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August 2003
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Search Proves Online Must for RealtorsA new study by the National Association of Realtors shows that 70 percent of home buyers turn first to the Internet to start their search. In the San Diego market, paid search clicks cost about a dollar and a half... continue reading »iVillage bUys gURL.comWomen's site iVillage bought the teen site gURL.com. Terms were not disclosed. gURL.com was purchased by Primedia - owner of Tiger Beat, among other titles in the genre - in 2001 from dELiA*s. IAR and Crain's NY report. Tig Tillinghast... continue reading »IAB Joins in Snubbing DMA Over Spam PolicyThe Interactive Advertising Bureau's e-mail committee chairman plans to withdraw support to the IAB's members for the Direct Marketing Association's Council for Responsible E-mail's long-awaited e-mail best practices document. This following yesterday's report of resignations from within the DMA's subsidiary... continue reading »Eyeblaster Releases Huge Ad UnitIf you were wondering how third party rich media companies plan on competing with DoubleClick's Motif product, one response has just been introduced by floating ad pioneer Eyeblaster. It is a one megabyte drop-down banner ad unit. The ad unit... continue reading »Spam Proves LucrativeOK, so I'm a search marketer, and search is hot, but it seems I'm in the wrong business. If I were willing to toss away ethics and become a spammer, it looks like I could be making millions, at least... continue reading »Treffiletti Lists Biggest Buyer ComplaintsCory Treffiletti writes of his three biggest pet peeves for online buying. They include insertion order shuffling, invoicing and reps that speak more than listen. MediaPost reports. Tig Tillinghast posts.... continue reading »E-commerce Sites: Dynamic Pricing Good, DifficultDynamic pricing helps e-commerce sites win the most revenue, shifting prices up in regions, times or in front of specific people, where logical criteria show that customers should be willing to pay more. But it isn't easy. Companies exist today... continue reading »Hitwise Launches Search ToolFirst comScore released qSearch, now Hitwise has launched a search tool to their own web stats product. They call it Hitwise Search Terms Intelligence Service, and it determines the terms that lead to competitive sites or sites within a specific... continue reading »Espotting Commits Classic PR Blunder, Annoys Hundreds of JournalistsEspotting accidentally sent a really boring press release to 375 journalists today with all of their names in the CC field. Rick Bruner cruelly mocks them.... continue reading »Google Starts Beta Tool to Monitor News By EmailFollowing on the heels of the NYT starting to charge for its popular email news alerts, Google News steps in to fill the void, providing free email new alerts of its own. Olivier Travers reports on a press release. ... continue reading »Documentarian Readies 'Craigslist: The Movie' for SundanceA documentary maker is profiling Craigslist, the wildly successful grassroots classifieds forum. Sign on San Diego reports. Rick Bruner comments, including coming up with his own estimate for the company's revenue.... continue reading »Tracking Email Campaigns on The CheapA ClickZ case study describes how a flower seed vendor used a service called ConversionRuler.com to track results from their email campaigns. Among other findings, it's interesting to note that even mailings that are weeks or months old still lead... continue reading »Most Connections to Be Broadband by June 04June of next year appears to be the month in which broadband connections will finally outnumbered the slow, according to Andy King, founder of WebReference.com. Center for Media Research reports. Tig Tillinghast posts.... continue reading »DMA Opts Out of Defining Norms, Publishes Laws InsteadAfter being publicly embarrassed by most marketing trade publications for their quashing the publication of anti-spam standards for email marketers, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) today published instead a summary of the many laws covering the topic. MediaPost reports. Tig... continue reading »Canadians Prove UsefulCanada native Tessa Wegert reviews some of the ways Canadians are becoming a useful audience to online marketers, with one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world. About 30 million Canadian Internet users reside just north of the... continue reading »The Way Not to Test Online Ad EffectivenessTechno Scout wanted to know how well their online advertising was doing in terms of generating online sales, so taking a somewhat extreme approach, they stopped all online advertising for three month. Internet Retailer reports. Robert Loch comments on the... continue reading »Google Automates Its Own ExpansionGoogle is upgrading and expanding its AdSense program, where it allows partner sites to host its AdWords paid search listings sales program. In a soft roll-out early in the summer, Google's AdSense started to let other sites add their own... continue reading »UK 'Innovation': Right Handed AdvertisingRobert Loch comments on The Shropshire Star's decision to accept only "right hand" advertising on their website. Hold The Front Page reports. ... continue reading »BusinessWeek Compiles E-newsletter TipsBusinessWeek's Digital Manager column collects some best practices advice on putting out a business e-newsletter. It covers the types of content and tone that work, useful vendors and tracking advice. BusinessWeek reports. Tig Tillinghast posts.... continue reading »McMoms.com Aims to Sell Hamburgers Via EmailMcDonald's has relaunched McMoms.com, something it tried originally back in 1994, as an email newsletter to engage mothers with small children. DM News reports. Rick Bruner comments.... continue reading »'Troubled' Google Placements Likely Self-HealingMediaPost's Adam Guild sees trouble ahead, fueled by paid search businesses' expansion into contextual ad serving on non-search sites. It is true that the contextual area is fraught with risk, but the examples provided in Guild's story (where ads are... continue reading »eBay Takes Tough Stance on Searches of TrademarksAuctionBytes reports that eBay has started attempting to enforce its trademarked name (and several common related phrases) where it has been used as a paid search term. Kevin Lee comments.... continue reading »UK Firm Produces Internet-Ready RestroomsCaptive View introduces Internet-enabled public restrooms. Indian Television reports. Rick Bruner washes his hands of it.... continue reading »WordBiz Report Revisits the PDFWith newsletter formatting debates largely relegated to HTML versus text, WordBiz Report Publisher Debbie Weil thoroughly examines the pros and cons of using Adobe's PDF format. Publishers like the control and quality the format provides, but some worry it is... continue reading »Abandoned Shopping Carts Don't Spell DoomBryan Eisenberg gives a list of factors that influence abandonment rate, such as the number of steps in the checkout process and the ability to easily navigate between product pages and the shopping cart. ClickZ reports. Olivier Travers comments.... continue reading »Crusader Tilts at Spam MillsIf Andy Sernovitz were already in his grave, he'd be spinning, but as it is now he's just hopping-up-and-down mad. Sernovitz has made it his personal mission to rid the world of spam, but he says he does it only... continue reading »Microsoft Taps Best AdsMicrosoft announced the winners of its own creative contest for branding, direct marketing and the use of rich media. Online research expert Rex Briggs helped company executives choose winners. GE, Dell and New Balance took the respective honors. MediaPost reports.... continue reading »DMA Sacrifices AIM for SpamClickZ's Rebecca Lieb blasts the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) stewardship of the Association for Interactive Marketing (AIM), likening its representation of the marketer group to Saddam Hussein representing Amnesty International. Tig Tillinghast posts.... continue reading »Yahoo Closes Australian Auction SiteContinuing a pattern of consolidation by international market, Yahoo pulled the plug on its Australian auction division, leaving eBay the owner of most of the market. The site was originally purchased by Yahoo from F2 in 2001 for about $15... continue reading »New Fee Causes NYT News Alert Subs to Fall 96 PercentWhen the New York Times introduced a $19.95 annual fee this May to its email News Alert service, subscriptions fell from 500,000 to 20,000. Editor and Publisher reports. Robert Loch comments.... continue reading »IDC Publishing Press Releases in RSSTechnology analyst group IDC is now publishing its press releases in RSS. InfoWorld reports. Rick Bruner comments.... continue reading »Google AdSense Rolls Out Publisher FeaturesGoogle now lets publishers pick colors for AdSense ads. As a search marketer, I'd be much happier seeing them roll out tools that let publishers see campaign data by different site or campaign segment. When you run a large site... continue reading »Google Backtracks on Related SearchesYesterday Google announced that they were going to add related searches within the Adsense ad boxes. Google anticipated that this would be a good thing for small publishers. But publishers heavily criticized the new feature, threatening to figuratively throw their... continue reading »Who Are Today's Biggest Media Influencers?Rick Bruner wants to know who you think are the most influential media people today in terms of technology and culture. Please comment. ... continue reading »MediaMap Starts BloggingMediaMap, a leading firm serving the PR industry with information about the changing landscape in the media business, has started a blog. Rick Bruner comments.... continue reading »Marketers Yet to Embrace Do-It-Yourself AdvertisingIn Joe Jaffe's latest iMedia column, he observes that the craze for reality TV is leading inevitably, if slowly, towards reality advertising. Rick Bruner wholeheartedly agrees and is annoyed it's not happening sooner.... continue reading »More Celebration of Self-PublishingOnline Journalism Review has two interesting new stories on the trend of personally produced journalism. Rick Bruner gushes.... continue reading »Latest in Garbage Marketing: Notepad PopupsSome clever hacker has figured out a way to use MS Notepad for annoying pop-up ads. Rick Bruner comments.... continue reading »Yellow Pages Plight May Be ContagiousDirectory advertising, the term of art for yellow pages listings, even sounds like an online medium. Unfortunately, the similarities don’t end there. Both types of media are considered absolute musts to specific categories of advertisers. Both do a brisker business... continue reading »Study Compares EU Registration FeesResearch carried out by the Technical University of Vienna on the differences in the cost of domain names across the European Union finds that the price varies from $121 in Sweden to $17 in the U.K. TelecomWorldWire reports.... continue reading »Kiwis' $1Million Domain MisappropriatedTrade NZ, the Kiwi tourism board, so wanted to own the newzealand.com address that it first initiated legal proceedings that it knew would fail against the U.S. owner and then paid out $1 million for the name in what is... continue reading »BuyMusic 'Compliments' Apple AdsApple fans expect, even hope, that PC companies will imitate the various innovations they create for their relatively small but loyal audience. But BuyMusic has gone a step further. After copying its iTunes music service, the PC-oriented company decided to... continue reading »Beware New Zealand Domain ScamNew Zealand Commerce Commission suggests domain name owners be wary of a company operating as "Domain Names NZ".... continue reading »Google & Overture Dance on Remnant Media's GraveThe "traditional" online media folks have noticed a strange phenomenon recently. Very little "remnant" banner inventory is available, the opportunistic swathes of media they were once able to pick up on the cheap because sites had failed to sell it... continue reading »Early Emails Fight with ClutterPaul Soltoff argues that marketers should avoid sending email prior to 9 a.m., in order to avoid the "email rush hour." Clickz reports. Robert Loch comments. ... continue reading »iCrossing Picks Up AccountsAccor North America, Brookstone , FedEx, Humana and Quantum, all recently signed on with search engine marketing (SEM) agency iCrossing. The company calls its approach to SEM "reverse direct marketing," referring to the fact that it connects companies to people... continue reading »AOL, MSFT Against Do-Not-Spam ListMajor ISPs Microsoft and AOL have aligned with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) against the prospect of a do-not-spam list. The wildly popular do-not-call list sponsored by the FTC has caused a groundswell of support for an email equivalent list.... continue reading »Nigerian Spammers Seek Credibility, Enlist BBCSomeone somewhere must be falling for this, because the fraudulent spam messages from Nigeria just keep coming at an ever faster pace. Now it seems media outlets like the BBC are unwittingly being used as references of a sort, as... continue reading »Phones4U Launches 'Foul Feet' Viral Game CampaignFrom the folks who brought us the washing machine orgasm for women, comes "Foul Feet," an online viral contest where those with the ugliest feet are awarded a new cell phone. The company behind this game is U.K. based Phones4U,... continue reading » |