Web

Our Favorite Time of Year
This is without a doubt one of our favorite times of year. The end of the year is more than a date on a calendar. There is something truly experiential about it. This time of year simply feels unlike any other, the atmosphere tinged with optimism and a mixture of relief. It beckons for reflection, and for as fast as... More...

Are We Too Cynical or Just Jealous
One of our favorite publications is Business Insider. Every direct marketer should read them not for information in the customer acquisition space but for their headlines. It is almost unfair how catchy they make their titles and the open / clicks that come as... More...

When to Think about Your Next Business
I forget where we heard this, but a famous author and researcher asked people to go to the bookstore, either online or in that old thing called a bookstore, to count the number of titles that have the word happy in them. The question alone suggests... More...

The Average Shopper Will Spend $704.18 on Holiday Gifts and Merchandise This Year; More Shoppers Will Do Holiday Shopping Online
According to the National Retail Federation's (NRF) "2011 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey", conducted by BIGresearch, holiday shoppers in the U.S. plan to spend an average of $704.18 each on holiday gifts and seasonal merchandise this year, down slightly from last year's mark. More...

16% of Online Shoppers Always Look for a Coupon or Coupon Code
A recent poll conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs on behalf of Offers.com reveals that nearly half of U.S. adults plan to cut back on their holiday-shopping spending this year compared to last year. The poll also found that many adults aren't taking advantage of online coupons to help with their... More...

Global Online Advertising Grew 10%, While CTR Rose and CPC Fell in Q3 2011
According to IgnitionOne's "Global Online Advertising Report: Q3 2011", global online advertising spend grew 10 percent year-over-year in the third quarter. Meanwhile, separate data from Marin Software shows that advertisers increased click-through rates (CTR) while reducing their cost per click (CPC)... More...

Online Shopping Will Be More Important to Consumers This Holiday Season
According to a survey from The NPD Group, consumers will look more to online shopping this holiday season, as overall spending looks to be about the same as it was last year. More...

Ticket and Back-to-School-Related Sites Thrive in July
The latest set of data from comScore shows that consumers made their way to ticket and back-to-school-related websites in July. Individual winners included Ticketmaster, MovieTickets.com, Staples.com, Office Depot, OfficeMax and Zappos Sites. Google Sites remained the No. 1 overall Web property... More...

Brands and Performance Marketing
A handful of weeks ago, we went to a small event that featured a panel of incredibly high-powered agency holding company executives. To give a sense of scale, one of the participantsâ€™ company employs more than 1000 people, and that is in New... More...

The Internet Makes Shoppers Less Impulsive, More Social
A study from Yahoo and Universal McCann (UM) looked at the new dynamics in the path to purchase so marketers can better utilize digital media to engage shoppers. "The Long and Winding Road: Gamesmanship of Shopping" found that the growing array of online tools available to consumers have made them... More...

Warmer Weather Brings More Traffic to Travel, Home Improvement and Green Sites
The month of March meant good things for websites that had something to do with the areas outside of our homes, according to the latest figures released from comScore. More...

The Startup Dilemma
Every time we head to San Francisco, we can't help but think about the start-up scene. Where as Los Angeles is dominated by the entertainment industry and New York by finance, outside of the ever-present homeless population, the Bay Area oozes... More...

Coupons vs. Deals
The public stock markets make it very easy to separate those who had a good year from those who did not. As is the case with the... More...

Ads By... Your Company Name Here
Publishers, Network, and Advertiser. These are the essential building blocks of the performance marketing ecosystem. Publishers work with networks; networks recruit and work with... More...

What Is A Startup?
Less than a week from today a large portion of the internet advertising community will convene in New York City. It's not for the screening of Mad Men, and unlike last year it won't involve... More...

The Week in Review
Headlines from the industry. To receive daily updates please visit the Digital Moses fan page More...

The Week in Review
The Week in Review: Headlines from the week. More...

1.1 Trillion Display Ads Delivered in Q1 2010
According to the latest figures from comScore, 1.1 trillion display ads were served in the U.S. during the first three months of 2010, a significant boost from the same quarter last year. More...

Quality of Customers Service Much More Important to Online Bankers
According to comScore's recent "State of Online Banking Report," customer service for online banking is getting a lot more attention in 2010 than it was last year. More...

The week in review
Week in Review. Headlines for the week. Get Daily headlines from our facebook fan page (digital moses) More...

Display Ad Engagement Leads to More Searches
Being able to engage users who see your display ads is obviously a good thing. More...

6.7 Billion Tweets in January 2011?
According to Pingdom, Twitter handled 1.76 billion tweets in April, which reflects a 46.7 percent rise from 1.2 billion tweets in January. "Twitter is growing like crazy," according to the company, and if it keeps things up, Twitter better hope its servers are ready. More...

Week in Review
Week in Review. Headlines for the week. Get Daily headlines from our facebook fan page (digital moses) More...

Tax Sites See Boost in Traffic
As tax season nears, Internet users in the U.S. are flocking to tax-related sites, according to comScore. Travel sites also saw big increases in traffic in January. More...

Week in Review
Review of headlines in the industry More...

Size Doesn’t Matter as Much as Creativity for Rich Media Ads
According to Eyeblaster's recent "Global Benchmark Report 2009," rich media ads benefit from things other than size, though banner ads benefit from increased sizes because of increased visibility. More...

Google Top Property in September, Entertainment, Education Sites See Fall Boost
According to the latest data released by comScore's Media Metrix service, September showed a visible shift from the summertime to the fall season online. More...

Margin vs Market Share
Often topics in the business world fall out of favor once the next great mantra comes along, either replacing and/or refuting the last . One week it might be "Who Moved My Cheese?" the next "The Four Hour Work Week." Some... More...

ROI is King
According to iMedia Connections, marketers in the U.S. appear to be eyeing strategies that offer more measurable results. More...

Career Sites See Gains in January Traffic
The implications of the precipitous downturn in the U.S. economy for the Internet are many, and include a general boost in traffic for online career development Web sites, according to recent figures released by Nielsen Online. More...

Online Advertising in January
Nielsen Online recently unveiled a quick peek at the online advertising landscape in January. The business-to-business, software and Web media industries experienced big boosts in ad impressions, while some familiar companies topped the sponsored link impressions list. More...

Top Gaining Sites in January Reflect Tax Season
comScore's latest portrait of the top Web in January showed that tax and career sites experienced big boosts in traffic, while Facebook finished the month in the elite top 10 list of the biggest Web properties for the first time. More...

US Retail E-Commerce Sales Dismal in Fourth Quarter
According to comScore’s latest retail e-commerce sales figures for the U.S., the fourth quarter of 2008 was the first time the company observed a negative year-over-year percent change. More...

Spain Sees Surge in Number of Internet Users
The latest figures released by Nielsen Online show that the number of Spain’s active Internet home users in November saw a month-to-month jump of 6.37 percent in November. More...

Economic Ebola - Part 2
The Bear Stearns collapse took place in mid-March of this year, but as touched upon in Part 1, signs of its perilous fall, from almost $30 per share to its purchase price two days later at $2 per share, began clearly in... More...

Economic Ebola - Part 1
Last week, in "People versus Partners," we opened by saying, "In this decade, we have witnessed two of the most major collapses in the history of the US economy, rivaling in scope to the Great... More...

Suck Less
A little more than a year ago, while attending a real estate related conference in New York City, we listened to an enigmatic and none too optimistic professor of economics tell a room full of real estate agents that... More...

And The Results Are In
A few weeks ago we talked about how the beginning of July marks one of several important dates for those who track financial performance, and this past week, the public companies in our sector report their second quarter... More...

Don't Lose Focus
Last week, after another slight free for all in the stock market, it felt like perhaps we might have hit if not the bottom at least closer to the bottom. Looking again at the stock markets over the past week, that doesn't seem... More...

Where Is The Bottom?
If you remember back to the beginning of this year, the stock market didn't get off to a good start. Within the first three weeks, the major markets had lost almost ten-percent of their value and technology stocks in particular... More...

Search Versus Store
A couple of weeks ago, after much speculation, news came out that Google had launched its Google Health product, which as the site claims, "puts you in charge of your health information." Translated, that last part... More...

Time Warner Cable Begins Test to limit Broadband
Everyone knew something like this was coming sooner or later. Today we can all exhale, because Time Warner Cable has taken the first step towards limiting broadband access More...

Latin America’s Web Landscape
Recent figures released, by comScore World Metrix, paint a broad picture of what the Internet landscape looks like in Latin America. More...

Platform-A Leads All Ad Networks in March
Recent figures released by comScore regarding online advertising networks showed that AOL’s Platform-A ad network (which includes Advertising.com, Quigo, and Tacoda) led the pack, reaching 90.7% of the total number of Internet users in the U.S. during March 2008. More...

Asia Pacific Region Boasts Biggest Internet Audience
A recent report titled “Digital World: State of the Internet” released by comScore shows that the U.S. can only boast about 21% of the worldwide Internet audience, which is a dramatic drop from the 66% share it had in 1996 More...

U.K. Continues Strong Online Ad Spending
Online ad spending in the U.K. is expected to reach $6.4 billion in 2008, after reaching $5.3 billion in 2007, according to eMarketer. More...

Women > Men Online
The U.S. population is made up of more females (154.5 million) than males (149.4 million) in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More...

News, the Broken Variety: Huge Mergers
This episode of Broken News is brought to you by our trusted industry insider, Cauldron Larynx. Cauldron utilizes deep knowledge, deeper skills and deepest relationships to make up the most breaking and relevant news in the Affiliate Marketing sector. More...

Will 2008 Be Great?
As we wrote out our predictions for the upcoming year, one question kept creeping into our mind - "Will this year be a good one?" Saying this company might go public or this vertical might not tells the affect but not... More...

Women More Likely to Buy on Impulse Online
A recent survey conducted by GSI Commerce shows that 55% of women between the ages of 45-54 make impulse buys online, compared to 38% of men in the same age range. More...

Google, Microsoft, eBay Popular in the U.K.
Bucking a trend that usually sees a decreased day-to-day media consumption during the summer holiday season, the total online population in the U.K. actually reached its largest size ever in July. With 31.8 million unique online... More...

News, the Broken Variety: Billz
This episode of Broken News is brought to you by our trusted industry insider, Cauldron Larynx. Cauldron utilizes deep knowledge, deeper skills and deepest relationships to make up the most breaking and relevant news in the Affiliate Marketing sector. More...

Yahoo is Popular in Japan
comScore recently released its first report detailing the top Web properties and the top gaining Web properties in Japan for the month of June. The figures took into account all unique visitors age 15 and over who browsed the Internet... More...

Content is Bigger Than Search
A four-year study conducted by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) indicates that Internet users in the U.S. spend almost half of their time online viewing content. The study also found that users are spending less time on... More...

The Significance of Green for Search Engines
Green is quickly becoming a very important color for search engines. And no, this does not concern cash. More...

Internet Population to Reach 1.5 Billion by 2011
A recent report released by JupiterResearch indicates that over the next five years the worldwide online population will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.6%, which means that by 2011 there will be 1.5 billion people... More...

Top Web Properties in May
May was a month that included the beginning of the summer movie season, Mother's Day, and the start of major political debates. According to comScore Media Matrix this meant that May 2007 was a good one for movie information... More...

Going, Going, Gone.
Call it the rise and fall of an old media at the helm of new. Call it a sign that we have truly entered Web 2.0. Call it what you will, but the end of one reign and the beginning of a new took place on June 18th, 2007. That's when Yahoo... More...

Overlapping Pays Off For Advertisers
Atlas Institute, a unit of aQuantive, Inc. released a study on Monday titled "How Overlap Impacts Reach, Frequency and Conversions" which examined the impact of advertising across Web portals such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and... More...

U.K. Spends Most Time Online
A study conducted by comScore World Metrix found that Web users in the U.K. spend more time online than users from any other country in the world. Britain’s crummy weather is partially to blame. More...

Broadband Connections On The Rise
Broadband connections are expected to be more pervasive in the U.S. and across the world in the next few years. In a report titled "US Broadband Forecast, 2007 to 2012: LECs Maintain Advantage over Cable Operators in... More...

McAfee Study Finds AOL Has Safest Search Results
A recent study conducted by McAfee’s SiteAdvisor group titled "The State of Search Engine Safety" concluded that of the five largest search engines, AOL had the safest search results while Yahoo! had the most unsafe results. More...

Maps Become Hot Battleground
It seems that Google and Microsoft are taking their battle to the streets. Literally. Well, Almost. More...

Microsoft Top Parent Company in April
Although Microsoft can’t seem to lay a finger on Google when it comes to search market share, it can claim a bigger unique audience as a parent company than the search giant. In April, Microsoft led the list of the top 25... More...

Broken News - Pimps Unite!
In a recent development amongst fed-up Affiliate Managers across the major networks, they have joined forces to create their own fraternity. This "Pimp Union" as they are calling it will be "Alpha Male Epsilon. More...

All Your Base Are Belong To Porn
Good Magazine, “media for people who give a damn” according to its Web site, recently unveiled a revealing video with some revealing information about the big world of porn. More...

Intrusive Advertising = Effective Advertising
There is a myth that exists that advertising needs to be intrusive in order to be effective. While this is not an entirely true statement, in most conditions it is correct. There are two types of products advertised in our market: products in... More...

The Right (Media) Stuff
In October of last year, Yahoo took many in the ad space by surprise announcing a strategic investment in ad network and exchange Right Media, as it led a $45 million Series B round of financing. While not an... More...

Comcast Goes With Yahoo
The past week or so has been an eventful one for Yahoo!, the second most used search engine in the U.S. First it swooped up online advertising exchange Right Media, which follows on the heels of Google’s DoubleClick... More...

Online Ads Like Portals
Online ads have been good business for the big portals of the Internet, and it doesn’t seem like this will change anytime soon. The respective shares of the pie look a lot like the actual search engine rankings, which means that Google... More...

Online Banking Grows but Mobile Potential Sees Hurdles
The online banking population in the U.S. grew 9.5% to 44 million customers in 2006, according to comScore. However, this single-digit growth is significantly slower than the double-digit increases that were observed in 2005... More...

Comcast Considers Breaking Up with Google
Google edged out Microsoft to win a big AOL advertising deal in late 2005. However, it seems that Microsoft now has another opportunity to take a shot at Google, the company that is causing the most headaches for the Windows... More...

Domain Registration, Web Audience Rises
According to "The Domain Name Industry Brief, March 2007" released by VeriSign, there is now a base of 120 million registered domain names across all top-level domains (TLD). This is a 32% increase from the 2005 figure. More...

Google Gains, Yahoo Loses in January
According to recent figures released by comScore Networks, Google remains the dominant king of the search engine realm. In January of 2007, it gained 0.2% from the previous month to claim 47.5% of all search queries conducted... More...

Wireless Web Users: Who Are They?
A recent study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project gives some broad demographic information about Internet users who have surfed the Web with a wireless device as opposed to users who have not. More...

Wikipedia Now Top Ten, Needs Wikiasari’s Help
Regardless of how reliable Web users deem Wikipedia, there is little doubt that it has grown into one of the more influential and referred-to sites on the Internet today. A recent report by comScore confirms this notion, indicating that... More...

Google Being Evil in Poland?
So, what kind of beef could Google possibly have with a small group of Polish poets? The kind that’s bad enough to spur the search giant to file for legal action against them. More...

TLDs, Font Size and Your Site
It’s common sense that top-level domains (TLD) have a strong influence on domain name selections and the perceptions that are formed by consumers. Rich Brooks of flyte new media wrote an interesting, albeit "unscientific" study... More...

Commoditization of the Direct Marketing Process
You surf MySpace and in between the barrage of dating offers placed ever so conveniently that you stand a good chance of accidentally clicking, you come across a banner that those in the direct marketing space know all too well. You... More...

Portland Trail Blazers Social Networking Site Launches
The Portland Trail Blazers are a very young team in the NBA, so it makes sense that the organization is trying to create a youthful appeal across all its operations, on and off the court. The team’s new social networking initiative for... More...

Yahoo, MySpace Catching Up To Google?
Starting on Monday, Yahoo! Mail Beta began giving some users the opportunity to use an integrated version of Yahoo! Messenger right from their e-mail window, similar to how users can log on and use Google Talk directly from... More...

Birth of Web 3.0
Hard to believe, but more than four years has passed since eBay bought PayPal. In those four years, those at PayPal, and specifically, those who decided to leave PayPal have kept busy. In the Long Island of the West, Silicon... More...

MySpace Helps Out
MySpace’s huge popularity and fame has not come without a cost. As the social networking site has swelled to enormous numbers, high-profile problems involving young users have led to complaints that the company has... More...

Online News Beats Out Newspapers in Classrooms
The Carnegie-Knight Task Force released a report on the Future of Journalism Education on Monday, which indicated that 57% of teachers use online news sources with some frequency. More...

In Support of User-Generated
In 1979, a British Band named The Buggles released a song that almost all reading have heard at some point in their lives. Chances are most people haven’t seen the video, which is slightly ironic considering its status as the first... More...

E-Mail Sites Losing Their Allure to Advertisers
New numbers released by Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance show that e-mail sites received 44.2% of online display ads in December 2006. This number shows a noticeable decline from November’s 47.5% and October’s 51.1%. More...

U.S. Teens Like Social Networking
New numbers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirm the obvious: teenagers in the U.S. love their social networking sites. And, as expected, MySpace is the overwhelmingly favored site for teens when it comes... More...

Chinese Chicken and the Egg
Last year, one of the predictions we made was that someone would create the X10 equivalent for Chinese traffic. Someone would create the ad that would not only monetize any remnant but signal a new dawn of advertising. With so much... More...

Online Shoppers Were Happy This Holiday Season
A consumer survey conducted by ForeSee Results and FGI Research indicates that overall, consumers who shopped online this holiday season were happy with the top 40 retailers on the Internet. More...

DMA Reports Increased Internet and Catalog Holiday Sales
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) today released a white paper on holiday shopping reporting the average combined Internet and catalog holiday sales are 8.3 percent... More...

Google Cheating on Firefox?
Last Friday, Google’s homepage was “marred” with a huge banner recommending its users to download the “new, safer Firefox 2.0” placed at the very top of the page. Then on Monday, Google threw a slight curveball at those who closely watch the search engine’s every move when it displayed... More...

Streaming Music is Significant to Consumers
In a report about their Net Usage Index for Digital Music, Akamai Technologies, Inc. conveyed findings concerning consumer online music habits. According to the index, global digital music Web sites receive daily... More...

AOL Goes Latino
In its latest transitional move, AOL made its Spanish language portal available to Web users at no cost. The portal, called AOL Latino, was only available to subscribers who paid up to $26 per month for the service up until Monday. More...

Social Networking Sites Faring Well
American males and females between the ages of 17 and 25 agree on one thing: Facebook is engaging. The social networking site was noted as the number one site among both groups, but was more popular among females. More...

TV Suffers at the Growing Hands of Online Video
According to a study carried out by ICM, a market research company based in the U.K., and commissioned by the BCC, online video sites are taking away from the time people spend watching their television screens. Though this... More...

MySpace is the Driver, All Other Sites Are Destinations
If the Internet was a bus, MySpace would be the driver, and other Web sites would be stops that users are dropped off at. This is the basic idea behind a recent report by Hitwise. The report analyzes the traffic that big sites like... More...

MySpace Heads to Japan, Korean Portal Courting Google
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese business newspaper, News Corp. and Japanese technology giant Softbank Corp. will participate in a 50-50 joint venture to launch MySpace Japan, which hopes to be the Godzilla to... More...

Wikipedia Gets Bad Press
Antivirus vendor Sophos published a notice last Friday indicating that malicious code was being spread by way of the German version of Wikipedia. The code was found in links to a fix on the page for the “Lovesan/MSBlast... More...

Something Video This Way Comes
It’s hard to explain or put a finger on it, but we are beginning to witness something big. When it comes to just what the next big thing will be, much of the discussion to date has focused on online video. And, chances are that’s... More...

Google Bringing Negative Attention to YouTube?
Since Google’s big acquisition of YouTube on October 9, it seems that the video site has become a big-time target for angry content owners. Almost two weeks ago, the Google-owned YouTube complied with the requests of the... More...

Users Look to Search Engines for Health Information
Is online health information reliable and accurate? Doctors worry about this question, but Web users in the U.S. don’t seem to mind. A recent report titled “Online Health Search 2006” released by the Pew Internet & American Life... More...

Internet-Influenced Holiday Spending Expected to Jump
If the latest survey sponsored by the National Retail Federation (NRF) is correct, consumers are planning on giving the gift of green to U.S. retailers this holiday season. The survey, conducted by BIGresearch, indicates that the... More...

Britons Blog, Make “History” on Tuesday
According to a study called “Digi:Nation” conducted by the Harris polling institute along with the Guardian newspaper’s online edition, over a quarter of Web users in Britain have created their own blogs or Web sites. This is seen... More...

Google, YouTube Notch Deals, Make a Deal of Their Own
On Monday, Google announced two separate deals with Warner Music Group and Sony BMG Music that will allow Google Video users to view music videos from both labels at no charge, thanks to Google’s ad-supported model. The... More...

CHECKING OUT THE FLYOVER: CONQUERING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Conventional wisdom —a very fallible and flexible thing these days— maintains that culture comes out of places like Los Angeles and New York City. Since the tech boom of the 90s, those epicenters of influence have shifted to include the... More...

Future of Internet Advertising
It’s getting almost predictable, but there’s more reaffirming reports about the good health of Internet advertising. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the first six months of 2006 delivered... More...

Online Gambling Goes Bust in the U.S.
After the House of Representatives and the Senate approved the Safe Port Act on Saturday, a bill that includes the barring of U.S. banks and credit card companies from making payments to online gambling sites, the industry all... More...

Spammers Go Old School and Geeky, IM Attacks Increase
According to a recent report released by IT security firm Sophos, September was both good and bad for the battle against spam. The upside was the fact that the overall ratio of infected e-mail was at an all-time low of 0.33%, or just... More...

Online Ad Spend Up 37% in First Half of 2006
According to the latest report released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), marketers spent $7.9 billion in their Web advertising campaigns during the first half of 2006. This was a 37%... More...

Video Sharing
The uploading and sharing of video on the Internet must be a bonanza for copyright lawyers, be they in defense or prosecution of the practice. In addition to the endless supply of amateur video clips, generations of television and... More...

Social Networking Software
Is social networking software on the decline? After boasting so much success, is this seemingly lucrative software no longer on Murdock's radar? More...

Video Primer Part 1
It almost embarrasses me to join the fray of people covering the world of online video. Admittedly, though, the world of online video has begun to take shape, and quite a bit has unfolded within the past week. This week’s news... More...

Xanga Fined Record $1M by FTC
Late last week the FTC revealed that it had reached a $1 million settlement with Xanga.com, a social networking and blog Web site. The fine comes as a result of Xanga’s violation of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act... More...

Web 2.0 Growing in Popularity in U.K.
According to a report released by comScore World Metrix, user-generated content (UGC) sites have seen rapid growth in the past year in the U.K. More...

Internet Ad Spend Jumps 49 Percent
According to information released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus and Nielsen//NetRatings, Internet advertising spending increased 49% during the first half of 2006, while overall advertising spending rose 5.1%. More...

YouTube Slaps Facebook
YouTube’s latest addition will be seen as a slap in the Facebook. This is because YouTube has added a group called “Colleges on YouTube” to its list of user Groups. The page touts the new group as a place where students can... More...

MySpace to Sell Music with Help from Snocap
MySpace will begin to sell songs this fall with the help of San Francisco-based digital licensing company Snocap, which was founded by former Napster software writer Shawn Fanning. This will be great news for unsigned bands... More...

Music Downloads: Do Frogs Eat Apples?
Thank goodness Hurricane Ernesto was a dud; Floridians deserve a break from hurricanes and the rest of us are certainly not starved for hurricane coverage. As this storm’s demise became obvious the cable news teams... More...

Part 2 - Domain Name Landscape
Whenever an operation reaches a certain size, it is impossible to avoid some friction. Think of McDonalds and Wal-Mart in the offline world or Datran in the online world. The percentage of complaints each receives is low in... More...

Google and eBay Partner Up in Overseas Ads
The latest splash at the online giants’ pool party comes courtesy of Google and eBay. The two companies announced a multi-year deal on Monday that indicates a joint revenue-sharing enterprise in contextual and click-to-call ads... More...

Part 1 - Domain Name Landscape
There is a lot of land in the world. Virtually all of it is owned, be it by an individual, a corporation, or a government; a fair amount is developed, and the value of the land ranges dramatically based on its location. Some owners of... More...

Bubble 2.0 ?
Few areas have shown the growth or the robustness that lead generation has. Rising from not just relative obscurity but the dregs of credibility, the model and those in the space have shown they belong in front and among the top tier of... More...

Outlook for Web 2.0 Sites is Del.icio.us
According to a Hitwise blog post last week, Web traffic to del.icio.us has more than doubled since the social bookmarking site was purchased by Yahoo in December of 2005. More...

Mobile Internet Population Swells to 34.6 Million
Telephia released a report on Monday called the "U.S. Device Consensus Report for Q2 2006." It indicates that in June of 2006 in excess of 34.6 million consumers browsed the Internet with their mobile devices. More...

SPOTLIGHT ON: Drew Curtis of Fark.com
* Lessons from a website with 1-2 million daily visitors
* Learn how Fark established itself with no advertising
* Find out how you can help them monetize their traffic properly
More...

MySpace and Google Make $900 Million Deal
On Monday, Google garnered the favor of social networking behemoth MySpace.com by agreeing to make minimum payments of $900 million over the course of the deal that will last three years and nine months. This figure is... More...

State of Remnant Advertising
Two weeks ago, we looked at the impact that sites like MySpace have and will continue to have on those in the direct response / lead generation space. Historically, lead generation advertisers have found a way to succeed on... More...

And a Pony
A colleague in the office has hooked me on a particular phrase, “…and a Pony!” Jeff Atwood coined the phrase and first published on his Coding Horrors blog at the beginning of this year. Those who avidly follow the... More...

Eons.com Targets Social Networking at 50+ Crowd
Founder of Monster.com, Jeff Taylor, unveiled his latest project: Eons.com, a social networking site aimed at Web users aged 50 and over. More...

The Breaking Point
Reading that the mortgage banking lead generation vertical might be showing increased signs of contraction will worry some people and have others pleased. For those who make their living off the vertical, they see the potential... More...

Direct Response In A Behavioral Marketing World
If Google is the king of search, then MySpace is the king of the impression. Analysts, journalists, and all other sorts of “ists” have for years closely tracked the percentage of queries that each of the major search engines receives, but... More...

Insane in the Domain
Here are some things about domain names that I didn’t know that were mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article this week featuring a “domainologist”: 1) There are roughly 47 million registered “.coms.” 2) The letter “a” when used More...

Bet On Conviction
Another trusted officer of a publicly traded company was arrested this week, nabbed in Texas while changing planes. No, he isn’t from Enron or WorldCom and is not accused of cooking the books or embezzlement. In fact, until his... More...

Mozilla Will Immortalize Evangelical Users
Dedicated users of the Firefox Web browser will have a shot at being written into the very source code of the next version of the browser, Firefox 2.0. In observance of the Mozilla Foundation’s three-year anniversary, on July 15 the... More...

Topix, ShopLocal Offer Local Online Ads
Local news aggregator, Topix.net, and ShopLocal.com have teamed up to offer a way for big and small brands to advertise to specific localities online using a ZIP code-based system... More...

Mechanics of “The Tail” or Long Tail Economics
This week’s Digital Trends explores the phenomenon known as the Long Tail, a phrase and now book by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, first published as an article for the magazine he heads in October 2004. Part 1 of... More...

Power Law Functions - Explaining “The Tail”
At some point last year, I realized just how little I knew about the Internet. I had lived in a world that dealt originally with email advertising in newsletters to registration paths. I grew up, if you will, in a time where search had yet to prove More...

Google Checkout, Concerns Unveiled
After more than a year of anticipation, Google finally revealed Google Checkout late last week. Though the new Google product is not the rumored “GBuy” that was feared to directly compete with PayPal, it offers similar features and will... More...

Microsoft, Poker Top Nielsen//NetRatings List
After obtaining the results from the sampling activity through its MegaPanel of Web users at work and at home, Nielsen//NetRatings has released its findings for the top parent companies and stickiest brands in the U.S. for the... More...

Exitcution: The “150/100” Challenge, Part 2
Exitcution is all about how a company handles grow. Exitcution deals with not just how companies handle growth but whether they will continue to grow. It’s part strategy and a big part execution. With respect to those in the Internet... More...

Big Brands Securing .mobi Domain Names
There’s a new top-level domain in town, and its name is Dotmobi. The name is a moniker for mLTD, which stands for mobile Top Level Domain, Ltd. It was appointed to be the authorized worldwide registry for the .mobi domain by the... More...

MySpace Implements Safety Measures
Safety for young users of MySpace has always been a concern for parents and safety experts, but the issue was thrusted even further into the limelight when the mother of a Texas teenager, who claims she was raped by a man she met... More...

Those Smashing Mash-Ups
The world heeds me not when I extol the virtues of convergence. “Con-what?” It’s the coming together of technologies, don’t you know, the new wave of…And I’ll stop right there. There’s better terminology for convergence as we tangibly... More...

Mpire Looks to Enhance Online Shopping Experience
Mpire.com is being spearheaded by CEO Matt Hulett, the former president of Expedia. The new online shopping site allows users to search for items on eBay, Yahoo!, Overstock, and Craigslist all on one site. Search results can be... More...

Facebook: $750 Mil in Hand Worth More than $2 Bil in Sky
It came up conversationally, but I believe I’m the only person at my company to have firsthand experience as a user of Facebook.com. It was kind of funny to have all these online advertising professionals asking me... More...

Text Links Tips
Text links are loved by some and hated by others, but regardless of what your personal stance on the issue is text links are tools that should be, at the very least, understood... More...

TicketsNow and StubHub Cleaning up Ticket Resale
Ticket scalping has been a practice that was never highly regarded and involved many risks for buyers. However, the Internet may play a major role in altering the face of ticket reselling. Two sites offer answers to the problems... More...

SPOTLIGHT ON... Rick Raddatz from AudioGenerator
- Meet Rick Raddatz, who put audio on the web for increasing website conversion
- Find out his partnership strategy
- Discover how to make software services popular for consumers More...

SPOTLIGHT ON... Scott Rewick from Next Internet
- Learn how Scott started Netblue
- Find out what happens late at night when you're playing poker with billionaire Ebay founders
- Discover how Scott is funding companies More...

Google Checkout Foreshadowing Battle with PayPal?
Back in February there were murmurs about something called GBuy, which was supposed to be Google’s response to PayPal. Jeff Jordan, the president of eBay’s PayPal unit, said that “It's a very legitimate competitive threat. It's... More...

Television Commercials Moving to the Web
Up until recently, the basic 30-second commercial spot on television was viewed as the no-brainer knock-out punch. It was the most obvious way to make the biggest splash in the minds and behaviors of consumers. In some... More...

Facebook Becoming More Mobile
Just weeks after expanding their mostly college-focused age group to include corporate groups, Facebook recently announced plans to launch a feature that will enable users to view the site on their phones similar to the way they can... More...

Social Networking Sites on a Roll
Data released by Nielsen//NetRatings on Thursday have confirmed what everyone already knew: social networking sites are continuing their rampage through the Internet and all its users... More...

Google Calendar Makes Its Debut
After months of speculation and expectation, Google finally unveiled its Google Calendar on April 13th. Google Calendar is a free, online calendar that allows users with a Google account to schedule events, reminders, and other... More...

8bestsites.com - Robbing Peter to pay Paul
More often than not, the topics for publication come together at the last minute. Occasionally, the topic might exist beforehand, although that still doesn’t guarantee it being written before the last minute. This week’s topic falls under... More...

Free Wi-Fi Blessings for that City by the Bay
Last week the city of San Francisco accepted a joint bid from Google and Earthlink to bring universal wireless access, or “Wi-Fi” to that city by the bay. Residents will be able to log in wirelessly to the Internet from home, work... More...

Nielsen Norman Study Tracks Eyeballs
A recent study conducted by Fremont, California-based Nielsen Norman Group utilized advanced equipment that tracks the eyes of Web users in order to delve into the minds of a group of participants. The study was done to see... More...

Google and EarthLink to Unwire San Francisco
Last week, the city of San Francisco reviewed six final proposals for building a wireless network across the entire city. In the end, they chose Google and EarthLink’s concept. The team will begin discussions with San Francisco... More...

Bertelsmann Eyeing Online Networking Scene
Bertelsmann, the fourth largest media corporation in the world, thinks that it’s about time to use the Internet as a tool to further connect their older club members. Currently, the German media giant has its own Direct Group of... More...

Testing 1, 2, 3
Do you remember the story of New Coke? Its pretty interesting. In 1985 Pepsi had been beating Coca Cola in lots of taste tests. In addition, Coke's market share had been slipping over the previous 15 years. After doing a lot of research... More...

Google’s Growing Online OS
Could Google be planning an online operating system? Despite their denials just about a year ago, recent moves and rumors seem to confirm these notions. This past week Google acquired Upstartle, a small startup that offers... More...

MySpace Messenger Coming Soon?
Peter Cashmore, an entrepreneur and consultant who writes about Internet startups on his Mashable blog, recently said this: “I pointed out that when MySpace users aren’t on MySpace, they’re checking their email or chatting on... More...

Make it like Google!
Web designers - what a difficult job. Having to listen to marketers, systems, and business development folk harp on about what they want a page to look and ‘feel’ like. More...

Google To Challenge PayPal With GBuy
Last March, Google created the Google Payment Corporation. It is now being reported that Google has spent the past nine months recruiting online retailers to test a payment system named GBuy. Users will see the GBuy icon next to... More...

The Year Of The Customer
Three weeks ago, collaborator and friend Cliff Kurtzman, creator and maintainer of the wonderful Online Advertising Industry M&A Deal Flow, sent me a link to a PDF white paper created by Ken Sonenclar, Managing Director of the Digital Media... More...

Splogs Threaten Blog Appeal
Spam is quickly rearing its ugly head in the blogosphere, and it could very well turn off people who currently enjoy the value of browsing through blogs. Despite the fact that approximately 800,000 blogs are created each day, according to new... More...

Innovate Germany
Last August, The Economist released an article titled “Germany’s Surprising Economy” (August 20th, 2005) which highlights the country’s revival of its business and consumer confidence as well as domestic demand... More...

Friendster Seeking New Friends, With Little Success
In the midst of its decline, online social network Friendster has made attempts to increase its waning popularity through methods that have not been received well by some. Friendster said that the company recently kicked off a “reminder” promotion... More...

Leaked Gates Memo Signals Another “Wave”
It was 1995 when Bill Gates wrote his famous “The Internal Tidal Wave” memo, where he called Microsoft to pay heed to the emerging importance of the Internet. More...

The $100 Drink of Water
The Gold Rush is on in China. Companies are running to China faster than gold miners headed out to California back in the 1800’s. In late 1849, the California Gold Rush was in full swing. Because of poor planning, many western-bound 49ers were... More...

Trends - The Year Of The Fees
Almost a week ago, Experian made an announcement that should have sent the online ad interest more abuzz than it appears to. Last week, they announced their intent to purchase LowerMyBills for $330 million dollars with an additional $50 million.... More...

On Borrowed Time
Depending on whom you ask, the pop as we know it is living on borrowed time. The pop has already quietly been under siege. More...