PromotionWorld
Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. “Google, regardless of it’s [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals,” he says. “It’s important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process.”
For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you’re positioning a product for the younger set, “there’s still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo,” Henige says.
Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online–and tended to attract searchers from the “affluent suburbia” and “upscale America” brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, “gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start,” Henige says.
Adweek
A new survey claims that America’s slumping economy is having an effect on online ad growth. Conducted by William Blair & Co, the new survey forecasts that the gloomy economic outlook will contribute to slowing growth. The investment bank queried 150 Chicago-area interactive marketing companies about their budgets, and two thirds of respondents said economic conditions would affect spending.
According the results, the respondents expect Internet advertising to grow slightly more than 16% in the next year, less than the 19% William Blair tracked in previous surveys. Respondents pegged paid search and ROI-based direct response ads as the sectors most likely to thrive.
“Online’s healthy, but the economy is definitely having an impact,” Sean Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, a Chicago ad service for newspaper sites, told Adweek. “In a weak economy, people are going to move more towards direct response. We’re seeing brand advertising take a much bigger hit this year.”
The New York Times
Display advertising may suffer as the economy slows. Mixed results from the likes of Yahoo and Time Warner indicate that online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they sell. More and more advertisers are opting for automated targeting and delivery through cheaper advertising networks instead of buying directly from expensive publishers like Yahoo. And the cost continues to go down, dropping 23% from March to April, according to PubMatic, a technology firm that runs an online pricing index. The drop was even steeper among large Web publishers, falling 52%, according to the firm.
If those figures are accurate, the rest of 2008 will be painful for big media firms whose online services depend mostly on display advertising. That lengthy list includes Yahoo, AOL, Viacom, News Corp., The New York Times Co., Disney, CBS, NBC-Universal, CNET, and many others. As Sanford C. Bernstein & Company analyst Jeffrey Lindsay says: “The weakest form (of online advertising), the one that’s most susceptible to a downturn - and this is what we’re seeing - is display advertising,”
Lindsay added that recession fears might actually be a boost to some media companies, such as those depending on automated advertising systems like search. “In a moderate or even quite severe downturn, online advertising actually improves, because people switch their advertising budgets out of traditional advertising formats - TV, radio and print - and move more online because it’s got higher performance, it’s cheaper and it’s more measurable,” he said.
Google passed Yahoo in its share of monthly visitors in the United States for the first time this April, buoyed by growth in search and YouTube videos, according to ComScore statistics released Thursday.
However, underscoring the variability of this sort of measurement, which extrapolates overall data from the usage of a “panel” of users at home and work, ComScore rival Nielsen Online released its own data as well with some different results. Although it also showed Google as No. 1 in terms of unique users, it said Google passed Yahoo way back in January 2007.
ComScore said Google sites had 141.1 million unique visitors in April, a tad ahead of Yahoo’s 140.6 million. Microsoft was in third at 121.2 million, with AOL at 111.3 million.
Nielsen’s data showed Google at 128.2 million, Microsoft at 122.1 million, and Yahoo at 117.1 million.
Nielsen also provides information on time spent at the sites, though. There, Yahoo leads its rivals with 3 hours and 9 minutes per month, but AOL owner Time Warner leads Yahoo at 3 hours 40 minutes per month.
Microsoft’s usage was 2 hours and 17 minutes, and Google was 1 hour and 47 minutes, Nielsen said.
Despite earlier speculation that the online ad space may be spared the effects of a downturn, the fallout from the soft economy appears to have reached the online advertising industry, dragging down monetization rates across many segments.
According to the May edition of the PubMatic AdPrice Index, publisher monetization across the board has dropped by 23% during the past month. The reason? The growth in online advertising is slackening, causing ad network payouts to fall.
The index shows that eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped 52%, from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to weather the storm, increasing monetization from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April. Continue Reading »
San Jose Mercury News
The “R” word may be looming over America’s economy, but Internet commerce continues to grow apace, and Google’s chief economist and several analysts, speaking at a forum on the state of the Web economy, believe it will continue to defy broader economic trends. During the conference, Ed Garrubbo, chairman of the Electronic Retailing Association, reported that while the overall economy tanked, online sales jumped 17% in the first quarter of this year. Meanwhile, e-commerce has grown 22% in the past two years.
“The lesson here is that the economic slowdown is not an Internet slowdown,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “The Internet is looking pretty strong compared to other sectors.” Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech think tank, predicted that e-commerce would continue to grow as high-speed connections proliferate and e-commerce technologies improve. “The absolute growth has been steady now for several years. The Internet economy is almost counter-recessional,” Atkinson said.
Garrubbo cited data from Forrester Research, which said that more than two thirds of all Internet users have bought products online; 53% of all computer and hardware sales take place online along with 30% of sales of toys, video products and auto parts. In fact, Garrubbo said that the looming recession may actually contribute to e-commerce growth.
BusinessWeek
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said the company is prepared to walk away from its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, but BusinessWeek thinks Ballmer is bluffing. The business journal says Microsoft needs Yahoo, as first quarter results again exposed the persistent downward trend in the software giant’s online services division.
As Brent Thill, Citigroup’s director of software research says, “it wasn’t a spectacular quarter by any means,” especially in online services, where losses widened to $228 million. The division, which relies almost exclusively on online advertising, went a further $43 million into the red from a year ago, although revenues grew 43% to $843 million. Yahoo, meanwhile, reported first-quarter sales of $1.35 billion.
Ballmer said Yahoo’s results, which slightly beat analysts’ estimates, won’t cause Microsoft to raise its offer. But Microsoft has to make this deal soon-if it’s going to make it at all. As UBS analyst Heather Bellini wrote in a research note, “Microsoft must get this acquisition right to remain relevant in the Internet age,” because as Thill says, “There’s still a runaway train they’re trying to catch (Google). And (Microsoft and Yahoo) are two little trains trying to hook up.”
Hamlet Batista
As Hamlet Batista notes, a solid link-building strategy involves equal parts link-baiting and link-conquesting–and he delves into the pros and cons of each tactic.
“Chasing links is the traditional way of building links,” Batista says. “This includes things like submitting your site to directories, creating press releases, submitting articles and comments with your site link and anchor text, and other strategies.”
Aggressively pursuing links gives you the ability to pick and choose which kinds of sites you get them from–meaning you can stick to high authority, highly relevant Web sites and reap the benefits. The only con is that it can take hard work–and it isn’t a tactic that you can readily outsource, “because it requires personal rapport,” Batista says. “It necessitates having your own voice and building a connection with representatives of other sites. Clearly, it also takes a whole lot of time and patience.”
On the other hand, getting people to link to you without asking them is the idea behind link-baiting. This tactic is based on developing exciting, interesting content–be it an article, a video, a widget–and enticing the influencers in your niche to pick it up.
“When successful, a good link bait will yield a massive amount of links,” Batista says. Outside of crafting the content, link-baiting is less labor-intensive and more cost effective, and your link profile will be flush with lots of different kinds of anchor text and many different Web sites. The cons stem from the fact that you aren’t in control of where the links come from, or what they’ll look like (you’re aiming for targeted, keyword-rich text, aren’t you?), and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be successful.
GigaOm
In a memo to employees about the Yahoo saga, AOL CEO Randy Falco underlines the problem facing social networks: “But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.”
Falco hits the nail on the head: social nets want marketers to foot the bill for content that’s specifically tailored to an experience where the user is completely disengaged from marketing messages. Falco thinks that by combining Platform A and Bebo, AOL could fix the problem.. But lumping another company into AOL’s portal and then using an ad network, even a highly targeted one, to serve it ads won’t solve the social networking question. Someone still needs to come up with a way to make social networks more relevant for advertisers.
It’s more than likely going to be a technology solution from a company like ScanScout, whose technology is able to break up, say, a video into tiny segments that it lumps into advertising categories, making sure the piece of content is both advertising-friendly and relevant. Social media sites need technologies like this to extract ad friendly inventory for reticent advertisers.
The Economist
Social networking is definitely the next big thing, but it’s not necessarily the next big moneymaker. Like Web-based email before it, social networking will evolve as a feature tied to the Web portal experience. However, like email, it’s not (really) a business.
Meanwhile, as media companies bid up the value of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, the industry is still searching for a suitable revenue model. Recently, Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that “social networking inventory as a whole”–which includes its own offering, Orkut, as well as a search advertising deal with News Corp.’s MySpace–was performing worse than expected. Facebook has done even worse. The company recently admitted that it “simply did a bad job” with Beacon, an advertising program that tracks online activity and informs users of their friends’ purchases or actions taken on third-party sites.
The bigger question is whether users should really have to visit a specific Web site to make use of those connections. As Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said in a recent report, “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” because social media services “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.”