Articles of the Day
Gauging Yahoo’s $300 Million BlueLithium Grab - Yahoo’s imminent acquisition of the BlueLithium ad network for $300 million comes at the midway mark of CEO Jerry Yang’s 100-day strategic planning period, on the heels of a management overhaul by president Sue Decker, and prior to government clearance of rival Google’s deal to buy DoubleClick. So what’s it all mean?
NetRatings Sustains Heavy Loss, Finance Chief Steps Down, Joins Popular Video Service - Internet ratings giant NetRatings has a somewhat lighter senior management team following the departure of finance chief Todd Sloan, who has joined online video service Heavy.com as CFO, Online Media Daily has learned. The move is a bit ironic because Heavy.com has been waging a public feud with NetRatings over its online ratings, which Heavy.com chief David Carson asserts substantially underestimates Heavy’s actual audience.
Offline Influence on Online Search Yields 39% Conversion - According to a the “iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Online Search Behavior Study,” conducted by JupiterResearch, 67% of the online search population is driven to search by offline channels. It also revealed that 39% of online searchers who are influenced by offline channels ultimately make a purchase. This 39% conversion rate suggests a synergistic relationship exists between search and offline channels, concludes the study.
Online Yellow Pages to Pump Local Ads? - A vast proportion of local ad spending goes into yellow pages directories. While a national yellow pages market exists, it will reach only $2.2 billion in 2007, compared with $12.4 billion going to the local pages, according to Universal McCann. Internet yellow pages (IYP) might seem to be the most obvious online parallel to the traditional yellow pages, but that is not the way it turns out. According to “The User Revolution,” a February 2007 report from Piper Jaffray, the offline yellow pages and classifieds market—at $37 billion—shows the potential of local ad dollars. If only 20% of that budget shifts to the Internet, for example, that would add $7 billion to local online ad spending.
Casual Gamers Bring Family Along - More than 50 million video gamers play simple online games with other family members, a report says. Hardcore games get the headlines, but casual games may end up getting the ad dollars.
How to “Retarget” Consumers - If you thought that 50% of your ad budget wasn’t wasted if you were spending on the Internet, you’d be wrong. Thank goodness most of it is cheap, though. If you’re in the biz, you know that low CTRs (click-through rates) are the norm, especially for display, but a new startup called Fetchbook has “a slightly creepy solution to the problem.”
Search Pro’s Take On Where Engines Are Headed - 2007 has seen two major upgrades to the way search engines work — with Ask’s busy, feature-rich, three-panel approach and Google’s Universal Search — as well as changes to the way search is perceived by media measurement firms like Nielsen//NetRatings. SEOmoz’ CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin serves up nine more ways that he thinks the search industry will evolve, from incorporating more user data and searching history, to more vertical fracturing, to a widespread inclusion of human-powered results.
Nets Sharpen Web Tactics - As the networks gear up to roll out their new fall shows, they’re also coming out with new Web strategies for those programs. In a two-year deal reported last night by Variety, ABC.com will stream four Warner Bros. TV shows aired on ABC — “Pushing Daisies,” “Men in Trees,” “Notes From the Underbelly,” and “Big Shots.” ABC will be able to stream shows for up to four weeks after they air. Next year, Warner Bros. TV will have the right to stream reruns of the shows and sell downloads of them.
