Articles of the Day
Google Confident Of OK On DoubleClick Deal - Senior Google officials last week expressed confidence that the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick will pass both FTC and EU hurdles.
One-on-One With Hachette’s Philippe Guelton - In a leadup to his panel at the American Magazine Conference in Boca Raton, FL, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. COO Philippe Guelton talked about the company’s digital strategy, latest deal with TheFind.com, and the surprising success of Womansday.com.
Media Buyers Welcome More Open Yahoo - Media buyers welcomed Yahoo’s step last week to open up its home page by adding outside links, but said the company should be moving even faster to bring down barriers.
eMarketer on Microsoft-Facebook - When Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook last week, it acquired the rights to sell Facebook advertising around the world. With 34.5 billion page views in September, according to comScore Media Metrix, Facebook is now the fourth most highly trafficked Web property worldwide. Just how important is the international part of the equation? Facebook in September racked up 14.7 billion page views in the United States, comScore reported – just 43% of its worldwide total. Yes, the validity of the page-view metric is debatable, but for Microsoft’s sales organization, that is a flood of new inventory any way you look at it.
Google’s Social Assault: Maka-Maka - Google may have lost out on a piece of Facebook, but the Web giant is now responding by moving headlong into the territory of Facebook and MySpace. Google plans to incorporate social media features into all of its applications, using them as the glue that sticks each application together. The initiative goes by the name “Maka-Maka” and borrows heavily from Facebook.
Hulu.com Launches Under Great Pressure - Whatever the fate of Hulu.com, the media world will be watching carefully. The free, ad-supported television partnership launches today on an invite-only basis. Yet it seems like everyone is expecting this thing to fail. Why? Diverging agendas, technical challenges and an all-powerful enemy: YouTube; a group of bloggers has even started calling Hulu “Clown Co.” However, reporters were impressed last week at Hulu’s press unveiling.
Why Hulu Will Fail - Hulu is a product, or an arrangement between content owners–it doesn’t actually own the TV shows or movies it distributes. Actually, NBC and News Corp. can stream as much of their content through their own Web sites as they want, and in any arrangement they want (commercial-free, for example). The only thing Hulu has the rights to is third-party distribution agreements. NBC, for example, couldn’t strike a deal with YouTube, but Hulu could.
When Google = Search, Indie Alternatives Continue to Dwindle - Despite their efforts to keep the word “Google” from becoming as generic as “Kleenex,” or “Xerox,” or “Band-Aid,” the search giant’s name is still synonymous with — well, search. It’s great for the company’s market share, but bad for smaller, independent search engines, according to OneUpWeb’s Chip.While indies like Judy’s Book and WiseNut are mere blips on the search landscape, they do add value and give searchers options that the giants don’t provide.
Deeper Insight Into Live Search (Part 2) - In Microsoft’s quest to improve Live Search’s relevancy for users (and ROI for adCenter advertisers) the software giant’s search team focused on a number of key areas –including the actual semantics behind queries. The company continues to shed light on the nuts and bolts of the improvements –and today’s post centers on the upgrades to user abbreviations (entering ‘Nw’ for Northwestern university, for example) and the handling of “stop words” (or articles like “a,” “the,” or “and”).
