Written on February 4, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Object
The HotJobs for sale rumor has been around for some time. Yesterday a deal with Monster was finally announced. It is being widely hailed as a smart move by Yahoo to gain cash and divest itself of another “non-core asset.” Except for payment and other terms the deal is conceptually analogous to what Yahoo is [...]
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Written on December 10, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Yahoo (moves toward the little blue bird, the center of attention at the party): Well, hello there, baby. You sure are popular here.
Twitter (BIG SMILE): Yep! And I have #friends @overthere and @overthere and—
Yahoo (slips an arm around the bird): How would you like to come back to my place for a little . . . integration?
Twitter: Whoa, buddy—this is why I carry an API at all times!
Back in July, Twitter was popping up everywhere: first a deal with Bing, then a deal with Google. Not to be left out, Yahoo made a real-time foray with OneRiot, but apparently they still had their eyes on the life of the party: Twitter.
Last month, Yahoo News integrated Twitter into its results for breaking news via a tabbed shortcut:
Apparently this went well, because now more of these Tweet results will be directly integrated into the SERPs—and they just might be doing this right:
However, Yahoo won’t be adding Twitter to all its results. According to the Yahoo Search blog,
So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page.
And if they do that, that might be just the way to integrate Twitter into SERPs: filtered for relevance, used only for topics generating a lot of discussion, and sequestered in a section of the SERP.
What do you think? Is this too little, too late for Yahoo? Or is this more than you want to see of Twitter in your SERPs?
Here is the original post:
Yahoo Moving in on Twitter
Written on September 15, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, marketing
In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.
Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”
What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:
[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.
The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.
Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.
My question: what’s with all those vowels?! Are you sure you didn’t mean “clickr”? Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys. 
Naturally, the first real question is what’s their business model. And the answer is typical of search engines: advertising, both search and display. However, they also plan to offer premium accounts, “which the company envisions might be used for storing your favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.”
We’re obviously still learning new things about how to do online video all the time, as Hulu has shown us. But is there room for another video search engine—and if so, will Clicker be it? What do you think?
See original here:
Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?
Written on September 2, 2009 by admin
This year, Google has made no bones about the fact that they’re looking to take on Amazon in the eBook arena. First, they made a deal with Sony (maker of the Sony eReader, top competitor to Amazon’s Kindle reader) to provide more than half a million public domain titles. Then in June, Google “signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.” A couple weeks later, Google Books came out with new viewing and embedding features, including mobile-compatible features.
But still, all the embedding and viewing features in the world aren’t much competition for the eye-strain–preventing, ultra portable, WiFi connecting Kindle. Without some awesome hardware, Google’s eBook revolution would probably remain just a pipe dream.
So it’s a darn good thing they’ve partnered with Interead, makers of COOL-ER eReaders. Designed as a cheaper eReader, the COOL-ER is an up-and-coming Kindle competitor. Of course, Google’s partnership with their parent company only extends to the public domain books in Google’s repository (the first such deal that will have effect outside the US).
The COOL-ER is a cheaper alternative to the Kindle—both in price, and, according to the reviews I’ve watched, in quality and durability. (If I’m going to plonk down $250 for an eReader, I might as well spring for the full-featured Kindle.) However, the COOL-ER has the greatest file compatibility range—19 in all, from PDF to EPUB to MP3. (And I’m most inclined to wait at least one more generation on any eReader, at the very least.)
The next logical step might very well be Google influencing the COOL-ER itself—and in keeping with the Google way of doing things, keep it affordable, make it accessible and make it quality. Also in keeping with the Google way—get someone else to do your hardware.
What do you think? Will this be Google’s back door into the eReader industry? Or are they only interested in selling the books themselves?
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Google To Get Hardware to Take on eBooks?
Written on September 2, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo
Facebook has a lot going for it lately. They’ve got more than 250M users worldwide, they’re the most popular social network in almost every country in the world, they’re hiring in a down economy, and according to a new comScore report, 8.2% of all Internet ads are served on their site.
But, then, maybe this all makes sense. Since Facebook is so popular, it’s not entirely surprising that they serve one out of every twelve online ads. Even better? At least some proportion of their on-site CPC ads lead to another page on the site—so they’re getting money and traffic.
This isn’t a recent development, of course—we’ve all seen ads to “Become a Fan” of something on Facebook. But as smart as it sounds to make your advertisers pay for generating traffic to your site, the underlying logic is pretty much a stroke of genius:
Facebook has long been accused of being a “walled garden”—with its fan pages, apps and other utilities, FB is almost a subset of the offerings of the Internet. If your brand is prominent enough, you’re on Facebook (or you should be!). Driving paid traffic from a personal page (personal) to a branded page only makes sense on that kind of paradigm.
Of course, that kind of advertising is good for advertisers, too, or they wouldn’t do it. JCPenney went from 22,000 fans to 500,000 fans with these advertisements in the run-up to back-to-school shopping (though Bloomberg didn’t say if JCP saw increased revenue from this).
And something seems to be working for FB, too. Last month, Bloomberg said the most popular social network in the world should post at least $500 million in revenue this year.
What do you think? Is Facebook a subset of the Internet, and is internal paid advertising a natural extension of that mentality? Can Facebook sustain this kind of revenue?
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Facebook: An Internet unto Itself
Written on August 11, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: blackhat, book, seo
It finally happened. You know those mandatory commercials you get before a news clip when you go to a site like abcnews or foxnews.com?
Well today I clicked from this discussion thread to this youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMknKXfbyt8
When I got there, I had to sit through a Chili’s restaurant Commercial For 30 Secs before the Video would start. This is the first time I have ever seen this on youtube and it’s probably a trial run. They have all this Geo-Targeting and user information but feed me Chili’s restaurant commercial . . . when I’m surfing the Net from Brazil. I would love to go to a Chilies - but the nearest one is 3000 miles away.
It’s bad enough when you’re watching a youtube spot and you get that annoying adsense ad that covers 1/3 of the video screen for completely irrelevent crap like “Photojurnalism Canada” or “Used Printing Machines”. Now those timesuck commercials have arrived to Youtube as well?
It IS a CBS news clip, so it’s possible that Google has struck a deal with this network requiring the commercial before showing copyrighted clips. Regardless, it shows that they are comfortable with the revenue format so expect to see more of this in the future. If this catches on, expect a Tivo-Like application to be developed for tube sites that predownloads all the clips to your computer so you can watch them ithout commercials.
Youtube does need to turn a profit. This is NOT the way to do it. The way to do it is to rank Youtube #1 in Google Searches for every TV show and movie ever made and sell the video download for $1. Give half the money to the copyright holder and make it an “Opt-Out” system like they did with books.
Is that evil? I donno. But it would win and it would be what people actually want.
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Mandatory Commercials Have Come to YouTube
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