SMARTpages has relaunched with a new look and feel, preparing for the eventual merger of the site with RealPages.com under the unified YellowPages.com brand. The new site is a significant improvement over the user experience previously offered. FAST Search &…
I'm trying to get a bunch of things done and only have time for bullets right now: Print growth was sluggish but there was significant Q2 online newspaper revenue growth (28.6% to $500.7 million) vs. one year ago, according to…
According to MediaPost: Google and Yahoo! are attempting to purchase Amsterdam-based Trader Classified Media, which publishes 578 print guides and runs 56 Web sites with classified ads in 22 countries, according to published reports in Reuters and the London Sunday…
After an almost unprecendented frenzy of speculation Google Talk is live. What is it? It's an IM client that has VoIP (good transmission quality). You have to have a gmail account to participate. (This may help drive gmail adoption.) It's…
So here's a bit of compulsive behavior from me -- coming out of the baby zone to post. I read this piece tonight on Om Malik's blog and thought it was a very interesting and bold set of predictions about…
Following the latest wave of job "meta-search" sites (Indeed.com, SimplyHired, etc.), Business.com is launching Work.com after several months in beta. Calling itself a "premium" jobs site, Work.com's twist is that employers pay only for those leads (recruits/applicants) that click through…
I finally caught up with Jeremy Stoppelman, one of the founders of Yelp, a social networking + YP site. The site has had a much lower profile than competitors with very similar models, i.e., InsiderPages and JudysBook . Like those…
Small business Web host Affinity Internet recently launched a product called €œValueTraffic Deluxe,€ which is an upgraded version of its previously deployed, guaranteed clicks, €œValueTraffic€ product. For a flat monthly fee of US$500, the service delivers a minimum of 250…
Though still in beta, Google last night put Local on the Google.com home page. No longer will users need to go to the somewhat buried Local.Google.com, nor will local results come up irregularly and, from a user point of view,…
I cut out on SES early to head to Denver to observe a focus group conducted by our research partner ConStat, Inc. The point was to find out anecdotal information about consumer behavior, the purchase cycle for both products and…
Lots and lots of stories were written about MSN's promised PPC platform launch. Danny Sullivan's written a comprehensive overview at SEW. The most innovative dimension of the new product (beyond adding a major competitor to the marketplace) is the demographic…
Toronto-based DCCI has partnered with Ingenio to give online publishers the option to offer local phone numbers to advertisers seeking to adopt Pay per Call. Right now, the option is targeted pretty much exclusively to IYP publishers in North America.…
The conventional wisdom is that there is little or no search-engine loyalty€"Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Jeeves, InfoSpace/DogPile, Lycos, etc. are €œjust a click away€œ from Google. I hear this argument again and again -- and as a hypothetical matter it's true.…
Like Yahoo! before it, Google announced a significant increase in Q1 revenues. Profits were US$369.2 million on revenues of US$1.26 billion (vs. revenues of US$651 million in Q1 last year), beating analysts' expectations. Growth appeared to be driven in part…
Traditional media, including TV, Yellow Pages and newspapers, face a central paradox and challenge that was explored in Lincoln Millstein's keynote at Drilling Down on Local. In a very thoughtful presentation, he advanced a skeptical view of the revenue potential…
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Internet as an advertising medium has surpassed radio in the U.K. Ad spending on the Internet in 2004 was 653.3 million pounds, or US$1.2 billion, representing 3.9 percent of total advertsing in the…
There was an article today in the NYTimes about click fraud. The piece is pretty balanced: it's happening but the search engines are dealing with it. I think that's the reality in the marketplace; it's there but it's not terribly…
I'm late to the party, but results from the NextSearchSurvey, an online survey of search engine users about the current state of search and its future direction are available here. The survey was conducted from August, 2004 through November, 2004.…
Search marketing firm Oneupweb released data showing that four-keyword queries were correlated with the highest conversion rates, compared with shorter and longer strings. Over a roughly six-month period, average conversion rates for paid search ads appearing in response to those…
No doubt Google's acquisition of Urchin Software (rumoured by Battelle to be worth $30 million) was in the works for a while, but MSN's AdCenter announcement (with its enhanced analytics) might have given the deal whatchya might call a "nudge."…
