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...

Procter & Gamble cutting adspend and moving it online?

It was on the WSJ a couple of days ago. P&G, a big fish in the advertising market, is rumored considering cutting ad spend this year by as much as 10%. No surprise here, considering real estate and finance are having what could be defined as a “soft” year to say the least. Apparently, retails and pharma are joining them in terms of “soft market”. More interesting, it seems that P&G is...

Facebook to borrow 100mn$?

Facebook is taking up 100mn$ to buy servers (?). And apparently it is burning at least 150mn$ per year. Noty bad for the enfant prodige company that was able to get 240mn$ at 15bn$ valuation from Microsoft. They had better figure out a way to make more money, pronto.

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...

Don’t shoot Comscore

After Google reported strong Q1 earnings, people from all around the world started shooting at Comscore. Quite wrongly, considering that Comscore numbers weren’t used in the most appropriate way. As Comscore points out in a blog post, it is necessary to compare apple to apple. And to know their product fairly well, before making any conclusions. Comscore has a good product, and tracking internet audience and...