So with all the recent news about the Large Hadron Collider, many of you may have this nagging question: what, exactly, would happen if you stick your head in the particle accelerator?
Well, actually, we know the answer to that because someone did stick his head into a particle accelerator. Here’s the story of Anatoli Bugorski:
Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.
From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don’t know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.
Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.
Link - via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Things About the Large Hadron Collider You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
As I have mentioned previously, we are entering an overall advertising recession and even online advertising growth has slowed. Notes the LA Times in August:
“Advertisers have pulled back in a pretty meaningful way, and display is feeling the brunt of it,” said Clay Moran, a Stanford Group analyst who recently wrote a research report called “Online Advertising: caution required.”
In recent weeks:
* Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang told analysts that demand for display advertising was “softening.”
* Online publisher Tech Target Inc. lowered its third-quarter forecast, blaming “macroeconomic weakness in the U.S. and its impact on advertising spending.”
* Lending site Bankrate Inc. cut its 2008 guidance. CEO Thomas Evans explained that the company had “continued to experience softness in display advertising from several of our largest financial advertisers.”
* Ad network ValueClick Inc., based in Westlake Village, blamed the economy for a slowdown in display advertising, which led to a 6% drop in its second-quarter profit.
What does this mean for startups? When advertising budgets dry up, three things happen:
This has two implications. The first is simply brand recognition. It is much easier to make the case to buy media on a well known site. As a result, scale matters. The leaders in both web 1.0 (AOL, Yahoo, Cnet etc) and web 2.0 (Facebook, Myspace, Rockyou*, Digg etc) will continue to see high demand for their advertising inventory.
As the web 1.0 leaders are already at scale, they may see greater negative effects from the overall market, but there will continue to be a strong core of demand. Many of the web 2.0 companies have grown out their traffic and brand in advance of their sales forces, so they may be able to ride the growth of their sales teams to better mitigate the market effects.
But being big (5m+ UU/mth), and a leader in your category, will help a lot.
The second implication is that advertisers will continue to buy advertising against targeted content. Advertisers are used to buying content adjacencies. Targeting against users (whether behavioral or demographic targeting) can’t be counted on to lift CPMs in the next couple of years.
Sites with highly targeted content that attracts endemic advertisers (Flixster*, iLike, Streetfire.net* etc) or demographic clusters (TMZ, PopSugar, AskMen etc) will be better off than broad reach sites.
In an ad recession, advertisers appetite for experimentation is low. They like to stick to the established ad standards. New forms of advertising are hard. Startups whose sales processes feel more like business development than selling off of a rate card may have a tougher time.
Companies selling standard ad units will weather the recession better than those that have unique ad units.
The brightest spot in an ad recession is direct response. As Ad Age notes:
Many analysts now agree that when marketing budgets come under pressure in a stressed economy, those sectors that can best document their connection to ROI, such as search-engine advertising, are far more attractive to corporate chiefs than other kinds of less-trackable traditional advertising.
Direct marketers will continue to spend to acquire customers if that spend can be directly tracked to a sale. Lead gen companies (Quinn Street, Tippit*, LowerMyBills etc) will hold up better, as will companies with CPC and CPA models (Google, TripAdvisor, $uperRewards, etc). However, they may also be affected if the overall number of people “in market” goes down, or prospective buyers become less likely to buy, due to the overall economy slowing down.
Who will have it toughest? Sites that are sub scale (<1m UU month), with no targeted content AND selling custom ad units are going to have to work the hardest over the next few years. Great teams always find a way, but the road may be long and hard.
What are your thoughts as to what sort of online media companies will survive the ad recession best?
UPDATE: WSJ also finds that experimental budgets are getting cut
FURTHER UPDATE: Which companies might benefit from an online ad recession?
* Rockyou, Flixster, Streetfire.net and Tippit are Lightspeed Portfolio companies.
Bluishorange is written by Alison Headley, who lives in Austin and has been blogging since the dawn of time. I’ve meet Alison a few times at SxSW, and I feel a long-distance affection for her, though I hardly know her. I don’t read her site regularly, mostly because she doesn’t post very regularly, but I love to stop in every few months and root for her. She writes things like this:
“Sometimes I wish more people had affectionate nicknames for me.”
And shows you magic things like:
Why doesn't somebody make this?
This would make it easy to plug in laptops, USB peripherals, and all your rechargers at your desk without crawling around on the floor.
(The photograph shows a product by Mockett which comes tantalizingly close, but which has knockouts for you to hardwire your own ports instead of built-in LAN and usb hubs.)
Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
I know I'm not the first, but I'll be the next to profess my love for these Mad Men-inspired illustrations. The title on this one is just perfect...
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