Macromedia also offered some impressive statistics about Flash. There are almost 1 million Flash developers, as well as 1 million DreamWeaver users. There were 230 million downloads of the Flash player in Q3 2000, and over 1 billion total downloads of the Flash Player. Despite the popularity of the Flash platform, there is much work to be done to offer the benefits of it to the web, especially in the area of web advertising. The basic problem, quite frankly, is that most banner ads (non-Flash, of course) arenit that great. Currently, about 1% of web ads are in Flash.
To help address this situation, Macromedia announced the creation of the Macromedia Flash Advertising Alliance, with founding members AOL, CNET, DoubleClick, TBWA\Chiat\Day NY, 24/7 Media, and Unicast. One of the first deliverables is the Flash Tracking Kit, allowing creators of Flash content to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
Other initiatives include MacroMedia University, which offers online training for $10/hour on many MacroMedia products. Thereis also DreamWeaver Exchange, which has over 270 or so free extensions, which have been downloaded over a million times. They Recently launched similar Flash Exchange, which already has 67 free extensions.
Also shown were OS X versions of their latest products, such as FreeHand, DreamWeaver and FireWorks, so we should expect them to be available shortly after the release of OS X. They closed the keynote with the premiere of a nice Flash creation with a medley of Pink Floyd tunes, which you can view by clicking here.