In the first of what is sure to be many articles in a similar vein,  media planner Ben Kunz writes at BusinessWeek Online about how mobile media threatens Google’s online revenue model. The smaller screen slows for fewer ads and less ability to monetize. If substantial shares of Web traffic move to handsets, this could spell trouble for the very digital models that media companies were hoping would save their dwindling offline businesses. Well, not likely. TV didn’t kill movies and the Web didn’t kill print, and it is likely that profitable models will be found to exploit mobile. The Eyeball’s take is that mobile gives media brands the opportunity to recapture lost users. His nibs is rediscovering Time, CBS, USAToday, and Car and Driver precisely because their mobile extensions stand out and advertise their core value propositions so well. The real economics of mobile for most media brands should be how this platform helps engage the user across all other platforms, how it can be one arc in the loop of TV/Print,Web, email, SMS and WAP.

So here we are the end of Earth Week and the planet is still polluted and globally warmed. Publishers and advertisers alike have been filling our eyes and ears with their sudden strikes of earthly consciousness in an effort to appeal to those of us who sleep better at night knowing we support green brands. Vanity Fair did the green issue. So did Time. So did Elle. Even Black Enterprise joined the party.

But here’s the thing: I’m ok with lying to myself about my “sofa” commitment to saving our planet. I know that nodding in agreement to Al Gore’s face when I see it plastered on a billboard in Times Square isn’t really “doing anything” but it makes me feel better and frankly, lying to myself is a sharply-honed skill that I just can’t unlearn. I may not have a soul, but I do have a brain and I can tell when I’m being served tap water when I ordered bottled. Basically, I don’t like it when brands lie to me, especially brands that I’ve known and loved all my life.

The actual and physical environmental actions taken by consumer magazines is debatable; they’ll do things like claim they use a certain percentage of recycled paper in their pages and who am I to dispute that? If I had the ability to tell what percentage of a piece of paper was comprised of recycled materials, I wouldn’t be writing for a living. But this I do know: if a magazine is truly committed to this whole green thing, why not go digital for Earth Day? Isn’t that the only truly green option? Suggesting a publication to go digital for a month and sacrificing advertisers who might not be on board is asking a lot, but I don’t think it’s asking more than Vanity Fair is asking of me when it shoves environmental consciousness down my throat on any number of it’s hundreds of pages (recycled or not). If risking losing all those ad dollars for a month is just not feasible, then how about cutting pages in half in the name of the environment? All I’m saying is there are other options.

Personally, I find the brutal honesty in Vogue’s fall and spring fashion issues refreshing at this point. The arrogance of publishing issues that enormous and even listing the number of pages on the cover is simply awesome. Just sell me what I’m really buying and spare me the notion that you care if polar bears are getting uncomfortably warm in the Arctic Circle.

For a list of digital publications and to see how it all works, check out Nxtbook.

Also check out Zinio and Texterity, two other great digital media companies.

While reported elsewhere as somehow entirely new and novel, Men’s Health will follow HFMUS and Maxim in making its pages interactive via mobile technology. Using provider SnapTell, readers will be able to send phone cam images of the ads into a database that recognizes the page and sends back additional information. Several years ago, ElleGirl and other HFMUS magazines started a similar program with Mobot. Last year Maxim had a “mobile” issue with SMS short code prompts next to articles and ads. The return channel of SMS response to the photo snap can link to any manner of WAP site, coupons, videos, etc. For advertisers that value add is that it calls greater attention to the ad creative itself and extends the relationship with the user. It is unclear how the magazine will cue readers to taking the snap, how involved the instructions will be for use, and whether users will have to email the image to specific address or use a downloadable application to send in the pic. All of these elements have been barriers in the past to getting good performance from this approach.

Some interesting people notes coming in this week indicate sea changes in the digital ad industry The outspoken and ubiquitous Madison Ave. figure David Verklin steps down from his CEO post at media agency Aegis Media as the long-time Mad Man makes a planned departure. His protégé Sarah Fey takes the job as Aegis announces a reorganization. Verklin says he is moving on to a new stage in his career, probably involving media rather than another agency. Part of Verklin’s legacy at Aegis is initiating a full integration of traditional and digital media planning, a move that is being echoed throughout other major agencies.
Meanwhile at the always-tumultuous AOL, Tacoda continues to disappear soemwhere within the Platform A plan. In what looks to be an almost total removal of old blood from the Platform A and AOL bloodstream, Tacoda president Daniel Jaye leaves AOL, following Curt Viebranz and David Morgan’s recent departure from the company. Other members of the marketing and ad sales group also exited AOL as new Platform A head Linda Clarizio accelerates the consolidation of technologies and teams in the AOL ad networks.

Just when it seemed that magazine publishers were beginning to understand how to monetize their online brand extensions (sort of), along came mobile to further confuse the digital matter. Finding audiences online – what they want to see and where and when they want to see it – is one thing, but how do you know what people want to see on their mobile devices, especially when these devices vary so vastly, from screen-size and capabilities to frequency of use?

Well, thanks to thought-pushers like Apple, mobile web awareness has increased enormously, even if people don’t have an iPhone. And with that increased awareness comes increased mobile web usage. According to Nielsen, since December of 2007 mobile web users have increased from 35 million to 40 million. The time for publishers to figure this out has officially come.

Hearst is the leading the way, with nine current mobile platforms. Director of mobile for Hearst magazines and digital media, Sophia Stuart, explained at the Min Day Summit last week in New York that mobile is not something that can be ignored by publishers, but that it will not work for every publication. “The content must make sense for the user. This is not the web, it’s the user’s personal device so it has to be relevant, helpful information.” Hearst currently incorporates five revenue streams and packages their mobile platform along with the print as a line item and not simply an add-on. Stuart noted that there are four reasons to develop a web application:

1. Entertainment
2. Time sensitive information, like breaking news
3. Personalized information that is specific to each user
4. Lifestyle information, like restaurant tips, music store locations, etc.

But if the web is now available on so many phones, why develop a mobile platforms for your readers? “The number one reason is for targeted advertising,” says John Paris, director of mobile products for Time, Inc., “and people don’t want to search for things on their phones, they want the content to come to them.”

While the web is the place to experiment, mobile devices are not. Paris affirms, “I will not be the guinea pig for any mobile company. I will only listen to pitches that have proven, powerful results from three major brands.”

You can stop wringing your hands over the “waning interest in social networks.” After a couple of months of decline that triggered gigabytes of speculation, the flagship sites in the category came back strong in March. Some argued that Facebook, for instance, had peaked as its meteoric rise f the past 18 months leveled off, but after 32.4 million uniques in February, the site grew to 35.5 uniques in March, according to comScore. MySpace, also too often discussed as a has-been, spiked to 72.7 million after three months in the 68 million user level. In fact, almost all social media enjoyed some kind of a come back as the winter wound down. Blog traffic at Blogger.com and Six Apart properties expanded their audience as well. Analyzing social media traffic patterns is a chancy exercise this early in the game. Given the accelerated growth in the category, it has been hard to detect any seasonal influences (school being in or out, etc) on activity at these sites. The long terms threat to social media is not boredom; it plugs into a basic human need that perpetually refreshes itself. The real threat is that the functions of social network will become baked into Web browsers, email clients and operating systems. The end game for social networks is not that one or two dominate the scene but that it becomes a feature, not a brand.

Nothing can make a head spin quite like trying to wrap it around the concept of virtual worlds as anything more than something a creepy neighbor used to sit in his mom’s basement and experiment with. But they are coming out of the basement, slowly but surely. They sure seemed to be a viable, real life medium at the Digital Worlds Conference held two weeks ago in New York. And newly created worlds such as the vLES (virtual Lower East Side created by vMTV and Vice magazine) and the CosmoGIRL! virtual prom (a CosmoGIRL! and There.com creation) got so much coverage by the mainstream media, it seems as if everyone is hip to these virtual worlds but you.

Not true. The reality is that while virtual worlds are more developed and have more visitors than ever, everyone is not “doing it”…yet. Over 70% of the users are children (with influential, malleable minds) and the others are using the medium for video games or Second Life, both of which are largely based on fantasy and not what the “new” virtual world creators claim their worlds are really all about. The applications now being developed for virtual worlds for purposes like real world business development are still on the fringe.

At the min Day Summit today, keynote speaker Geoff Ramsey stated that virtual worlds are good for two things: to learn about community activity and to test new marketing concepts, the key words there being LEARN and TEST. Ramsey also suggested that hardcore users of Second Life should “get a real one,” a notion echoed throughout the digital community.

So while advertisers scramble to figure out how they can make their brand presence known and how to turn virtual interest into real ad dollars, most of the rest of the world is still googling “avatar”.

According to Compete, “s*x” is the top search term used at YouTube in March, followed by musician “Lil Wayne.” In fact, musical figures account for half of the top ten searches.

Top YouTube Searches (March 2008)

1.    S*x
2.    Lil Wayne
3.    Low
4.    Chris Brown
5.    No Air
6.    Porn
7.    Family Guy
8.    Soudja Boy
9.    Naruto
10.    Funny

Source: Compete

Just as it seems the entire Web and much of TV is going paparazzi mad and TMZ-ified with ephemeral clips of starlets getting in and out of SUVs (Quick! Panty check!), New York Magazine shocked us a bit the old fashioned magazine way on February 25. Its fashion issue featured the now-infamous Lindsay Lohan/Bert Stern nude Marilyn recreation. The online gallery brought NYMag.com to new heights, as we report in this week’s Min’s Box Scores. The site, which previous grabbed 4.3 million uniques, skyrocketed to 9.6 million, or a 120% gain. Page Views almost hit 156 million, more than three times the usual 35 million level. To its credit however, and unlike some magazine that get such momentary spikes, NYMag.com seems to have leveraged the spike. The site reports its March traffic retained some of the tsunami, with page views up to about 50 million and uniques to 5 million. Of course there may have been some residual Lohan-peeping going on into March that accounts for some of the lasting bump, but it has been our experience that these spike retreat very quickly. The art of managing capricious Web traffic will be a matter of marketing to newcomers as if it is the last time you ever will see them, because it might be.

User tolerance for searching search results is shrinking. Any search engine optimizer should be aware that only 8% of users will drill deeper than three pages of results, which is a decrease from 10% two years ago, according to iProspect. About 68% of users say they tend to go with first page results, up from 62% in 2006 and 60% in 2002. Also important is brand credibility, with 37% of respondents saying that being at the top of search results indicates a brand’s leadership in that category. The emergence of blended search results (images, video, blogs and text) have crowded the field even further, making less room on a page for traditional text-based hits. Companies should be optimizing and hyper-distributing multimedia into the search eco-system as well.