Spiral Frog paints a positive picture with its latest press release boasting that the number of monthly visitors double between January and February to more than 2 million. The number of registered users passed 850,000 during the month as well.

However, according to CNET, the day of reckoning may be close at hand as the company must report it's quarterly earning within the next few days. Spiral Frog is burning through millions per quarter, with much of that likely going to royalties to Universal Music, it's sole major label partner.

As I've said from day one, the business model is untenable, with the paltry ad dollars per download not even close to what they must pay Universal in royalties per song that gets legally downloaded onto computers.

I downloaded 5 tracks today and saw only a few banner ads (I bet the CPM is probably in the single digits). Once the songs are downloaded, you can play them back in Windows Media player so you never have to seen an ad again. Spiral Frog requires that you log in to the site once a month to keep your membership active. Songs that you've downloaded won't play without an active membership, but that's a small price to pay for what becomes ad-free music after it's downloaded.

Spiral Frog needs to acquire bet user data to target consumers and use rich media interactive ads to even have a snowball's chance of breaking even. But they may not get the chance if they don't slow down the cash burn.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism's new state of the media report contains some intriguing insight for marketers.

News is now a service, not a destination.

Because people read news throughout the day, the pressure to continually produce updates is higher. Advertisers should consider this frequent interaction between publisher and reader in developing their messaging strategy. For example, are their subsequent messages you'd like to deliver the 2nd or 3rd time during the day that people see your brand?

The media covers the biggest stories to death to increase page views.

Sponsorships of or targeted banner ads to "special sections" covering an issue such as the presidential election can make sense for brands. The tricky part is that many of these subjects are controversial, but if you want to get mass exposure, go to the hot topic du jour.

Citizen journalism won't change news.

Comments are the most likely contributions to the news conversation as original "reporting" has been minimal. This is a good thing since advertisers don't want to be associated with spurious information (not that incidents like what happened this week at LA Times will end). Comments and tips that generate leads for professional journalists is the more likely impact of citizen reporting.

Advertising execs are one step behind.

The business models are in flux, and while online news is the area of growth, advertisers for now prefer to work with old models and old media rather than jumping on the latest technologies for delivering news. Stay tuned for how the news/advertising relationship shakes out.

First Hillary, now Google? Senator Clinton was described by the media as the "inevitable" candidate but then fell behind Barack Obama. Now, Google, which many advertisers view as the inevitable choice for search marketing, is showing signs of slumping.

Google's number of paid clicks decreased by 3 percent in February after showing growth of 30-40 percent for much of last year.
You can question the survey data provided by ComScore, but even a 10 percent margin of error shows that the rapid growth of before is over.

Google tried to explain the stock-diminishing slump thusly:

The Mountain View-based company said in January that the drop in click-through rates is a result of its efforts to boost the usefulness of each click to its advertisers' sales performance. For instance, the company decreased the space around a word that would result in a click, so more clicks would be intentional.

So more accurate clicks is the culprit? That sounds like a permanent shift, so while maybe correct, it means that the growth that pushed the stock over $600 isn't returning.

Then there's the recurring problem of click fraud, which unlike Yahoo, Google continues to largely avoid rather than address.

Despite Google's massive reach, the slumping economy has encouraged search marketers to take a closer look at Google's effectiveness. While Google will remain the leader in search marketing for the foreseeable future, it's position as the inevitable choice for advertisers is no longer guaranteed.

Wordpress bloggers looking to boost their page rankings and increase traffic have a new friend in Zemanta. TechCrunch has the details on the alpa program from Slovenia that scans text and looks for related articles and keywords terms and automatically generates the hyperlinks.

This technology is not new but it is new to Wordpress, and could substantially increase readership if implemented well. High end content management systems have had this functionality for more than a decade, but for bloggers it can eliminate much grunt work.

Internal links are important to search rankings, so peppering your blog with appropriate internal links will increase your rankings.

Look for Wordpress users to flock to Zemanta.

I don't find the streams of information on the social networking sites particular interesting or usefull at all. I don't care who my friends are now friends with, or what they are thinking at the moment or any new widget they've added to their page.

However, I would find recommendations about movies, restaurants, attractions or services useful, and that's where local meeting social comes in. Loladex is a Facebook application that taps into local businesses.

Figuring out where to go and what to do can be a time consuming process, and while services like CitySearch are helpful, your friends are a better barometer your tastes than strangers.

What would make this type of service popular would be an incentive to get as many people adding ratings as possible. Facebook should offer some reward -- free music, or gift certificates, or some prize based on the most businesses rated -- to get people to write reviews. Without an incentive it will take a long time for the volume of reviews needed to make local services like Loladex highly valued.

Google's announcement to make its OpenSocial social networking development platform truly open will acceleration new applications, but it won't be the ubiquitous standard that the company envisions.

Sure, with Yahoo and MySpace onboard, developers can get a good return on their efforts since applications can be used on multiple sites. But companies will largely continue to develop their own social networking apps for their own websites.

If you want to create ad-driven apps for the big sites, then OpenSocial makes sense. But as Larry Dignanreports, social networking isn't something you go to, it's something built into every site, and proprietary solutions will rule the day there.

Most publishers -- and corporate intranets -- will go with their own applications built inhouse or from the hundreds of widget or community developers. These efforts aren't all going to switch to OpenSocial in any great degree since they've already invested in proprietary code. Sure, some publishers will want to tap into the social nets' audience, but many will create their own communities.

Microsoft as always is out on its island, hoping that for some reason people will choose their "me too" technology. Not gonna happen.

Running a blog site and making money is about as easy as running a restaurant. It takes countless hours, lots of people willing to work for not much money, and the majority fail to every turn a profit.

Mashable's Mark Hopkins writes about Huffington Post's maybe-maybe not profitability and questions why political blogs are having a hard time making money as compared with tech sites.

That's an easy one. Tech sites -- like cooking sites, or car sites, are largely about products and the demographic can be sold to advertisers for their consumption. It is an easier sell because it is a targeted market.

Politics - like sports -- is easier to write about and tougher to sell because people like to talk more than they do act, and anyone can have an opinion on it, so the barrier to entry is lower. What do people from the left or write like to buy? How can you sell beer or hotel advertisers on the demographic that is different than what USA Today or CNN has to sell?

Also, Huffington Post's refusal to pay its contributing writers is bad for the industry. Advertisers might not think this deeply, but why sell against a free site -- what does this say about the website's management.

Google's new feature for site specific search has created some controversy, but publishers really shouldn't complain.

The secondary search box that is generated when a website name is entered can be a helpful tool. Several articles have pointed out that while the search results are all from within the site itself, the ads that are displayed may come from competitors.

This is the same thing that happens when you do any Google search that includes any brand or domain name, so I don't see the problem. People who search using a company name in the search box haven't branded their site well enough for people to memorize the URL, so it's fair game.

This new feature is great for Google because it generates more traffic for their site and therefore more ad dollars. Advertisers also like the chance to win over folks looking for a competitor, so it's no surprise that Google has gone in this direction.

As the battle over banners continues to intensify with more networks fighting for territory, vertical networks are seen as premium providers of targeted audiences for major brands.

Over at Online Spin, Dave Morgan of AOL wrote about how big brands are looking for performance-based ad buys. Going with portals for brand campaigns to access the largest number of eyeballs will no longer cut it as advertisers want to see quantifiable results, not just throw their name around.

Enter vertical networks, Morgan says.

"This is the time for one or more premium publishers to build a new, independent, business-aggregating, premium, vertical inventory and audience, backed by financial investors — not strategic ones — focused exclusively on financial success metrics, not strategic ones, and with the full freedom to operate in any market it wants without worrying about potential conflict or competition with any other sales channels.

As the co-founder of a rich media company that operates a vertical network focused on green business, I couldn't agree more. Vertical networks can't be just banner ad networks -- they must be able to prove the value of their audience and offer customizable packages that combine sponsorships, email, and video campaigns. The big brands need to justify their spend and get something different than the portals can offer, creating a unique opportunity for vertical networks with targeted marketing capabilities.

Morgan couldn't have said it better:

"Someone is going to fill this void. The market need is too great for it to be missed."

Despite the potential for delivering ad-supported web content to TVs, the market is pitifully small today. Technical challenges and a lack of options in sharing video have limited the audience to a mere 5 percent, according to a new survey from Harris Interactive (as quoted on ArsTechnica.

Only five percent of those surveyed said that they watch video on a TV or other video-playing device regularly.... only 10 percent of those surveyed said that they have any desire to do so.

The overall audience of those who have downloaded video was 43 percent, and more than a quarter said they watch TV regularly. Probably just as many use TiVo or another DVR instead. A surprising 15 percent said they had downloaded full length movies, which seems unbelievable considering the small audience that Movielink and its competitors have drawn.

These numbers are low not because people would never consider doing so -- it's because today its nearly impossible to do so unless you work for the Geek Squad. Check out this horror story about trying to get a wireless media player working. Other companies such as TiVoare doing a better job of enabling selected video files to be moved to a PC while Apple continues the long uphill slog of making Apple TV a product worthy of its cost.