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October 2004
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Washington Post Buys SlateThe Washington Post is acquiring Slate, the perennially unprofitable online magazine started by Microsoft. Newsweek, another Post property, already works closely with Microsoft's MSN division. PaidContent reports.... continue reading »Nielsen Juggernaut Solidifying Metrics GripMediaPost reports that agency folk are fretting that Nielsen's deals with DVR companies, securing its measurement monopoly further into the future, will hurt the long-term competitiveness of the media metrics business. Worse, Nielsen's parent, VNU appears to be stalking the... continue reading »Judge Finds Against Maker of Copyright ThreatsDiebold knowingly tried to misuse the DMCA act to intimidate students and advocacy groups, a judge ruled, making Diebold pay for the defendants' legal costs. Swarthmore students a year ago published online leaked Diebold documents that appeared to show the... continue reading »Tivo, Netflix Confirm Rumors of Video on Demand ProjectDVD rental firm Netflix and digital video recorder firm Tivo confirmed the rumors and announced a partnership that would deliver video on demand to homes with Tivo boxes. Netflix will tackle the licensing arrangements with movie studios, and Tivo will... continue reading »Microsoft to Reveal Search Tech to Selected BloggersMicrosoft put together a group of bloggers and search experts to act as a sort of focus group for its ongoing search development efforts. The group, to travel to Redmond for a two-day "Search Champs" event has all the appearances... continue reading »Search Growth Estimates Wildly DifferSearch Engine market growth predictions remain all over the map, with Jupiter's curmudgeonly Nate Elliott holding the bottom line at 34 percent and financial analysts proving more optimistic, pegging growth at almost twice that. In general, people working in the... continue reading »Email Marketing Tied to Web Metrics, User BehaviorAn email marketing firm and a web metrics company have combined their offerings to engineer a product that will send targeted emails to web site visitors based on their online behavior. Responsys and Coremetrics, which don't appear to have named... continue reading »Real Estate Ad Dollars Shifting OnlineReal Estate ad revenues look to be shifting from print to online, although the process has only just started. One of the key drivers is the tendency for online ad opportunities to be priced per lead, typically a much more... continue reading »Do-Not-Spam Registry PossibleThe hugely popular Do-Not-Call Registry has proven both larger and more successful than anyone predicted. More people put themselves on the registry than voted for president last time around. The success is making people not take at face value the... continue reading »Froogle Leaps Across PondFroogle, Google's shopping engine, launched in beta in the U.K. a few days ago. Looking at the random selection of unlikely items on its home page (who is shopping for ketchup or pepper online?), it's still a bit hard to... continue reading »FindWhat Launches PPC Auction NetworkFindWhat launched its own version of a cost-per-click auction network, debuting AdRevenue Xpress. While the auction process remains much like Google's AdSense network, FindWhat lets advertisers bid on keywords and categories, rather than contextual placements. The program is now available... continue reading »Mediasmith Hires Bob Heyman for SearchSan Francisco online buying shop Mediasmith hired well-known industry figure Bob Heyman as chief of search. Heyman founded Cybernautics in the mid-90s, selling it to USWeb three years later. He was also a co-founder of CybeReps. ClickZ reports.... continue reading »Google Expands into Norway, KenyaGoogle announced its entry into its 102nd and 103rd markets, with Norway and Kenya added to its global portfolio. The search giant's blog said that there was a legal department-inspired delay in launching the Norwegian version as Google means "sunglasses"... continue reading »MarketWatch Adds Still More AdsMarketWatch launched a redesigned site, expanding its page to include new advertising real estate. It also forces site visitors through a brief initial full-page ad view that recedes to an upper-right-hand corner placement. The company plans to also insert broadband... continue reading »Kerry Online Ads Sell Debate WinAfter last week's debate, the John Kerry presidential campaign unleashed an online advertising effort to spin the performance, maintaining that he "won" the debate by pressing several key points. In point of fact, polls coming out in the last few... continue reading »Yahoo Local Pushed out of BetaYahoo started promoting its two-month-old local service prominently on its homepage, pushing the new search site out of beta and into the harsh world of Yahoo's massive traffic ecosystem. Chris Sherman of SearchEngineWatch, who already positively reviewed the beta version,... continue reading »Study: Small Biz Sites Rocket Small Biz GrowthA company that sells website and hosting services reported finding that its study measuring small business return on investment showed almost universal and very large profitability increases for those established small businesses starting a website. C I Host's survey of... continue reading »Affiliate Network Acknowledges Publishers Won't Bear All the RiskWayne Porter reports that Commission Junction is supporting cost-per-click deal structures again, after shunning them for years during the downturn. The pendulum has swung back to a more balanced situation between advertisers and publishers. Alternatives such as Google AdSense now... continue reading »Bush, Kerry Underfund Online AdsPew reports that online advertising represents merely a blip in campaign spending this year, contradicting many predictions that this would be the breakout year for the internet in campaign budgets. The Bush and Kerry campaigns, along with their various surrogates,... continue reading »Dex to Offer Local Sites, SearchYellow Pages publisher Dex launched an online product, mixing small website development and search engine marketing, to be marketed to the directory publisher's 400,000 small business customers. The move comes after BellSouth launched a similar offering last spring. To date,... continue reading »Hispanic Car Buyers Growing Online TargetHispanics are buying cars at four times the rate of the rest of the population, according to an AOL study, a trend that automakers are starting to employ in their media choices. Almost half of online Hispanics have used the... continue reading »Phone Owners on Portable TV: Eh, No ThanksLyra research reports that, despite the hubbub from cell phone makers, people don't really care about video on their handsets. Only nine percent said they were very interested in doing so. Many were interested in using their phones as portable... continue reading »Yahoo Joins Personalized Search BandwagonYahoo rolled out its personalized search features, including access to search histories, annotate links, URL blocking capabilities and the ability to save query results into a personal directory. The new elements are currently available to people with MyYahoo accounts. The... continue reading »Paid Inclusion a Relative BargainClickZ's Fredrick Marckini does the math on paid inclusion marketing, determining where the inflection points are for positive returns when adding "PI" to the search engine marketing mix. In most cases, PI seems to pay for itself. Only Yahoo continues... continue reading »Radio Firm: Creative Stinks, We'll Take OverRadio firm Clear Channel is pushing its own ad creation services, hoping to reduce station switching due to highly annoying radio ads. A great deal of discussion has been afoot in recent weeks about the sad state of online creative,... continue reading »Amazon Opens Up Alexa DataAmazon opened up its databases, including its Alexa Web Information Service, publishing mechanisms for other sites and services to use its product information and Alexa's data on the relative traffic rankings of websites. Amazon said the Alexa data will be... continue reading »Online Sales Growing Quickly Once MoreE-commerce got a boost in the latter part of September, with the week ending September 19 showing online retail sales increases of almost a third over the same period in 2003. The recent spate of good sales reports comes after... continue reading »AOL Chair: 'Walled Garden' not Useful, No Search AmbitionsIn an interview with iMedia, AOL Chairman Jonathan Miller admits that AOL subscribers don't find the "walled garden" of AOL content a big attraction, and that opening up that garden to the rest of the internet shouldn't have much of... continue reading »MarketingVOX Launches Reader SurveyMarketingVOX launched a survey yesterday to let readers help determine future editorial efforts and to begin measuring audience characteristics for advertisers. The site will be expanding its offerings - all completely advertising supported - and your input will help keep... continue reading »Gawker Launches Three More Sites for MenGawker Media, producer of popular consumer blogs like Gizmodo and Wonkette, launched three new sites geared to reach young men. Its "testosterone trio" includes Kotaku, a video game site; Jalopnik, a car site; and Screenhead, a sort of Adrants-without-the-ads that... continue reading »LinkShare Award Nixed on Spyware AccusationsFor a second time, LinkShare took back a "Titanium Award" granted for the largest affiliate sales increases, and for the second time it is because the company first chosen as winner was accused of being a spyware concern. TheDesktopShopper.com won... continue reading »Gun Firm to Start Email Marketing EffortPistol manufacturer Smith & Wesson, in business for more than a century, started its first customer loyalty program, including an upcoming email marketing campaign to existing gun owners. Called Smith & Wesson Club 1852, the effort gives items like key... continue reading »Supremes Uphold No-Call RegistryThe Supremes upheld the decision to validate the federal government's Do-Not-Call Registry, presumably holding that the discrimination against commercial free speech was not unconstitutional. The Supreme Court's rejection of the appeal was made without comment. This clears the legal ground... continue reading »Kerry Campaign to Loose Another Net Ad Volley TonightJust after researchers were noting the surprising absence of online advertising in the presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) dropped a $400,000 media bomb on the market in one day, advertising on more than 50 sites. The Kerry ad... continue reading »Razorfish Search Launched, Combining with eonMediaAvenue A's Razorfish launched a search-specific arm for its agency services. The awkwardly-named Avenue A/Razorfish Search will combine staff from Razorfish as well as grafting on the recent aQuantive holding company purchase of eonMedia. Razorfish currently books about a quarter... continue reading »Kanoodle Joins Self-Serve Ad ClubKanoodle joined the club of sites with self-service advertising tools, allowing advertisers to jump into media auctions without sullying themselves by having to have contact with an ad rep. The new BrightAds system lets publishers participate by offering their own... continue reading »SEMPO Fields Search SurveySearch engine marketing industry group SEMPO fielded a questionnaire today in an attempt to better grasp the in-house resources being used by firms for their own search efforts. (Click through to take the survey.) Other questions include information about... continue reading »One in Three Computers Has Malicious CodeEarthlink updated last spring's somewhat misleading survey of spyware installations, announcing that a scan of three million computers resulted in finding 83 million instances of spyware. MarketingVOX pointed out in April that the study takes a pretty liberal view as... continue reading »Blogger Founder Leaves GoogleThe founder of Blogger, the blog software program Google acquired in 2003, will leave Google as of Friday. Evan Williams characterized the split as both amicable and voluntary, as he wanted to take some time off, presumably facilitated by the... continue reading »Email List Rentals Stage ComebackThe email list rental business suffered greatly in the past two years, polluted by dishonest brokers, discredited by lists that proved to be poorly maintained and tainted by spammy practices, suffering through deliverability problems, ignored by mainstream brand marketers who... continue reading »Hyperlinks, Short Subjects Key to Email SuccessEmailLabs reports that a study it conducted on email marketing shows better deliverability and clickthroughs can be had with shorter subject lines and more hyperlinks in the body text. The desirability of short subject lines has been axiomatic in email... continue reading »Bezos: Google's Just FineSearchEngineLowdown's Andy Beal cornered Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos over a cocktail in San Francisco yesterday and snuck in a few questions over a drink. Two interesting tidbits came out. The e-commerce giant seems quite happy with Google as a provider of... continue reading »Google to Launch Book SearchGoogle is set to announce tomorrow the launching of its book search product, in beta since last December. Both of the company's founders will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair to demonstrate the technology. Much like Amazons similar service, searchers... continue reading »Doerr: No Google BrowserAt San Francisco's Web 2.0, celebrity venture capitalist and Google board member John Doerr threw cold water on rumors that Google would be coming out with a browser to compete with Microsoft. Several signs, such as browser engineer hires and... continue reading »AOL to Break $30 MM Campaign, New LogoAOL will launch a new $30 million brand campaign tomorrow, featuring a redesigned logo and an eight-point set of commitments that collectively promise to provide a better web surfing experience. The Martin Agency in Richmond, hired only two months ago,... continue reading »House Passes 'Bono' Anti-Spyware BillThe House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Energy & Commerce Committee's version of an anti-spyware bill. Known as the "Bono Bill," the measure has not yet been modified to incorporate the features of another House bill. That bill provided protections... continue reading »MSN Exec: Desktop Search Will Be First 'Foray'On a panel including search executives from major firms like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Amazon, MSN executive Christoper Payne said that for Microsoft "desktop will be the first foray," into the search realm. Previously, industry watchers assumed that its website... continue reading »eBay Dominates Keyword BrandsShowing off its new keyword tracking abilities, Hitwise reported that among shopping sites, eBay is by far the brand most searched for by search engine users. Variants of eBay's name occupied three of the top fifteen brand name words. The... continue reading »Signs Show Google Dance Upon Us AgainSearchEngineGuide reports evidence of an impeding major change in Google's calculation of which sites are relevant to which keywords. Tip-offs of an oncoming Google dance include two different bots running about the web for Google indexing pages and reports from... continue reading » |