Sponsored search and economic crisis

What we have seen so far in online advertising is a shift from brand spend to direct response spend, i.e. from banner into sponsored search, affiliate marketing and the likes. It does make complete sense. Given the though economic environment, and the pressure in companies on controlling costs while maintaining revenues, a shift from brand spend (i.e. demand generation) toward direct response (i.e. demand...

Chrome

I think Google’s browser is a good piece of software. I am using it, and find it quite cool. Not that is anything much beyond Firefox, but it’s nice to use new things. What really disturbs me is the T&C, where they state that, plain and simple, any content produced with Google browser becomes IP of Google. Quite disturbing, to be honest. It would be like BIC, the famous pen producer, claiming IP...

Wow!

Ok I am sorry and I have to apologise. Been quiet for quite a while, but have been travelling a bit, went on vacation for long and been quite busy with my work. Also, have been quite shocked at what happened recently in the world. Probably about to recover as I write. To summarize: Freedie and Fannie went “bust”. Well, they did. Lehman’s going bust, or something. Next, please. Oil down to 100$ and...

Microsoft pays you to search: the war on margins has started

Recently Microsoft has announced the Live Search Cashback initiative. An interesting product that, if successful, can have far reaching consequences. And I am eager to see how it does. Live Cashback gives you money back for shopping with selected merchants. Easy: make a search for a product (try here), select the appropriate result (or refine search by category) and you are presented with a nice page with the...

300 adnetworks in US

This is crazy! I read this number on the WSJ, if I remember correctly. I am not convinced there is enough space to nicely run 300 ad networks in the US. Probably not even in the whole world. There is probably enough room for a dozen or so. Every sort of medium sized publisher that thinks that creating and running an ad network is going to save the day should consider investing the money in enriching their content...