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August 2004
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MatchNet's IPO Called Off; Tappin Steps DownOnline dating site MatchNet's initial public offering is the latest casualty of "market conditions." The operator of JDate.com and AmericanSingles.com said that the IPO would be delayed due to "faltering marketing for Internet-related IPOs," this a day before Google's Dutch... continue reading »Internet Important Every Day for Seven of Eight AmericansPew reports that most Americans with access (seven out of eight) say the Internet is a daily part of their lives and that they would be adversely affected (two thirds) with its absence. But, even though they do all these... continue reading »Overture Plays Down New Fees RumorsA survey by Yahoo that implied the company was considering introducing new "subscription" fees to its paid search advertising system was downplayed by an Overture employee queried by SearchEngineLowdown. "No worries... just business as usual. Overture regularly surveys its customers..."... continue reading »Forrester: 13 Percent of All Sales to Be Online by 2010By 2010, about one in eight dollars spent on general merchandise will be spent online, according to Forrester Research. Online retail spending will hit $151 billion, up from today's $76 billion. Online ticket sales are also expected to more than... continue reading »Home Furnishings the Number One Net Growth CategoryAmong goods sold online, home furnishings is growing the fastest, according to Roper Reports. A full quarter of online adults purchased home furnishing items on the Internet this past year, up 17 percent from the previous year. Other categories grew... continue reading »SEO Firm Settles Charges of Service FailureSearch engine optimization (SEO) firm Internet Advancement settled with Washington State's attorney general over charges it failed to deliver promised services to clients. For roughly $1,000, the firm had promised many companies it could get their websites listed in the... continue reading »Updated: Playboy Interview Clouds Google IPOA not-so-revealing interview in a Playboy issue to be released today is getting the founders of Google into warm water, as the Wall Street Journal reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing whether the publication constitutes a violation... continue reading »Digitas to Cut Every 25th WorkerDigitas said it will cut 50 jobs - about one in 25 of its staff - due mostly to AT&T and Delta Air Lines cutting back their spending with the firm. It also alluded to a "creation of excess capacity,"... continue reading »Toys 'R' Us Gets Order Against Amazon.comA New Jersey state judge has been mostly finding for Toys 'R' Us in its contract dispute with Amazon.com. Toys 'R' Us complained that Amazon was ignoring the exclusive arrangements they had agreed to together, allowing other toy retailers to... continue reading »MSNBC Bows ClassifiedsNews site MSNBC is launching its own newspaper classifieds online, providing jobs, real estate, cars, personals and general merchandise. The company will partner with major existing classifieds listers in each category, including eBay, CareerBuilder, Cars.com, Homegain.com, Match.com and Expedia.... continue reading »Local Search Stinks, to Grow SlowlyNate Elliott explained why his JupiterResearch study gave such short shrift to local search, predicting it will grow at a slower rate than other search media: he says these new local search engines still stink. Pointing out that today's local... continue reading »Warner Music Caught Spamming BlogsWarner Brothers Records got caught in its ham-handed effort to get bloggers to push its new Secret Machines album release. While winning some praise for directly engaging bloggers and handing over an MP3 file for them to post (perhaps their... continue reading »Unwanted Sales Emails to Hike by Two Thirds, Push Marketers to NewslettersJupiterResearch's onslaught of future predictions continues with the prognostication that online users will get more than 6,000 unwanted commercial emails a piece in 2008, up by almost two thirds from last year. In part as answer to this clutter, advertisers... continue reading »Feedster Brings Ads to RSSFeedster, the aggregator of RSS syndicated content feeds from websites, is rolling out advertising links in its search results. The ads will appear every sixth link at first in just the search results and later in other feeds. Ad sales... continue reading »SEC Reportedly Unworried about Playboy InterviewThe Securities and Exchange Commission reportedly said Google's initial public offering does not have to be delayed after a Playboy interview with its founders appeared on newsstands the same day the company began accepting bids for shares. The report said... continue reading »eBay Takes Piece of CraigslistCommunity site Craigslist saw a quarter of its equity - previously granted to a partner - sold to eBay for what the New York Times speculated was likely in the "low tens of millions" of dollars. Craigslist is strong in... continue reading »B2B Ad Dollars Leaving PrintBusiness-to-business ad pages are down in print, falling another three percent. The shift has been a drumbeat of pessimism in business-to-business print advertising, whereas online ads are growing in leaps and bounds. Unclear in the shift of ad budgets is... continue reading »Automakers Choking Sales LeadsAutomakers are dropping the sales ball online, says both Forrester Research and JupiterResearch in new reports. The Forrester report reports that almost a third of car buyers are flocking to the Internet to choose a car, and even asking for... continue reading »Research Paper Hints at Microsoft Search's Special SauceSearchEngineLowdown reports that Jason Dowdell has found some interesting published Microsoft tidbits that better explain how it may plan to trump Google and Yahoo with a new type of search engine in the coming quarters. The PDF document seems to... continue reading »China Hones Net Monitors on PornographyChina is pushing a multi-front "anti-porn" effort to control web content, including monitoring of people using the internet, computer tracking and filtering. The system has been shown in the past to be very porous, with unclear responsibilities among municipalities and... continue reading »Razorfish Takes Blockbuster AccountAvenue A/Razorfish won the Blockbuster online account and will release its first campaign this week. The account win comes at a propitious time, with Blockbuster Online launching a new Netflix-style online video rental service. The campaign will run on entertainment... continue reading »MSN to Bow Ad-Supported Video 2Microsoft is set to release a new video channel on its MSN network, called MSN Video 2. The free service will be paid for through advertising. The video interface was made to look like the Windows Media player and can... continue reading »Only 3 Percent of U.K. Sellers OnlineOnly one in 33 U.K. small and medium-sized businesses are selling goods or services online, according to PFA Research. Most businesses cited a lack of staff and other resources to manage the IT effort. Only 10 percent of businesses blamed... continue reading »Monster Gives Up on AOL, MSNMonster.com's CEO reversed the jobs classifieds company's marketing strategy after finding that the deals with MSN and AOL to drive site traffic were too expensive and not well targeted enough. "There were a lot of people that believed that traffic... continue reading »Product Buzz Affects MarketingWord-of-mouth measurement firm BuzzMetrics published a case study implying that popular topics and water cooler conversation may play a much larger role in the marketing process than previously thought. And its role is more dynamic than previously believed, with buzz... continue reading »Tune Not Yet Stopped in AOL's Musical Agencies GameAOL's agency churning continued with the hiring of The Martin Agency, and IPG property, not to replace Wieden & Kennedy as brand creative (that firm resigned those duties three weeks ago), but instead to handle some print work. Last year... continue reading »Networks Told They Were at Fault for Once-Missing MenLast week's story on television networks pointing to new Nielsen figures as vindication that young men never left the TV fold was hotly contested by a research piece put out by a new Magna Global report. TV networks blamed the... continue reading »LookSmart Adds Automated Ad System FeaturesLookSmart added budget and cost-per-click tracking features to its automated advertising system LookListings. The new features add a "position scorecard" report to help determine the best position bid, as well as a a budget forecast to warn advertisers if their... continue reading »Wired Admits Capitalizing 'Internet' All a MistakeWired, which through a series of cultural accidents in the mid-1990s became the style arbiter of Internet language use, admitted yesterday that "there is no earthly reason" to capitalize "Internet," "Net" or "the Web." It announced it will no longer... continue reading »Local Search Looking RosierWhile Jupiter Reserach estimates continue to predict negative growth relative to other parts of the online media mix, local search got a boost from a study indicating that small and medium-sized businesses that focus within a 50-mile territory tend to... continue reading »Google Seeks to Set Price TodayGoogle said it will move to price its initial public offering this afternoon. It announced it had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to declare its registration effective at 4 p.m. Trading would commence sometime thereafter under the ticker... continue reading »DoubleClick Reports Higher E-commerce ConversionsThe Q2 2004 E-Commerce Site Trend Report from DoubleClick reports that people are agreeing to buy things online more often. And even as the e-commerce conversion rate increased, users spent only the same amount of total time to view sites,... continue reading »VOX Interviews Quigo CEOWith vertical search company Quigo in the news a lot recently, MarketingVOX sent over a small batch of questions for CEO Michael Yavonditte, in an attempt to figure out how Quigo hoped to carve out a successful and defensible niche... continue reading »Google Lowers Price, Hopes to Launch IPOGoogle's initial public offering was lowered in price to a range of between $85 and $95 per share, putting the company's maximum value down from more than $36 billion to less than $26 billion. This, coupled with halving the number... continue reading »Meckler: Expanding Suit Against eMarketerJupiterResearch CEO Alan Meckler wrote on his blog that he had expanded the suit he lodged against eMarketer for allegedly appropriating research information as its own. He said legal action had also been brought in England and in France. He... continue reading »Another Weak Week of Online RetailThe week ending on the first day of August showed no growth in e-commerce from the year before, according to comScore. Sales just scraped past $1 billion, but $3 million less than last year's figure for the same week. So... continue reading »Crypto Researchers Chip Away at Net CodesCryptography researchers showed that some of the basic formulas used to securely encode data in online transactions aren't as secure as many thought. In a series of papers, different research groups have made significant inroads on a variety of the... continue reading »Netscape Upgraded (Barely)AOL released an update to its moribund Netscape browser software, upping it to version 7.2. Lacking any significant improvement, the new browser version is most notable in that its continued dormancy seems to be inspiring Microsoft to a similar level... continue reading »Study: Behavioral Targeting Huge ROI ImprovementAdvertising.com conducted some tests of its behavioral targeting performance on its own network, finding that targeted ads out-performed normal placements at least several times over. Behavioral targeted ads (impressions targeted to people who had, for instance, previously abandoned a registration... continue reading »DoubleClick Signs 86 New Ad Serving ClientsDoubleClick announced the signing of 86 new ad serving clients, along with 43 renewals for the first half of 2004. New customers included creative boutique Wieden & Kennedy and Date.com. DoubleClick told MarketingVOX it would not provide figures to show... continue reading »TV Networks Finally Succumb to Ad-ID StandardThe four major TV networks announced that they are complying with a marketer effort to standardize broadcast media tracking. The American Association of Ad Agencies (4As) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) have been pushing their Ad-ID standard for... continue reading »Traditional Ad Budgets Up 6.4 Percent in 2004Falling in with predictions, measured ad spending rose 6.4 percent in the first half of 2004, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Leading the rise was local magazines, cable TV and national newspapers. The Internet is not among the media measured by... continue reading »Olympics Sponsors Suffering Internet Share SetbacksThe three lead Olympics sponsors saw their web traffic share decrease significantly in the lead up to the games in Greece, according to the web traffic measuring company Hitwise. Site visitor figures don't equate to branding, but the lackluster online... continue reading »Video Game Viral Campaign Runs AmokThe company marketing new video game Resident Evil: Outbreak has set up a site allowing people to use mobile phone messages to spam others with unsolicited fake virus infection warnings. A typical message read " "Outbreak: I'm infecting you with... continue reading »Carat Interactive Rebrands to DiffinitiCarat Interactive is rebranding in the U.K. as Diffiniti. At first the in-house online media arm for Carat, the group is being spun off and replaced with still another in-house online media group, called (confusingly until now) Carat Digital. Robert... continue reading »Path to AOL and Microsoft Accounts Lies Through Sender IDMarketers and newsletter publishers hoping to get email into mail boxes of AOL, and Microsoft email accounts will likely have to become Sender ID compliant. Microsoft email programs include those from MSN and Hotmail. Senders who aren't identified in emails... continue reading »Google IPO Off and Running, Much ReducedAfter lowering the number of shares offered and pricing the offering at the low end of its restated expected range, Google sold $1.66 billion of stock to outside investors. The offering pegs Google's total value at $23 billion, far lower... continue reading »Eolas Rich Media Patent on Way to GraveMicrosoft won yet again against Eolas, the patent holder that initially won a half-billion dollar judgment against the software maker. This spring the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office started a review of that patent after it became something of a... continue reading »'Blogversations' Intro Advertorial to BlogsBlogversations, a new company that is half PR firm and half ad rep, is offering a service whereby it will get advertiser's stories placed on blogs. The participating blogs explicitly accept money for entertaining the topics, although they reportedly are... continue reading » |