Posted by: Heather Green on October 03
It does pay to buy clicks, it seems!
Hitwise says it's seeing an increasing trend in the share of visits to Microsoft Live Search coming from its Cashback program. With Cashback, people get money back for clicking on and buying products offered under the Cashback name.
MSN Cashback represented 3.75% of the traffic to Live.com 11 weeks ago.
It was at 6.29% last week.
Other tidbits:
About 55% of the traffic are women.
Nearly half of the visitors were between the ages of 25 to 44
22% were 25 to 34
27% were 35 to 44.
And the majority of the visitors have a household income of under $100k.
Posted by: Heather Green on October 03
New study from UK industry analysts StrategyEye shows a slowddown in M&A and VC investments in digital media from Q2 to Q3.
The company says it tracked an 38% decline in the number of deals and an 81% decline in the value of M&A and VC investment in digital advertising, video, mobile content, gaming, social media and online media.
Venture capital activity decline:
Number of deals: 48% to 151
Value of deals: 58% to $1.64 billion
M&A activity decline:
Number of deals: 49% to 106
Value of deals: 82% to $36 billion
Posted by: Heather Green on October 03
I spoke with Tim Vanderhook, the CEO of behavioral targeting service Specific Media, who is concerned about Microsoft and Google's new browsers. He argues that people using the browsers are provided with a way to block third party cookies and pixels, effectively blocking any kind of outside advertising based on tracking and analytics services.
According to Vanderhook, the issue seems to be that after repeated times of seeing a third party pixel on a site, the browsers will ask the users if they want to block those pixels. Vanderhook argues that people will do this, because they don't understand the echosystem of third party cookies and how important they are to advertising. He also argues that it's unfair because they won't block Google or Microsoft's own cookie tracking services. Vanderhook says the capability isn't turned on yet, but that the infrastructure is laid.
I was wondering if anyone else is concerned about this or whether it sounds like a legitimate concern to you? I'm not familiar with this issue.
Posted by: Heather Green on September 30
I would have flagged this yesterday but I was out sick. We and our readers pulled together this year's Best of the Web list and the list of the top 25 Folks in Tech. (For this year, the top people in tech is an ever changing thing, as we all know!).
I also did a story about how the Web is magnifying the influence of political commentators like Jon Stewart, who made the Top 25 list. But the story is also about how people aren't simply swallowing what pundits' say. They're actively doing their own fact-checking and searching out the direct sources of information
Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 30
Jeff Jarvis posts that collections of articles can no longer tell the stories that should be told. Maybe "stories" is the wrong word. He calls for a new type of topic page, but appears to question the article-based variety we have at Business Exchange (He links to another at the New York Times, which is assembled largely by machine). He calls such topic pages "just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate."
I'd say it's early in the experiment for us. If users take these pages as their own and help to build communities around them, they hopefully will turn into something more vital than collections of articles. That said, For the last week on the road I've been lax about the pages I'm curating, especially Social Mathematical Modeling. (My original title, as you can imagine, had Numerati in it, but I guess the site-meisters deemed it too obscure and self-promotional.) There's nothing vital about an ignored page. I'd love it if you'd join me there.
I'm in Seattle, talking to folks at Microsoft Research today, and then an 8 p.m. event at Elliott Bay Books. (Please come, if you're nearby.) Flying down to SF tomorrow. I'll be talking at the Commonwealth Club Thursday p.m., at the same time as the VP debate. I can only hope that folks TiVo the debate. Otherwise, it threatens to be an uncomfortably intimate gathering. Yesterday, I was on NPR's Fresh Air.
