Online Marketing has a bright future!

Future Predictions, Online Marketing, Online News, Web Statistics Comments (0)

Good news to everyone in the online marketing arena according to statistics published on USA Today (Stats acquired from PQ Media). We can expect a sharp increase in ‘New Media’ spending in the next 4 years despite all the economic worries.

“…companies will spend more than $160.8 billion in 2012 — up 82% from 2008 — on 18 emerging markets including online videos, store-based TV screens, sponsored events, TV and movie product placements, cellphones, video games and digital video recorders.”

Not only will ad spending increase, but online ad spending in ‘New Media’ currently accounts for 16% of total advertising spend and this will increase to 27% by the year 2012.

Here is the breakdown of the different ad spending channels:

• Online search: spending will grow 113%, to $26.1 billion. - Good news for SEO companies like SEOP, Inc.
• E-direct marketing: a huge 121% increase in spending ($22.1 billion). (email and pop-up ads)
• Online video and rich media: Spending will grow 389%, to $12.2 billion.

The online advertising and marketing area is a hot place to be the coming 5-10 years in my opinion. It is certainly where I am focusing my attention.

Chris Baldwin @ March 29, 2008

List of acquisitions made by Google to date

Future Predictions, Google, Online Acquisitions Comments (0)

Here is a list of acquisitions made by Google I found on wikipedia today. The majority of the companies acquired by Google are actually based in the San Francisco Bay Area of the United States (silicon valley).

A total of 51 companies have been acquired as of March 2008.

Click the image below to see the full updated list at Wikipedia.

2001: 2 acquisitions

2002: 0 acquisitions

2003: 6 acquisitions

2004: 6 acquisitions

2005: 11 acquisitions

2006: 10 acquisitions

2007: 16 acquisitions (!!)

2008: 0 (!?)

So Google had a busy year in 2007. But things have slowed down significantly as there have been no real talks of major acquisitions this year yet that I know of. But google has been very busy releasing their own software applictions this year and bettering the current services they currently run like Adwords and AdManager and also the recent release of Google Sky and OpenSocial and not to forget the new YouTube APIs.

I expect Google to venture further into the social networks and user/data connectivity arena. As well as the Ad serving arena.

[EDIT]: Google recently invested $1 million in a Chinese social networking startup named Comsenz, Inc. :) (I told you!) Chinese social media is a good place to place your money if you have some spare cash.

Chris Baldwin @ March 28, 2008

Google Goes Black in Israel for the Day

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Today, Google Israel is having a blackout! This blackout is in honor of Earth Hour, a global initiative to turn off the lights for one hour across the world at a specific date and time. Google results pages is still in white however.

In the US, Earth Hour will take place on March 29th at 8 pm, so look forward to perhaps Google.com being back in black on Saturday!

Funny that although Google has come out saying that blackening the Google screen does not save power, they have done so to boost awareness of energy conservation. Google cited a study and their positioning on blackening Google last year :

“One idea, suggested by the site called “Blackle” (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our custom search engine), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.”

source

Chris Baldwin @ March 27, 2008

Yahoo joins Google’s OpenSocial

Google, Online News, Social Networking, Yahoo Comments (1)

A recent announcement by Yahoo press center states that they have joined the OpenSocial Foundation. Open Social is a Google initiative that already includes MySpace and other social networks and is a nonprofit organization to promote a universal standard for applications on social-networking sites (OpenSocial.org).

Google also officially welcomed Yahoo to the foundation on their official blog.

Facebook, which is now one of the biggest social networks and about to pass MySpace in Worldwide traffic numbers, is still refusing to participate in OpenSocial, choosing instead to support Facebook developers only.

The reason for OpenSocial is to join social networks together for sharing of information via the creation of common APIs that can work across multiple platforms.

According to the site:

“The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.”

Here are some examples of applications that have already been built on OpenSocial.

Chris Baldwin @ March 27, 2008

New Bill Could be a Challenge for Google and Other Ad Agencies

Future Predictions, Google, Online Marketing, Online News, SEM Comments (0)

A recent New York assemblyman called Richard L. Brodsky has put together a bill that if passed will make it punishable or even illegal to collect personal information about internet user and the clicks they make on advertisements.

He assemblyman stated:

“Should these companies be able to sell or use what’s essentially private data without permission? The easy answer is absolutely not.”

The passing of such a law would cripple a lot of the big online advertising agencies like Google, Yahoo! and MSN, making it somewhat less attractive for advertisers with big online marketing budgets as the delivery of their ads would be less targeted.

Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania stated in the New York Times:

“A law like this essentially takes some of the gold away from marketers. But it’s the right thing to do. Consumers have no idea how much information is being collected about them, and the advertising industry should have to deal with that.”

This is one of the reasons for the Adsense terms of service update Google made a few months ago stating all publishers to clearly state in they privacy policy if they were collecting any information from visitors. If a publisher does not comply to the new Google terms, then they risk loosing the right to publish Google ads on their website(s).

Funny enough, Microsoft is for the passing of this Bill as it will affect competitors like Google and yahoo! which is a bonus for them of course.

Although this bill is far from being passed anytime soon, it is still a sign of what could be to come in the future and big advertising agencies are already following par and taking measures toward this possible.

If bills such as these were to pass we would still however be able to target through keyword selection, and we would still have generic traffic figures and market research information. So there is not too much to worry about from the marketers perspective, however, it does cause concern to the advertising agencies collecting user information as they could be faced with law suits from the governmental bodies or even from competitors trying to find the edge.

Chris Baldwin @ March 27, 2008

Modern Marketing = Make Peoples’ Lives Better

Future Predictions, Online Marketing, Product Marketing Comments (0)

I cam accross a very nice presentation called: The Future of Marketing + Advertising

It was composed by Paul Isakson and tries to present ideas on where we are heading to with modern marketing.

You can watch the presentation here:

http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/whats-next-in-marketing-advertising-318143

Basically, the take home message is: Modern Marketing = Make Peoples’ Lives Better

Chris Baldwin @ March 25, 2008

Google Backlink penalties are again being applied

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There is a very interesting discussion thread over at Google Groups involving Matt Cutts.

Basically, a website owner complained that his website was penalized by Google and many rankings where lost (-xx penalty). After a leangthy discussion, Matt Cutts joined in and pointed this out:

ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It
looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that.
For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links
on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if
Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have
less PageRank can also mean that a site won’t rank as well.
If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to
that issue, in addition to the other good advice you’ve already
gotten.
Matt

If you keep reading the discussion, you will notice what Matt is talking about. Not only did the website owner purchase links (which is considered bad by Google) he also probably paid for his link to be displayed in a wordpress theme template as the designer. See an example here (look at the bottom of page)

So, what has happened is that the site got 100’s of backlinks from webmasters using the wordpress theme for their blog and leaving the design credits and backlink. Unfortunately, many of the blogs where off-topic and have nothing to do with the linked website which is about furniture.

This is quite an extreme case of a backlink campaign but really demonstrates a very important lesson that Google is moving back toward penalizing websites for “unusual” backlinks. This was the case over a year or two ago but I feel Google has been very lenient the past 18 months on this issue as it was possible to attack your competitors by pointing back links to them.

Now, it seems Google maybe coming back to the backlink penalty rules which I think is a good thing. One noteworthy comment out of this thread was by the user JLH:

The site may have been ranking higher than it
should have been before. Now that they’ve discovered and subsequently
devalued the paid links it has sunk to its appropriate rankings. The
reason I bring this up, that if I am correct in my reading of Matt’s
comment, then even after a reconsideration request is filed and looked
at, you may not see a regain in rankings since the higher rankings you
were enjoying before were false to begin with. What appears like a
penalty is really not, and therefore there is nothing to be removed.
I just want to prepare you for that possibility.

The thread continues with over 140 comments and is well worth the read :)

Also, a voting pole over at seroundtable.com asked the question “are these penalties back link related?”

The results were as follows:

• 47% said Yes (50 responses)
• 28% said No Idea (30 responses)
• 25% said No (26 responses)

I made a post last week named: Google Webmaster Tools needs inbound link opt out like Yahoo!

It looks like this feature of being able to “reject” incoming links to your site is a must to avoid competitors abusing this backlink penalty system and attacking competitors in the same industry.

Chris Baldwin @ March 25, 2008

The Google Human Editors Manual and Guidelines

Google, SEO Comments (0)

HA! Found it :) Here is the full Google Human Editors Manual and Guidelines! Its a very interesting read actually and tells you what Google human editors (apparently around 13,000+ human editors!) are looking for in oder to penalize websites listed where they should not be.

I like the final note on spam (Web Spam):

When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to
ask yourself this question: If I remove the scraped
Also, a site might legitimately redirect from one URL to
(copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is
another. For example, since Compaq and Hewlett-
there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the
Packard merged, the Compaq URL automatically
page is probably Spam.

You Can download the document here: quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf

Chris Baldwin @ March 21, 2008