Archive for May, 2007

U.S. Military Blocked MySpace & YouTube

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 | Internet News | 1 Comment

The Defense Department will begin blocking access “worldwide” to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on its computers and networks, according to a memo sent Friday by Gen. B.B. Bell, the U.S. Forces Korea commander.

The ban affects only military computers, not the personal computers owned by military personnel.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/05/14/military.sites.blocked.ap/

Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | SEO, Search Industry, Yahoo | No Comments

…webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won’t use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a “nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike “cloaking” where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

It is not clear though whether slurp will follow the links within class=”robots-nocontent”.
Yahoo! Introduces “Robots-Nocontent” Tag
and
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-14.html

Yahoo to Shut Yahoo Photos Service, Pushing Flickr

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Yahoo | 1 Comment

Yahoo is shutting down Yahoo Photos, an online photo storage site, and asking users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr, a Yahoo official said.

In June, tens of millions of registered users of Yahoo Photos will be notified of various options including upgrading to Yahoo’s Flickr service or various outside-photo storage sites, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo also will offer consumers the option of loading their photos on competing sites when users are notified next month.

Outside sites include PhotoBucket — the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp.’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research MySpace — or more conventional photo printing and storage site such as Kodak Gallery (EK.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Shutterfly Inc. (SFLY.O: Quote, Profile, Research or Snapfish, he said.

“Flickr will get top-billing, of course,” Butterfield said in an interview late on Thursday about the plan to give users multiple alternatives.

Butterfield and co-founder Caterina Fake, his wife, sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005. Butterfield is now a director of product management at Yahoo.

Later, Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division, said in a company statement: “We are making great strides in our ongoing efforts to align Yahoo!’s resources and focus on core strategic priorities.”

“Part of this progress is today’s decision to close Yahoo! Photos to better serve our valued customers through Flickr.”

Yahoo’s move follows the explosive surge in growth by PhotoBucket, an independent photo storage site based in Palo Alto, California, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 percent last month, according to Hitwise Inc. data.

In the same period, Yahoo Photos’ share has been cut two- to three times over to around 5.8 percent of the U.S. market. Flickr, meanwhile, has grown to 4.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent, according to Hitwise U.S. Web audience data.

Yahoo continued to support both Photos and Flickr over the past two years, reflecting the different audiences of the two sites.

Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

According to data from comScore supplied by Yahoo a year ago, Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006.

By contrast, PhotoBucket rose to 32 million users in 2006 from 12 million users in 2005. It is set to grow to around 62 million users by the end of 2007, PhotoBucket Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Welch said in a recent interview.

English Premier League (soccer) sues Google/YouTube

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Google, Internet News | No Comments

The English Premier League is to sue video-sharing site YouTube for alleged copyright infringement.
The football organisation said YouTube had “knowingly misappropriated” its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6627135.stm

Windows Live Hotmail Debuts

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN | No Comments

Hotmail, perhaps the first major success of Web 1.0, has evolved.

Microsoft has announced the launch of Windows Live Hotmail globally in 36 languages, complete with AJAX goodness.
live
The new service has been built to be a vast improvement over the previous Hotmail offering, incorporating input from more than 20 million beta testers. However todays offering is only the move from beta to roll out.

We’ve covered Windows Live Hotmail previously: back in February Michael Arrington took a look at the then beta service and the results weren’t positive, the new Hotmail ranking third behind Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

Windows Live Hotmail launches with an initial 30 million users, with over 250 million additional users to be bought across in the coming months.

The new Hotmail is built on completely new code and marks the continued consolidation around the Windows Live brand.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be releasing a new free mail client meant to replace Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live desktop. The new client is called Windows Live Mail and will be a desktop client that provides Hotmail’s feature set locally on a users desktop. It will also support management of non Hotmail accounts.

There is some added benefits of logging into the new Hotmail; support is built in to allow Instant Messaging of contacts, or VOIP call contacts, with one click, which will also tie in with the Microsofts desktop IM platform.

My only question is why didn’t Microsoft build on the wonderful foundation that is Silverlight. Instead of promoting a platform that has such wonderful potential, Microsoft has seemingly ignored it with Hotmail. I’m sure in the coming months that others will be more willing to utilize the potential of Silverlight than Microsoft is.

Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, MSN adCenter, Microsoft & MSN | 1 Comment

Is Microsoft Driving Low-Quality Traffic to its Search Ads?

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its terms of service for adCenter, with some key changes:

Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches to display your advertisements.

Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of participating websites and other distribution outlets.

In a thread discussing the changes in the Search Engine Watch forums, user Mel66 notes that she’s seen some other uses of “criteria other than keyword searches.” Apparently, Microsoft is running ads through IntelliTXT, the much-maligned inline text ad provider. Mel66 clicked through on the ad to find it pointed to a search results page with one of her PPC keywords on it, which she believes is related to a recent drop in performance of those ads:

I wondered why we had a pocket of keywords with huge leaps in clicks and no resultant increases in conversions. This sucks. Is MSN really so desperate for traffic that they’ve resorted to running crappy ads for their own search results???
What this amounts to in my book is MSN running their own garbitrage ads. You click on an ad and get a page with more ads on it. This is bad, bad, bad, folks.

Mel66, whose real name is Melissa Mackey, is the search marketing director for MagazineLine, the magazine subscription division of American Collegiate Marketing. Mackey happened across a publisher site running IntelliTXT ads, and one of the keywords was “magazine,” which is one of the keywords Mackey targets in her adCenter campaigns.

The IntelliTXT ad included a Live Search box, with “magazine” pre-filled, which links to the Live Search results page for the keyword:

msn

The ad is part of a campaign by Microsoft to bring new users to Live Search by highlighting the relevance of certain queries.

“We turned off Yahoo’s content network over a year ago, partly because of IntelliTXT and its poor results,” Mackey told SEW. “What makes this even worse than that is that it looks like MSN considers this type of ad to be search, not content. We have opted out of MSN’s content network.”

YouTube Set To Test Marketability of SciFi Film

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, YouTube | No Comments

YouTube is launching a new animated science fiction show. The interesting part of this event is that YouTube is using the show, Afterworld, to test their marketing abilities.

“And with ambitions of tapping the Internet video advertising market, the producers of Afterworld will also provide Google-owned YouTube with its first real chance to demonstrate its revenue generating potential—just as the site gears up to roll out video commercials this summer’ , Red Herring opined.

“There is plenty of doubt whether Internet viewers are ready for commercials, but that hasn’t stopped producers at Electric Farm, the Internet production house behind Afterworld. They are pouring millions of dollars into the show in hopes of creating a compelling web serial that will attract the Internet digerati and advertisers,” Red Herring reported.

Yahoo and Microsoft Planning Merger Talks?

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Internet News, Microsoft & MSN, Yahoo | 1 Comment

We’ve seen plenty of unfounded speculation lately about Google’s plans to acquire NBC, or Dow Jones. Now we’ve got another rumor that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to consider a merger. It’s being reported by both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

The two companies had preliminary talks last year, but that was before Microsoft built its own search ad system, and Yahoo upgraded to Panama. Now there’s not a whole lot that a merger would offer either company, at least on the search side. On the content side, it might make a bit more sense, since the two networks draw different demographics. It’s not likely that anything will come of these rumors, but stranger things have happened when competitors start getting scared, and merger-mania strikes an industry.

UPDATE: The idea is being discussed all over the blogosphere today, as you can see from the Techmeme coverage.

Forrester’s Charlene Li says it’s a great idea (on paper at least) for Microsoft, but not so much for Yahoo. She goes on to say it will never work. “Given the messiness of a full out merger – and also the limited benefit it would bring to Yahoo! – I believe that a merger won’t be in the works anytime soon. More logical would be partnership agreements where the strengths of each company are shared.”

Former Wall Street Analyst Henry Blodgett, in his Internet Outsider blog, says that if the two decide to merge, the best plan would be an immediate spin-off of the combined entity. “If it doesn’t, both Yahoo and MSN will die,” he says. That seems to defeat the purpose of a merger, though, as Nicholas Carr notes in his Rough Type blog: “Microsoft has come to believe, for instance, that advertising will be central to the software business in the future. It’s not going to spin off its ad networks or search functions.”

UPDATE 2: The opinions keep coming, with the majority of people appearing to think this deal makes sense on some levels, but would never happen for various reasons:

YouTube to Pay Top Users

Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Google, Internet News, YouTube | No Comments

Google’s YouTube will begin paying top users for the video content they submit under a new revenue sharing partner program that will let the creators share in AdSense revenue generated by their videos.

“A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content,” Jamie Byrne, VP of marketing at YouTube, told Om Malik on Thursday. “This will help erase the stigma around the user-created content, and, to be honest, these guys are media entities in their own right.”

In a post on the YouTube Blog, the company said it is extending its partner program, previously only available to big media companies like CBS, Sony BMG and UMG and the NBA, to include “thousands of mid-sized to large content creators who range from video game companies to universities to production houses.”

“Up until now there’s been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube’s professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here. Which is why we’re adding several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community to our partnership program.”

The most important pay per click metric is not click through rate

Sunday, May 6th, 2007 | Contextual Advertising, Google Adsense & Adwords, Internet Marketing, MSN adCenter, Yahoo! Publisher Network | 1 Comment

It is still amazing to me the number of people who care most about what their AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing CTR is on their ads, while seemingly ignoring what is arguably the far more important - not to mention valuable - pay per click metric. Yes, CTR is valuable to know, but in reality, a higher CTR doesn’t necessarily equate to higher profits or sales.

So what is the most important metric for pay per click advertisers? ROI. The Return on Investment is the most critical metric to consider when tweaking PPC campaigns. But not only do too many people give an in proportionate amount of time focusing on their CTRs, many of those same people are doing so without a clue as to what their ROI is! They are simply working off the assumption that higher CTR must mean higher ROI, without having the data and stats to backup their beliefs. This thinking is so flawed when ROI isn’t be tracked.

Ad copy has a crucial impact on CTR. But it is not unusual to have an ad with a higher CTR actually perform far worse when looking at it from an ROI standpoint, while an ad with a lower CTR convert several times higher for the identical product… even with the identical landing page. Why is this? Because ads can definitely be written that tend to bring greater numbers of clicks that don’t lead to sales.

For example, you could write one ad without a price, or even wrongly implies a fabulous deal or freebie offer, or a comparison shopping site that will offer a variety of pricing from many different online retailers. These types of ads tend to have a higher CTR because they are much more likely to bring in clicks in droves, while those clicks tend to have a much higher percentage of “looky-loos” who aren’t prepared to type in their credit card number and complete the purchase.

The second ad with a price in the ad copy will have fewer clicks, since people don’t need to click to see your price and then click back to check out your competitors. But even though you have fewer clicks, they are more qualified since they already know your price and are less likely to be in that comparison shopping phase and are more likely to be further along in the buy cycle. Now, your CTR is lower, but so is your cost of acquisition. This results in an ad with a lower CTR but with a much higher ROI.

Are you not tracking your ROI yet? You definitely need to be using one of the many PPC trackers out there so you can properly monitor relationships between CTR, ad spend and sales, so you know exactly what your ROI is on every keyword you bid on. This will also allow you to reduce your overall spend by getting rid of under-performing ad copy and keywords, as well as potentially upping your bids on the golden keywords… the ones that have that great ROI you really don’t want to live without! Putting steps in place so that you will know what your ROI is should be at the top of your PPC to do list, if you are one of those advertisers who currently does not not track it and uses CTR to gauge campaign success.

So while CTR is an important metric for any pay per click advertiser, you need to be certain you are not sacrificing a higher ROI for that higher CTR. ROI is definitely your most important pay per click metric, and this should be the top priority in any pay per click campaign. Because at the end of the day, only your ROI is directly related to how much money you make at the end of the day.

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