Leslie Walker of the Washington Post writes up an investigation by ClickFacts that estimates approximately 35 percent of a single advertiser's paid search clicks from Google were "bogus." According to Walker's piece, 17% of the leads that came from Yahoo!…
At last year's ILM:05 event in Reston, Virginia — by all accounts the best ILM conference to date (that is, until the upcoming one :) — the final panel "The Local Landscape: A Coming Bonanza or Bubble 2.0?" featured a…
Ever since it was announced, I have been fascinated by the potential appeal of the $100 laptop developed by MIT, with the backing of Google and AMD among others. It's now in production. I've written about it a bunch in…
As we get ready for our Drilling Down event in San Jose later this month, we are also setting our sights on Directory Driven Commerce 2006, our directory industry event, which happens this Sept. 18-20 in Los Angeles. We are…
A new banner just appeared on the home page of John Battelle's site touting PPCall as more "cost-effective" than clicks. Here's the landing page. ______The ad appears now to be down.
Amazon adopts eStara's click-to-call functionality (written up in today's WSJ [sub. req'd]). The article confuses "click-to-call" and "pay-per-phone-call" (one is infrastructure; the other is revenue model). eBay has begun to do the same thing in Europe with Skype. Click-to-call facilitates…
Confirming what we already knew, research sponsored by CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, Fathom Online, SuperPages.com and Volkswagen reflect that local online marketing/classifieds are highly effective. Here's a summary of the findings in BtoBOnline.
On the same day that Nielsen releases its bullish broadband numbers, this Web version of a story to appear in next week's BusinessWeek takes a contrarian view: "Why The Web Is Hitting A Wall. U.S. Internet growth is stalling. And…
John Battelle has an interesting post about a New York public policy group that has taken out ads on Google grading New York state legislators' voting records. Political spending online is an important and growing area of geotargeted paid search…
AOL begins streaming free full episodes of "vintage" or "classic" (some might say euphemisms for old) TV shows here. Like Live 8, this could prove an important moment for online video as broadband consumers get accustomed to watching full-length TV…
After a series of pronouncements and surveys that argued broadband adoption had all but reached its apotheosis, Nielsen/NetRatings reported yesterday that broadband was still enjoying strong growth in the U.S.: The number of active broadband users from home increased ...…
"Social Search Is the New Black." People don't seem to get the joke when I say this. Anyway, "social networking" (or social search) has gone from marginal to almost mainstream in a little over a year. It's remarkable how almost…
There's tons of stuff going on over at Microsoft. I can't keep track of it all. So ... Search Engine Journal has updates here (video), here (Office Live's ad strategy) and here (MSN building ad network on internal sites).Here's the…
Om Malik reports on Google's acquisition of 3-D rendering company @Last Software, which owns SketchUp. He also asks what it means for Google. In a word: maps. Here's the company's Google Earth plug in. Google Earth already does rudimentary 3-D…
According to this Associated Press story (reg. req'd), U.S. District Judge James Ware indicated that he is going to order Google to comply with at least part of the Bush admin's request to turn over search records. Yahoo!, AOL and…
I got a chance to get a quick preview and overview of Vast.com yesterday. What is Vast? On first blush it's yet another free classifieds site, joining an already extremely crowded field. But if one looks closer it's much more…
I didn't listen in on the analyst call that McClatchy CEO Gary B. Pruitt held yesterday, but there must have been some chuckles when, according to The N.Y. Times, "Mr. Pruitt, tried to persuade his listeners that newspapers remained vital…
This N.Y. Times (reg. req'd) piece summarizes the findings of a recent DoubleClick survey of paid search and user behavior trends. Here's where you can download the report. Basically it confirms DoubleClick's finding in 2004 and separate comScore findings in…
A Reuters report today reveals that Britain's Yell Group has taken formal steps toward submitting a bid for the 60 percent stake in the Spanish publisher Telefonica Publicidad e Informacion currently owned by Telefonica. Yell has retained Goldman Sachs to…
A Web-hosting firm in the U.K., Fasthosts, conducted an online survey of 2,000 U.K. small businesses in January and February (as a marketing vehicle for its own services). Indeed, one must always take such surveys with a "grain of salt"…
