise 3% in 2011. Read more.

3/30: CNBC.com: TV Ads Rule Thanks to Social Media: Internet Ads Promising

The 30 second spot is anything but dead – in fact advertisers are spending more than ever on ads on broadcast and cable TV. And TV ads are expected to grow even more this year, to 39.1 percent of all ad spending, around $60.5 billion, according to eMarketer. The other fast-growing ad area is online, which has managed to steal from newspapers, magazines and radio, though not TV. Read more.

3/29: Bloomberg Businessweek: Twitter Chairman Dorsey Sees ‘More Approachable’ Service

Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey will become executive chairman and head of product development as the company aims to narrow Facebook Inc.’s lead in online advertising and get users to be more active on its site. Read more.

3/29: Ad Age: Among Media, TV Is Still on Top

The internet is consuming ever more of our waking moments, not to mention ever more ad spending, but that doesn’t mean that traditional media is the loser. At least not when “traditional media” means TV. Read more.

3/29: CNNMoney.com: How Amazon beat Google and Apple to the music cloud

Amazon on Tuesday launched the Amazon Cloud Drive, an Internet service that lets customers store music and other digital files on the company’s servers and access them on computers, smartphones and other devices. Read more.

3/28: The Wall Street Journal: Advertisers Wary of Myspace

With its traffic plummeting and its future uncertain, social-media and entertainment site Myspace is having an increasingly hard time drawing advertisers, especially for long-term deals. Read more.

3/27: The New York Times: Digital Strategy Paying Off for Publicis

When Microsoft this month awarded a big chunk of its North American advertising account to Publicis Groupe, the Paris-based marketing company, the news felt like vindication for the chief executive of Publicis, Maurice Lévy. Read more.

For more of eMarketer’s recent news coverage, click here.

… or put the genie back in the bottle. Pick your metaphor, as long as it means “impossible task.”

Last year, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore wrote an all-company memo on “how to put the genie back in the bottle.” The memo described an effort by senior VP John Squires to develop a paid content plan for the company’s editorial brands, which include the flagship title, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Life and others.

The fruit of Mr. Squires’ efforts is a pay wall that appeared quietly this week. Suddenly, when readers on Time’s website went to access articles that appeared in the print edition, they were met with this message: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010, print and iPad editions of TIME.”

I guess calling this a pay wall is a misnomer, since users can’t buy articles a la carte, or even through a print or digital subscription. Their only options seem to be running to the Apple store to buy an iPad (if they don’t already own one) or running to the newsstand to buy a print copy of Time (if they can find a newsstand). Not exactly the kind of strategy that leads to impulse purchases.

Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges told All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka:

Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and “commodity” type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

To which Newsweek senior articles editor Mark Coatney replied in a blog posting:

Why would I come to Time for this? I can get the wires from dozens of places, including CNN, MSNBC, etc. that have more complete, up-to-the-minute offerings. And Twitter gives me breaking news faster than any web site ever could.

Granted, Coatney works for the competition, so you wouldn’t expect him to sing Time’s praises. But he has a good point. If Time’s strategy is to make people pay for everything except the most commoditized content, then the company is going beyond The Wall Street Journal or planned New York Times pay walls, which at least give print subscribers free or discounted access to digital versions of articles in the paper edition.

In fairness to Time, the restricted content involves only articles that appear in the print versions of Time and, presumably, other titles in the stable. It does not stretch to the vast amounts of web-only content on Time’s many digital properties. But the lengths to which the publisher is going to “protect” its print content seem extreme at a time when so much content is available for free or under more flexible pay models.

I’m struck by this quote from Time managing editor Richard Stengel in The New York Times:

I think we’ll see what works and doesn’t work. We’ll adapt and change. We’re in the hunt like everyone else to figure this out … We kind of wanted to draw a line in the sand.

This is some of the most wishy-washy language I’ve ever heard from a corporate executive who’s empowered to speak to the media. Phrases like “I think,” “we’re in the hunt…to figure this out,” and “we kind of wanted to draw a line in the sand” don’t exactly convey confidence. Makes you wonder if Time Inc. really thought this through.

As with the recently unveiled Hulu Plus, I expect the Time Inc. pay wall to undergo substantial changes in the very near future.

I admit I wasn’t expecting to be bowled over by the arrival of Hulu Plus. But even considering my low expectations, the official unveiling of the service leaves me underwhelmed. The service will carry a price tag of $9.99 per month, for which subscribers will have access to multiple seasons of older TV shows no longer on the air, as well as all episodes from the current seasons of many shows on the participating networks (NBC, Fox and Disney/ABC).

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar told PaidContent that Hulu Plus will be “incremental and complementary.” Maybe. But even if this service delivers the extra bit of revenue Hulu needs to achieve its holy grail of becoming cash-flow-positive this year, the company won’t hit a home run until it shifts the cost/value proposition in favor of the latter.

Here are some specific steps that would help:

• Either lower the total fee to somewhere on the order of $7.99 or offer a “lite” version for, say, $4.99 per month.
• Reduce the ad load in the paid service. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Hulu Plus will run “as many ads as the free version of Hulu.” As a consumer, if I’m paying $10 a month for content, the first thing I expect is to see fewer ads than in the free version of the same service. In fact, I’d go further and argue that a $10 subscription should guarantee NO ads, a la HBO.
• Go deeper in offering content depth and exclusivity. I realize there are contractual obligations that preclude the level of access that consumers would like to have, but $10 should net something more than a deeper catalogue of back episodes of shows that are mostly available on the free service. One attractive possibility might be a live broadcast of a season premiere or season finale, or at least a shorter delay between broadcast and streaming for select content (say, 2 hours instead of 24).
• Hurry up and line up other content providers, starting with CBS. I expected CBS to be part of the Hulu Plus launch announcement, but so far the network is MIA from the service. The only media companies supplying content to Hulu Plus are the joint venture partners: NBC, Fox and Disney.
• I realize getting Viacom on board will be a stretch, but I hear incessant grumbling about the absence of Comedy Central from the Hulu lineup.
• Hulu on the iPad/iPhone has been a long time coming, but support for other devices and operating systems (Android, PS3, Xbox 360) needs to happen ASAP to build critical mass. Hulu’s “guided tour” of Plus suggests the service will be available on PS3 in July, while the rumor mill suggests it will be available on Xbox in early 2011.

I know this is an invitation-only “soft” launch and some of the things that I (and probably millions of other consumers) would like to see will happen over time. Still, I can’t help feeling a sense of disappointment, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Whether Hulu Plus can successfully monetize the 58.9 million people who watch full-length TV shows online in the US is anyone’s guess. Online video viewing in general is shifting to longer form content (and with it, online video advertising dollars), and Netflix has proven that viewers are more than willing to pay a subscription fee for an excellent online video service—actually, an excellent ad-free online video service. The question is whether Hulu Plus’s video archive will be “excellent” enough to overcome customer qualms with advertisements and sustain long-term growth. So far I’m not convinced.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will launch its long-awaited Google Editions electronic bookstore sometime this summer. This move, which had been rumored for months, will almost certainly reshape the e-publishing landscape.

To give you an idea of how analysts perceive Google’s impending market entry, a February 2010 Credit Suisse report stated: “We expect Google to be a major competitive factor in the eBook market.” Further, it predicted “a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market.” Amazon, according to Credit Suisse, had a 90% share of e-book sales in 2009.

In order to fully gauge the potential impact of a Google e-book store—and even a device, which the company is also rumored to be developing—we need much more information than the company divulged in a May 4 session at Random House’s New York headquarters.

At this point, we know nothing about the pricing, content mix or types of deals Google is making with publishers. Will Google use the “agency” pricing model that Apple is pushing for the iPad, whereby the publisher gets a 70% cut of each sale, with retail prices ranging from $13 to $15 per title? Or will Google follow the earlier Amazon “wholesale” model, where the publisher gets a 35% cut of a baseline price of $10 per title?

Rumor has it that Google prefers the agency model, which is also favored by most publishers, but we don’t know for sure.

Here’s what we do know:

• Google’s offering is browser-based. It’s not tethered to a specific device, which means any title purchased through Google should be readable on an Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, or any other e-book reader, laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile device.
• Google Editions will be closely tied to Google book searches.
• Google will allow book retailers to sell Google Editions on their own sites and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Commenting in the Journal, Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development for Oxford University Press, said: “This levels the retail playing field. [A]s a publisher, what I like is that I won’t have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account.”

Schnittman added that Google Editions represents “the ultimate test” of whether the ability to search, find and purchase electronic books will generate substantial revenues for Google as well as participating publishers.

As always, the deciding vote in whether the test succeeds or fails will be cast by the almighty consumer. If Google’s offering is compelling and priced fairly, there’s no reason to think the company couldn’t become a prime mover in the e-book business. On the other hand, this is already a hyper-competitive market thanks to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony and others. Google will have to thread the needle very carefully to find a place in this crowded field.

Whatever happens, I can’t wait for the next chapter on this one.

Well, it finally happened. After months, maybe years, of speculation, Twitter pulled the trigger on its ad monetization concept. We can now refer to it by its actual name: Promoted Tweets.

Everything we know about the plan so far is consistent with November 2009 comments by Twitter COO Dick Costolo and a February 2010 blog posting by All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka. That is, Twitter will show sponsored posts in feeds resulting from selected user-initiated searches. For example, when some users search for Starbucks or Best Buy, they’ll see ads from those companies before they see the string of conversational tweets that meet the search criteria. The Wall Street Journal noted that 2% to 10% of Twitter users will be part of the initial rollout, with more to come later.

At the most basic level, Promoted Tweets emulates the Google model of tying relevant advertising to search results. But that doesn’t mean Twitter will necessarily be able to monetize search to the extent that Google has.

Consider the differences between the platforms.

Google users tend to search for archived information, which makes them amenable to advertising as a tradeoff for thorough search data. On the other hand, Twitter users more often search for timely information and, in general, and are less likely to tolerate having their experience stalled by an ad. That being said, if Twitter is able to integrate Promoted Tweets into search results and user timelines as seamlessly as Digg, for example, it’s possible that users won’t be too bothered.

Then there’s the third-party issue. Many Twitter users access the service via external Web and mobile apps, so measuring the effectiveness of the ads will be more challenging for Twitter than for a closed-loop system. And measurability will be critical to the success of Promoted Tweets because the system is based on a CPM model. Even more importantly, Twitter has said it would discontinue ads that don’t measure up to a pre-established set of criteria. Twitter calls this “resonance,” and the factors that go into it include the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links, according to The New York Times.

So, will Promoted Tweets work? This will depend on how consumers react to having a corporate presence in their Twitter feeds, which in turn will depend on how well Twitter implements this new model. So far, the company is acting cautiously, limiting ads to search results among a small percentage of its users, with a fixed number of brands participating.

It seems smart to float a trial balloon rather than launch a rocket ship. This will allow Twitter to gauge feedback quickly and correct course if necessary—all of which is easier in a limited-scale project.

Consumers have grown accustomed to sponsored search results, so transferring that paradigm from Google/Digg to Twitter is not a huge leap. The real test will come later, when Twitter attempts to run ads in user timelines. Can the company do this while continuing to grow its user base to its stated goal of 1 billion by 2013?

Probably not, but more modest growth fueled in part by this ad platform seems like a reasonable expectation.

Image Credit: Twitter.com