Yearly Archives: 2006

PaidContent has an interesting interview with Jim Voelker, CEO of InfoSpace. It covers among other things the company's merging of its search and directory and mobile divisions. Read it here and listen to it here.

An addendum to the previous post: If the social networking space is indeed saturated, it just got a little more so. Viacom has announced it could launch what seems like a "me too" social network this year that will target…

Despite the perceived success of MySpace, there are skeptics of social networking business models. BusinessWeek brings up the possibility that we're in a social networking bubble that is reaching saturation while ad models remain somewhat shaky.From the article: For many…

There continues to be business activity in the embryonic field of video game advertising. As we've reported in the past here and here, this could be an interesting area to watch because of the repeated exposure that ads could receive,…

There is so much happening (most of it interesting) in the "space" we affectionately call "Interactive Local Media" that for every post I do there could easily be five or six more. I could do nothing all day but blog…

iMedia is reporting on the brief appearance of video ads in Google AdSense. iMedia quotes a Google press statement: "Google is always considering new ways to provide value to its advertisers and we frequently run tests of potential new features…

As Mike Boland wrote earlier this week, Edgeio has launched. Here was the original posting I did a couple of weeks ago. This is a very interesting site because one can publish local classified or services listings directly there or…

I was at the Topix.net booth tonight on the exhibit hall floor of SES talking to Chris Tolles and Mike Markson about Topix and the newspaper industry. Topix is owned by KRD, Gannett and Tribune. In addition to a relatively…

I know that may be asking a lot, but time is of the essence. Lots of smart people who understand the Internet work at newspapers; they just can't get their organizations to move quickly. Among the various things that newspapers…

This morning I had the chance to catch up with Daniel Read and Ryan Massie of Ask.com, as they ran around SES answering reporter and analyst questions about the site re-launch. The site upon first glance appears to have some…

Today's MediaPost featured an article (reg. req'd) about Fox starting to use MySpace to promote a new show, "Free Ride." It had begun to cleverly "seed" the campaign by creating character profiles on MySpace last month and now there are…

Along with the launch of the new Ask.com yesterday, the company introduced an upgraded mapping product that now looks very much like Google Local and Windows Live Local. It offers aerial and "hybrid" views in addition to the standard mapping…

A new piece of research from iProspect, carried out by Jupiter says the following:Sixty-two percent of Internet users who researched products online during the holiday season used a search engine to do so, and nearly half (47 percent) of researchers…

A piece that appeared in the WSJ today (sub. req'd) cites Google CFO George Reyes' remark that Google's growth "is slowing due to the 'law of large numbers' and it will need to find new ways to boost revenue." As…

A lot is happening today. Here is a quick sampling (with additional analysis to follow).— Quarterly revenue increases for Internet search companies are outlined here. — Homestore.com has announced the acquisition of Moving.com, which it will consolidate with Homestore, HomeBuilder…

The New York Times has an interesting piece today on Google's click-to-call offering, and that of smaller companies such as eStara and Ingenio, that have offered pay-per-phone-call marketing products (the ad model built around the underlying click-to-call technology) for some…

I'm busy finishing my presentation for a panel on search engine user behavior later this afternoon at SES. But I wanted to chime in, as many others have already done, on the new Ask.com. The IAC-owned search engine has rebranded…

I was at the Newspaper Association of America's Marketing conference a couple of days ago in Orlando, where it was a humid 80 degrees. I was unfortunately only there for one day, moderating a panel on how to compete with…

I just received a briefing from Google on Page Creator, which was the "20%" pet project of Justin Rosenstein, project manager, who said he wanted to create a simple tool that would enable anyone to build a site quickly and…