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.
• 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Nick Carr, the author of The Big Switch made an opening keynote at SES New York this week. Nick Carr discussed how computer systems and software algorithms are at the center of business today, and the implications for privacy.

Nick gives a recap on his New York SES keynote talk about Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo, net neutrality, and the implications on human thinking:

The Big Switch is getting a lot of attention lately and probably a good read for online entrepreneurs and marketers. The Big Switch is currently at number 5 of the Wall Street Journal best seller list.

I will be looking out for this book at Schiphol today on my way to France :)

I recently discovered (shame on me!) that Yahoo Site Explorer allows a webmaster to actually tag an inbound link to their site as ’spam’ and reject it as being counted as inbound link weight. Well, I checked to see if Google allowed this same feature within their Google webmaster tool and fair enough they did not. Then I did some research and it turns out that this is one of the most requested features that webmasters are asking for to be added to the Google webmaster tools.

Would it not be great to have control over accepting/denying links being created to your website!? Yahoo has done it and  I am impressed. I hope Google will soon implement such a feature.

If Google is going to penalize you for ‘poor quality’ or ‘inappropriate’ inbound links, is it not fair to the webmaster community that they first allow webmasters to audit the links being created and deny them if they are not up to standard. Think about paid links which Google openly admins is ‘bad’ and can/do penalize you for it. What is to stop your business competitor ordering 100 paid links to your website from dodgy paid link sources in the hope that Google will detect this and penalize your business?

Google should give webmasters a feature to opt out links from counting in Webmaster Tools if they feel they are not of the appropriate quality. Yahoo Site Explorer has it, so maybe Google should follow suit.

Here is how Yahoo Site Explorer works.

1. Login to Yahoo Site Explorer
2. Click on your inlinks link
3. Mouse over a link and notice the “report spam” button: