The New York Times reports on the case of Pandora, the Internet radio station that has survived over 10 years of setbacks and barriers to grow the online business to the successful position it now holds. Having struggled to find investors, battling record labels over royalties and losing a large audience outside of the US due to publishing restrictions, Pandora is now attracting interest from investors and is considering to move to a public company status.

The article outlines the stages that Pandora has gone through to now be a profitable company with a bright future. It says that Pandora's success can be credited to perseverance and adaptability in the changing online market, with the support of an intensely loyal user base and a willingness to shift directions when it faced difficult times, changing from a business to consumer model, from subscription to free, and from computer to mobile (taking advantage of an iPhone app to stream Internet music to users).

Labels: internet business

The Google AdWords blog has announced a new feature to help brand advertisers who use the AdWords content network. Although most AdWords campaigns are aimed at achieving a direct response from the advertising, brand advertisers tend to use display ad formats to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy at a later date (or often a combination of the two).

Google has now added a new feature which filters out "below the fold" inventory - that is, ads that might be served up onto a webpage, but are not actually seen by the user if they don't scroll down the page far enough to see the advert. This will enable brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear as the filter allows them to choose to show ads only in places that appear on the user's screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down.

Google's blog says that with a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, it's hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear differently on each user's screen. Therefore to simplify the process, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. This statistically driven model only considers ads "above the fold" if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads.

This is an interesting development and one that should help brand advertisers monitor and control their advert performance and to get a better understanding of how well these work across different sites on the content network.

Labels: google adwords, internet advertising

Google's Matt Cutts has posted a request on his blog asking for web users to submit link spam reports on websites that appear to be using 'spammy links'. The option to submit information about spam sites has been available for some years, but it appears that Google is now making a special effort to catch up, or get ahead, of the type of link spam techniques being used (such as paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers), and so they want to combine manual reports with the new algorithms he says they are developing.

This request is likely to generate lots of submissions from website marketers that want to try to penalise websites that might be ranking ahead of them, although hopefully Google will mostly receive genuine submissions from users who know what they are looking for and will contribute to a 'clean up' of the search results!

Labels: google, links

The latest issue of the monthly Web Search & Marketing newsletter has been published for February, covering some of the recent stories on web search and online marketing trends.

This month's edition covers some more Google products, as it looks at some recent releases of services and new features. Firstly, there is a review of Google's click-to-call phone numbers, which allow advertisers to target users of Internet smartphones and so this creates new opportunities for AdWords advertisers.

This edition also looks at Google's new social networking service called "Buzz", which was launched in February but raised privacy concerns with the way it was introduced. Finally, the newsletter considers what a good month it has been for Microsoft, with the search alliance with Yahoo! being given the go-ahead, as well as the launch of its ambitious new mobile phone platform.

If you want to sign up for future issues of this newsletter, please do so by using the form at the bottom of this page. To view back issues of this regular newsletter you can see the archive by date or by subject.

Labels: newsletter

News sites, such as the BBC, are reporting on the legal case in Italy which has widespread implications for video posting sites on the Internet. An Italian court has convicted 3 Google executives of breaking Italian law by allowing the video to be posted online showing an autistic teenager being bullied.

The convictions (suspended 6 month sentences) were due to privacy violations, but the ruling has come under widespread criticism and Google has also posted a blog article regarding the decision and the implications for Internet freedom and responsibility. If firms can be held liable for every piece of content on their site they would face an impossible job of policing and vetting everything before publication, particularly where there a large sites that encourage social interaction, such as YouTube and Facebook.

Google says it will vigorously appeal the case. The BBC report says that there is no indication that a similar case could or would be brought in any other European country at the moment. However Italy does seem determined to pursue such cases and similar ones are ongoing against other firms, such as eBay, Yahoo and Facebook.

Richard Thomas, the UK's former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was "ridiculous". He is quoted as saying that "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post. I can't imagine anything similar happening in (the UK). The case wasn't brought by the Italian equivalent of the information commissioner but by criminal prosecutors and we don't know their motives".

However, the verdict is likely to have ramifications for content providers around the world. Google said at the trial that pre-screening all YouTube content was impossible and the video at the centre of the case was posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube. Italian prosecutors argued that Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online, yet Google's lawyers said that the video was removed as soon as it was brought to its attention and that the firm also provided information on who posted it. As a result four students were expelled from their school in Turin, northern Italy.

Labels: google, legal issues, privacy

MediaPost reports that Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform soon, possibly within the next month. This will be the first move towards 'monetizing' the huge volume of traffic that Twitter now generates, to create some revenue back to the business. The challenge facing Twitter is to do this in a way that won't alienate users and makes it clear that 'tweets' or tags have been sponsored or not.

This comes at a time when Twitter is now handling 50 million 'tweets' a day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest data provided by Twitter, which demonstrates the massive growth in the service, from users writing 5,000 "tweets" per day in 2007 to 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. The latest figures represent a year-on-year growth of 1,400% in the short comments being posted each day, with the current levels averaging 600 tweets per second.

Labels: social networks, twitter

Hot on the heels of Google's recent phone launch, Microsoft have also announced a new Internet-phone called Windows Phone 7. This has naturally received wide media coverage, including by the Sydney Morning Herald that reports on the radically redesigned operating system that will soon become a serious challenger to Apple's iPhone.

The new phone looks quite different to the iPhone and not as stylish, but since it has been designed from the bottom up and with experience of the existing systems in the market, it is said to seamlessly pull together content from social networking sites and other web services on a scale unseen on competing platforms. Previous Windows Mobile versions have been replaced by a completely new design that integrates Microsoft's Zune music player and the Xbox Live gaming service.

Using Microsoft's own operating system, the new phones are due to hit the market by Christmas this year. Samsung, HTC, HP, Sony Ericsson, Dell, LG and Toshiba have already signed up as early partners and this is clear competition for Google and the market leader, Apple.

Labels: microsoft, mobile search

The Google blog has announced their acquisition of Aardvark, a 'social search engine' whereby users can login to ask questions and get responses from other users. Set up by ex-Google employees, Aardvark analyzes questions to determine what they're about and then matches each question to people with relevant knowledge and interests to give users an answer quickly (stated to be within 5 minutes), either by email or through instant messaging.

As with all Google's acquisitions, they tend to spot a good opportunity and a new service that could become more mainstream in the future. You can visit the Aardvark site here: http://vark.com/ask

Labels: google, social networks

An article by Media Post assesses the potential value of a good domain name related to a brand name or search term. Based on research by domain management company Sedo, it claims that the domain name is central to brand recognition and that direct navigation to a site (where people open a browser, type in a domain name and expect to find the correct website) remains the most popular web navigation technique.

Of course, it would appear that the outcomes reported by Sedo might be biased in their favour, as they claim that people use domain names like search terms, so that rather than entering them in a search box, they enter the name in the browser. However, others may feel that the most common way people will try looking for a website or brand is to go to Google and type the name into the search box - which certainly seems to be reflected by many web stats.

The article says that Sedo claim that "domain names matching search terms that define the business can generate between 10,000 and 30,000 unique visitors monthly". They also say that these domains can lead consumers to a website much more easily then if they had to find the information through a search engine because companies have to invest a lot of money in search engine marketing, both SEO and paid clicks.

However, this appears to be research that supports a sales pitch very conveniently. Few domain names other than the most global brands or search terms would generate that level of traffic per month from people typing in the URL on spec, and in most cases a company or brand name will easily rank first on Google's search results, which makes it a convenient way for people to find the site they want.

Labels: domain names

Google has announced a new service that aims to compete in the social networking space, to take on the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The Google blog has outlined the new service, which is currently limited to Gmail users or through a mobile phone app. Initially the service is being made available to Google's existing network of contacts through Gmail although the longer-term goal is for Buzz to be a fully open and distributed platform for conversations.

Gmail users will see a new option in their mailbox which will allow them to share information with other contacts, including photos, videos and links. There is an option to share publicly or privately, although Google will also present users with recommended comments or links from other people that are deemed to be relevant. On mobile phones, Google Buzz adds the component of location to the information being shared, so that posts tagged with geographical information have an extra dimension of context.

Of course this launch will attract worldwide media coverage, as usual with any significant new service from Google, and many will see this as an attempt to directly compete with the type of services being run by Facebook, Twitter and the like. Microsoft and Yahoo also say they have been running services like this for some time, so it's nothing new, so it will be interesting to see how widely this new option takes off against the existing tools now being used.