Marketing

Competitive Intelligence and Online Marketing
There are many tools online readily available that can be easily utilized for competitive intelligence gathering. More...

Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: 3rd in a 4 part series
To start, I must issue the following notice: Because I co-founded the LinkTrust tracking platform, I'm both very excited to cover the topic of technology and aware that I must speak objectively about platform technology in general. More...

Social Networking Ad Spending to Reach $2.6 Billion
According to revised estimates by eMarketer, $1.4 billion is the expected amount to be spent on advertising on social networking sites in 2008 in the U.S., a 55% increase from 2007's $920 million figure. More...

Social Networking: Mobile and PC
Social networking has already made its mark on the traditional, PC-based Web. MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo have taken leadership positions in global markets and there is little reason to believe that the landscape will change anytime soon. More...

Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: 2nd in a 4 part series
I probably peaked your interest with part 1 when I shared with you the main benefits of getting into the lead generation business. More...

Mobile Marketing Relatively Unexplored
A recent study conducted by JupiterResearch points to the relatively unexplored nature of mobile marketing. About 20% of online advertisers are testing the mobile marketing waters. More...

Coldplay.com Sees Huge Boost in Traffic
Taking a page from Radiohead's playbook, Coldplay decided to release a single, off of their upcoming album, online for free. More...

Beijing Olympics Sparks Online Attacks
Recent figures released by MessageLabs shows that spam (which turned 30 on May 3rd) was found in 1 of every 1.36 e-mails, or at a rate of 73.5% in April, a 0.3% decline from March. More...

Africa is Far Behind in Internet Progress
Pingdom, which monitors Web sites' uptime, recently posted figures shedding some light on the state of Internet connections in Africa on its blog. Traffic and penetration were focused on. More...

Breaking the Lead Gen Barrier: Part 1 in a 4 Part Series
As the cofounder of Burstabit Media and the LinkTrust tracking and lead management platform, I come across companies all the time who are eager to start brokering leads and co-registration data rather than just sending traffic from their affiliates to their merchant's websites. More...

Obama Wins in Online Video
According to recent figures released by Nielsen Online, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has a healthy lead in the battle taking place in the realm of online video. More...

Nielsen Online: Google Stagnant
The latest figures released by Nielsen Online show that while more queries were conducted in March 2008 compared to February, Google’s share of the search pie remained the same, while Yahoo! and MSN/Windows Live grabbed bigger shares. More...

Google Leads Online Video Market
According to the most recent figures released by comScore Video Metrix, more than 10 billion online videos were viewed in the U.S. during February 2008, a 3% increase compared to January. More...

Confirmed Opt-In Liked by Consumers, Sparsely Used by Marketers
A recent online survey of 523 e-mail marketers conducted by eROI, an e-mail marketing agency, found that just 30% of the respondents indicated that they use confirmed (or double) opt-in for signing up consumers. More...

China > U.S.
While China’s economy is experiencing some form of a slowdown, it does not seem to be slowing down the growth of the country’s Internet population, which was declared to have surpassed the size of the online population in the U.S. 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...

Only 1% Say They Have Clicked on a Mobile Banner Ad
A recent study conducted by Forrester Research revealed that the mobile advertising market still has a ways to go before marketers can depend on it the way they have come to depend upon traditional Web marketing. More...

Google is Not Done Dominating the Search World
While Google remains a virtual equivalent to anything related to the word or idea of “search,” it might be easy to overlook its current moves to ratchet up its dominance both in the states and overseas. More...

Bird’s Eye View of the Web in March
Nielsen Online and comScore Media Metrix offered various rankings and data concerning the Internet, from a broader perspective More...

Online Privacy: The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) And The FTC
Online privacy concerns seem to be a very active topic in recent weeks, particularly the practice of Behavioral Targeting (BT). More...

Introducing the LinkConnector Widget, a Powerful Web 2.0 Tool for Affiliates
LinkConnector's new widget technology brings the latest developments in the online world to Affiliate Marketing. More...

iPhone, Internet Explorer Lead Browser Markets
Ireland-based StatCounter recently released browser market share figures. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) is the most popular mobile browser used for Web access in the U.S., increasing its market share by 64%, from 0.14% to 0.23% between December and March More...

Affiliate Due Diligence - You Can’t Automate Common Sense
Recently, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at the first LeadsCon meeting in Las Vegas. Our panel topic was the “Proper Role of Affiliate Marketing in Lead Generation.” More...

Engagement and Conversational Advertising On Social Networks
I came across an article on CCNMoney.com earlier this week relating to slide.com which was founded by Max Levchin. More...

U.S. Online Advertising Spending Grows Almost 19% in 2007
Recent figures released by Nielsen Monitor-Plus reveal that while U.S. Advertising Spending grew just 0.6% in 2007, Internet ad spending grew 18.9%, making it the strongest category for the year. More...

Coverage Matters Less, Lower Costs Matter More
The end of 2006 seems like a long time ago, and it is fairly obvious that the typical cell phone consumer has had a dramatic shift in expectations and tastes regarding their mobile experiences. This is reflected in the most recent “comScore Wireless Report,” which reported its findings based on the responses of more than 2,000 U.S. wireless cell phone users. More...

After Wikipedia
It should come as no surprise that the majority of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google, followed far behind by Yahoo!. This might beg the question: where do these users go afterwards? More...

Active Internet Users Disappear in February
Are people not using the Internet anymore? More...

China Blocks Google News and YouTube
China is no stranger to blocking online content, and it has had a history of fickle attitudes towards Google and its various Web services in particular. More...

Online Video Cools Off in January
The latest figures released by the comScore Video Metrix service shows that while online video in general cooled off in January from its record setting December numbers, Google video sites still held onto its commanding lead in the U.S. market. More...

ValueClick Smacked with CAN-SPAM
Picture this: you receive an email, or see a banner ad, that congratulates you for somehow being eligible to receive a free plasma TV or a free Nintendo Wii, if you would just take a few minutes to complete a survey, with no visible indication of any conditions. More...

When Are Unsolicited Mobile Messages Considered Spam?
The best and simplest answer to the title is actually quite obvious: when the recipient has no interest in the offer at hand. More...

The Future of Online Video Advertising - CPA
With the advent of companies offering video advertising, how do you determine one company from the next? If you are a Direct Response (DR) advertiser they seem to be all the same. More...

Google Wins Handily in February
According to the latest numbers released by Hitwise, Google gobbled up 66.44% of all U.S. search queries in February 2008. More...

Spyware Trickster Forced to Cough up Dollars, Information
Timothy P. Taylor was asked to pay up $4,595.36 by a U.S. District Court for the District Of Nevada, formally ending a lawsuit filed by the FTC in November 2006. More...

The Text Message Spam Problem
In excess of 1 billion text message are sent in the U.S. every day. This figure is expected to rise in the near future, which also means that the issue of text message spam will rise in prevalence. More...

Internet Audience in the U.S. is on Upward Path
There were 188.1 million Internet users in the U.S. during 2007, according to eMarketer. This reflected a growth of 3.4%. In 2008, the audience is expected to grow another 3.1% to 193.9 million, which is approximately two-thirds of the country’s total population. More...

YouTube Upgrading to Higher Resolution
While other video sharing sites, including Vimeo, Dailymotion, and the recently shuttered Stage6, have offered high quality videos, YouTube has not made any visible headway towards that end until recently. The popular online video destination was recently found to be tinkering with the quality of some of its videos. More...

Frustration With Online Sales Reps
Now that I am back from Affiliate Summit and am somewhat getting caught up on work, it’s all about follow-ups. When I was in sales, one of my first priorities would be to follow-up with as many new viable business opportunities as I could. More...

More People File Taxes Online, But Hurdles Remain
The Consumer Internet Barometer, produced by The Conference Board, recently surveyed 10,000 households (with about 70% responding) and found that 40% of respondents plan to file their taxes online this year, compared to 34% three years ago. More...

Taxes and Politics Attract Attention in January
According to recent data released by comScore Media Metrix, it seems that (as expected), last month saw Web users turning their attention to two of the sexiest online categories available: taxes and politics. More...

Mobile Phones Become Likelier Targets for Viruses
Though instances of viruses and hacking on mobile phones are rare, there is evidence and good reason to expect these attacks to rise in the future as users become more dependent on mobile phones for access to the Web, social interaction, and entertainment. More...

LeadsCon Conference April 2nd through 4th
As a multi-billion dollar subset of online advertising, lead generation is perhaps the largest and only such subset to not have its own venue. That changes six weeks from now on April 2 with LeadsCon.com. It is important for the sector to have a dedicated venue for networking, learning, and the promotion of a common agenda. More...

Writer’s Strike Helps Record Month for Online Video
The silver lining to the cloud that the recent writer’s strike has cast upon Hollywood might be the surging consumption of online video content. More...

Spam: Asia and Europe Overtake North America
The most recent figures released by enterprise IT security and control firm Sophos indicate that the U.S. remains the top spamming country in the world, followed by Russia, China (including Hong Kong), Brazil, and South Korea. More...

Online Purchases Reduce Offline Purchases
The majority of online buyers in the U.S. indicate that their online spending reduces their offline spending, according to a recent study conducted by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. More...

MySpace and Facebook Cool Off in January
According to the most recent figures released by comScore, both MySpace and Facebook saw slight declines in their unique audience from December 2007 to January 2008, although both saw growth from January 2007. More...

Podcasts Get Sexier
Recent estimates made by eMarketer peg the U.S. podcasting audience at 18.5 million in 2007. This number is expected to grow to 28.0 million in 2008, 38.0 million in 2009, 47.0 million in 2010, 56.0 million in 2011, and 65.0 million in 2012. More...

Top Online Advertisers in October
TNS Media Intelligence recently released its list of the top 50 Internet advertisers for the month of October 2007. More...

Mobile Entertainment Has a Bright Future
Worldwide revenues from mobile entertainment are expected to reach $64.8 billion by 2012, an impressive increase from 2007â€™s $20.7 billion figure. More...

WSJ.com Gives a Free Peek
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has publicly expressed the possibility that the online version of The Wall Street Journal could offer the online public its content for free. As it stands, a year’s subscription to WSJ.com costs $79, while a dual subscription to both the site and the print version costs $99 for a year. More...

The Eyes Still Have It
Whenever there’s an old standard, there are always new ones that try to take its place. The same can be said about marketing and the old standard of reach. The up-and-coming concept of “engagement” has been gaining speed, but it appears that the number of eyeballs that a campaign will reach still trumps every other draw when it comes to alluring media buyers. More...

Online Video Matures
According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the number of U.S. online users who watch videos online increased 45% from late 2006 to late 2007. In 2006, about 33% of Web users said they visited a video sharing site, compared to 48% who said the same in late 2007. More...

Mobile Search: The New Frontier
Recent figures released by The Kelsey Group expect U.S. mobile search revenues to reach $1.4 billion by 2012. In 2007 this figure was $33.2 million, and 2008 is expected to see a figure of around $102.3 million. More...

Online TV Viewers Are More Attentive
A recent study conducted by Simmons, a division of Experian Research Services, indicates that consumers who watch television content online are more attentive than their traditional TV set counterparts. More...

Landlines Disappearing
A recent survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics confirms what everyone already knew: landline telephones are slowly becoming a vestige of the past. More...

E-Mail Marketing: $2.1 Billion in 2012
According to a recent JupiterResearch report, e-mail marketing spending will grow from $1.2 billion in 2007 to $2.1 billion in 2012. More...

U.S. Internet Audience Grows in November
Of the 10 countries that Nielsen Online tracked in November, eight saw increases in their active Internet home user audience. More...

More Americans Use Cell Phones for Entertainment
About 50% more Americans are using their cell phones as entertainment devices now than they did about eight months ago. More...

Social Networks Are Sexy
A couple years ago there was widespread ambivalence concerning the real potential that online video held for financial viability. More...

Out With the Old, In With the New?
Starbucks has relied upon the tried-and-true marketing method called word-of-mouth marketing, and until recently it seemed that that was all the coffee giant needed. More...

Online Ad Spending in Canada Plays Catch Up
Superior currency strength is not Canada’s only boasting point when it comes to comparing themselves with the U.S More...

Healthy Black Friday for Online Retailers
According to recent comScore figures, consumers spent $531 million on online non-travel purchases on Black Friday, a 22% increase from last year’s figure. More...

Rainbows Are Freer For Americans
Radiohead released its latest album, “In Rainbows,” to a great deal of buzz. It was made available online for download at whatever price the consumer desired, including “0.” More...

Online Comparison Shopping Grows in Popularity
Traffic to online comparison shopping Web sites increased during the week ending November 3, 2007, compared to the week ending November 4, 2006, according to Hitwise. More...

Online Advertising to Reach $42 Billion
According to a recent report released by eMarketer, online advertising spending in the U.S. is expected to grow at a rapid pace, reaching an expected $42.0 billion by 2011, which would be equivalent to 13.3% of total media advertising spending. More...

Subject and From Lines Important for Open/Click Rates
Personalization in e-mail marketing efforts is key. Though this is logical, it might behoove marketers to remind themselves of this fact and to check to see if their e-mails appear too shady for the typical consumer’s tastes. More...

Top U.S. Local Markets
Recent figures released by Nielsen//NetRatings show a glimpse into the top U.S. local markets both in terms of total unique visitors and time spent online per visitor. More...

Managing and Minimizing Campaign Tracking Discrepancies
A common trend has emerged in recent years among campaign tracking platforms where the number of successful actions reported by the Network is typically lower than Advertiser data. We all know this difference as the... More...

Old Media Spends Big Money Online
Though print media is far from dead, there is no doubt that the Internet has taken away a good portion of its thunder. More...

Hulu Finally Creeps Out of the Shadows
NBC and News Corporation have been talking for months about a joint venture into the realm of online video. More...

Google’s SearchMash Uses Flash and Snap
For those who are unfamiliar with SearchMash, it is Google’s small, relatively unknown alternative search engine. More...

E-Mail ROI is Falling
Though the return on investment garnered from e-mail marketing operations is still healthy, there has been a downward trend in recent years More...

Spam is Huge in Q3 07
Commtouch, a company that "is dedicated to protecting the integrity of the world's most widespread form of communication, e-mail," released a report last week that indicates that spam reached a new record in the third quarter of this year. More...

NBC Dumps YouTube
During a lull, on my Monday afternoon at work, I decided to check out the latest goodies posted on YouTube by NBC. To my surprise, NBC’s YouTube channel was nowhere to be found. More...

Word of Mouth is Valued
Yes, the title of this article is obvious, but it is the focus of a recent Nielsen study. The main finding from the study was that 78% of Web users around the globe think that consumer opinions are the most effective mode of advertising. More...

Facebook Eyes the Rest of the World
Though it has been no secret that Facebook has had hopes of expanding its territory into international markets, there has been renewed buzz lately thanks to The Financial Times reiterating this on Sunday, and a comment made by Facebook to MSN. More...

Social Networking Sites Being Blocked More Often
According to online security firm ScanSafe, a third of employers are now blocking access to popular social networking sites. This is a 17% increase from last year. More...

Online Shopping Has Grown, Influenced by Social Media
A study titled “How America Searches: Online Retail” released by iCrossing on Monday is similar to a study conducted by the marketing firm in 2005, and discusses U.S. adult shopping habits. More...

Microsoft, FullTiltPoker.com Top Brands in August
Nielsen//NetRatings recently released the top brands in terms of unique visitors and time spent on the sites. Microsoft topped the list of parent companies in terms of total unique visitors in August, while FullTiltPoker.com topped the list of stickiest brands for the month. More...

Google Ready and Willing to Comply With Canada
In August, Privacy Commissioner in Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, expressed major concern over Google’s Street View venture in major Canadian cities. More...

E-Mail Ad Spending Will Lag
E-mail advertising is expected to grow from $338 million in 2006 to $616 million by 2011, reflecting growth of 82%, according to eMarketer. This sounds great until you also see that total online ad spending is expected to grow twice as fast in that time frame. More...

Ringtone Shakeup - Part 1
If asked what an unknown article in the DMConfidential might cover, longtime readers as well as significant others to writers of this publication might guess any of the following - a) Google, b) search arbitrage, or c) the ringtone... More...

Behavioral is Better Than Contextual
According to a recent study done by Forrester for RevenueScience, behavioral targeting advertising efforts are better for reaching online consumers than contextual advertising. More...

B2B Search Marketers’ Budgets Unaffected by Competition
B2B search marketers keep close watch of their competition’s activities. That, of course, is obvious. But a new study released by Business.com takes a closer look into the details and finds that though these search marketers... More...

E-Mail Sites Generate Big Revenue
According to a recent study conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings, e-mail sites are tops in terms of advertising revenue-generating Web site categories in the U.S. In July 2007, e-mail sites generated $260.4 million in ad revenue. More...

Are Your Tracking Links P3P Compliant? They should be.
To understand if you should have P3P enabled for your tracking links, first you need to know what it is. The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables websites and tracking... More...

Web Users are Promiscuous
Are Web users faithful to the sites they use? This is the question that Nielsen//NetRatings offers an answer to in their most recent month-over-month data for search, career development, and travel Web sites. The leaders... More...

Complete Mobile Phone Penetration by 2013
In a recent study published by SNL Kagan, the information and research firm indicates that 84% of the U.S. population will have a mobile phone by the end of 2007. This includes consumer, business, and double users. This figure is... More...

E-Commerce Going Strong in 2Q07
The most recent numbers released by the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce show that retail e-commerce in the U.S. had a strong second quarter this year. On a not-adjusted basis, sales totaled $31.82 billion, which... More...

Online Back-to-School Shopping
As August nears its end, swarms of college students are thinking of what they "need" to buy for the upcoming school year. The most popular items and the places where they intend to purchase them are not surprising, but this time of... More...

Strangers Are More Trustworthy Than Religious Leaders
Advertisers are trusted less than anybody besides telemarketers, so it is imperative that they find others to spread the good news about their products and services for them. This is where word-of-mouth kicks in. According to... More...

Mobile E-Mail Users Not Ideal Target for Marketers
Marketing initiatives through e-mail may be an appealing and potentially rewarding venture, but shifting over to targeting mobile e-mail users may not hold nearly as much bang for the buck. This is because of the current limits to... More...

Video Game Industry Will be a Lucrative Channel
Though there are many varying opinions of the current consoles out there, there seems to be no doubting that the gaming console industry will continue to be a financial boon for whoever can muster the courage to fight their way into... More...

Mobile Gaming Revenues on the Rise
Though North America has quite a ways to go to catch up to Asia and Europe in terms of the widespread mobile network availability, Gartner still expects big numbers for the mobile gaming sector in North America. More...

Irresponsible Marketing Hurts Trust
There are many factors that cause U.S. consumers from completing online purchases, and unwanted marketing is a big part of it. Though identity theft is the primary concern, spam and uninvited phone calls and mail are also big... More...

The Way Men Would Do It
Maxim Magazine is hardly a revered source of statistics and information for online marketers, but that didn't stop them from commissioning a study analyzing men's media tendencies. Hall & Partners conducted the study... More...

MySpace Will Enter E-Commerce Game With eBay?
CEO and cofounder of the social networking giant MySpace, Chris DeWolfe, said firmly that "We will at some point offer user-generated e-commerce transactions. So if you're on your site and you have a line of T-shirts you have... More...

Hooray for Online Video Ads
According to a report titled "Frames of Reference: Online Video Advertising, Content and Consumer Behavior," online video ads seem to be making good on its promise of good returns. More...

Online Advertising in U.K. Is Expensive
According to a recent study titled "Pan-European Online Advertising Spend" conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Europe, $10.08 billion was spent in online advertising in the 13 countries included in the IAB Europe... 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...

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...

Google Looking To Profile Online Gamers?
Google has shaken many boots in the past whenever the media picked up on a possible privacy-infringing venture the search giant was looking to take, and there may be another on the horizon. Or maybe not. More...

Broadband Users Spend A Lot of Time Online
According to Media-Screen’s "Netpop|Play" report, broadband users in the U.S. spend almost half of their spare time in an ordinary weekday online. This means that a broadband user spends about an hour and 40 minutes of their... More...

Spam Hurts: Limit Complaints to Improve Results
One of the top challenges of any coordinated e-mail marketing program is maintaining a "clean" reputation with ISPs. Indeed this task can consume so much time and energy that many companies choose to abandon e-mail... More...

Strengthen Your Subscriber Base
More important than what you communicate through your e-marketing efforts, is to whom you choose to send it. Your list of email subscribers or recipients does much more than represent a core group of current or potential... More...

Males Are Hardcore, Females Are Casual
Popcap.com, a Web site that makes various online games available to users, noticed that the vast majority of its worldwide users were female. The precise split was 76% female and 24% male. Apparently, this is not an aberration, but... More...

E-mail Lists Could Benefit From Segmentation
Recent Internet Retailer figures studied by survey software firm Vovici seem to indicate that online retailers who reach their customers through e-mail efforts could benefit from more targeted e-mail lists. 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...

Online Video Viewers Are Mature
Most people would expect younger Internet users to make up the majority of the online video viewing audience, and most people would be wrong. Recent figures point to an online video audience that has an average age of a little... More...

Google Is The Number One Brand
In another display of their worldwide domination, and in yet another Microsoft upset, Google has been found to be the most valuable brand in terms of dollar value for 2007 by research firm Millard Brown and the Financial Times. It... More...

Are You Measuring Your Business Accurately?
Back in the late 1800’s John D Rockefeller knew a lot about how Standard Oil operated. Rockefeller was trained as a bookkeeper, so monitoring numbers came easily to him. One of the more famous stories from Rockefeller is about... More...

Ad:Tech SF Party Map 2007
It's that time of year again. Time to wear your shoes out, lose your voice, and fill your head full of information. Sessions? Exhibit Hall? No, it's P-A-R-T-"Why" because it's Ad:Tech time. When it comes to parties, San Francisco rarely... More...

Video Game Ad Spend to Reach $1.9 Billion by 2011
According to a recent study released by eMarketer, worldwide video game advertising spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate of almost 23% to reach $1.938 billion by 2011. This figure was $692 million in 2006, and... More...

E-Commerce Conversions Stagnant
Besides a few stellar exceptions, online merchants are seeing very few conversions. According to two studies, conversions for retail e-commerce sites mostly fall in between 2% to 3%. More...

How to make more money with your list using behavioral targeting
For years, we’ve all heard about behavioral targeting for the web and how its going to work... but never quite does... Well, some of the techniques being used in this kind of targeting for web inventory can also.. More...

Lessons from one of the most competitive markets on the Internet
One of the most competitive markets on the Internet for a low cost, general interest product is the government grants information market. It’s filled with people looking for free money from the government, and the level of marketing... More...

Online Video Viewed More by Males
In 2007, the online audience in the U.S. will be made up of 97 million females and 91 million males. This female-dominated ratio does not hold, however, for the total online video audience. More...

Online Ads Channel Malicious Code
Finjan, an online security firm based in San Jose, California, released findings from a study of live Internet traffic in the U.K. earlier this week. The analysis, which included over 10 million unique URLs, found that about 80% of all malicious code is hosted on online advertising. More...

Google Heads into the Tube
The time has finally come for Google to fulfill all the buzz about its entrance into the television advertising game. According to sources, the search king has been testing out trial ads with a few partners and advertisers in Concord... More...

Game Console Ownership Growing
A new report released by Nielsen titled “The State of the Console” reaffirms that gaming consoles are continuing to get a firm grip on American households. This is hardly surprising given the recent buzz surrounding new... More...

Third World Countries Most Keen to Mobile Content
As strange as it sounds, a new report released by the Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience (FAME), and sponsored by Palm, indicates that mobile device users in developing countries are more eager to access content and... More...

Quality Score Released and Publisher Quality Thoughts
For the first time since the introduction of the Quality Score in August of 2005, advertisers now have a glimpse into their Ad Group’s score. Advertisers learned last week that they could enable a Quality Score column as part of a... More...

Affiliate Mudslinging - The Ringtone Flare-up
“CPA Empire and Mobile Sidewalk Team Up On Ringtone Fraud.” That headline illustrates the difference between being a company and being an affiliate. A company cannot say such things, but a one-man show whose personal branding skills might just top his abilities in search can get away with... 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...

Datran’s 2007 E-Mail Survey Findings
Datran Media, an e-mail and online marketing solutions company based in New York City, recently released their annual e-mail marketing survey, titled "The 2007 Email Marketing Survey: Looking Forward." The survey was... More...

Super Bowl Influences Online Behavior
A recent survey conducted by comScore Networks concerning this year’s Super Bowl found that 10% of respondents said that they intended to visit Web sites of Super Bowl advertisers on game day, while 11% said that they would... More...

Mobile Marketing Sees Increased Participation
Consumers, and younger people in particular, are increasing their interest and participation in mobile marketing campaigns, according to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). More...

Mobile Gaming to Exceed $6 Billion
According to iSuppli Corp., the worldwide mobile gaming industry will surpass $6.1 billion in 2010. This is a far cry from the $1.8 billion the industry realized in 2005. 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...

Search Marketing Gets More Expensive
According to the DoubleClick Performics 50 Search Unit Trends Report, search marketers saw their costs rise during the third quarter of 2006. The average cost to a search marketer who purchased a keyword for the quarter... More...

E-Mail Marketers Challenged by the Same Old Concerns
If you’re an e-mail marketer who is finding the same old concerns popping up again and again, don’t worry, because you are not alone. More...

Lead Quality: Finding the right mix between quality and volume
“How do other lead generation companies pro-actively improve their lead quality while still delivering on the growing volume demands of their clients?” More...

Attention Media Salespeople: Don’t Forget 2007
This quote from the brilliant movie about the salesmen and the hardships they endure, fully explains the importance in understanding media planning, which is true for both the buying and selling departments. It is easy for companies to... More...

What’s in a Follow-Up?
Now that Ad:Tech New York is over, the fun begins. We’re now one week past the show, and if you attended, it’s well past time for all of those dreadful follow-ups. It’s time to kick it in gear (especially if you haven’t yet) and really explore... More...

Lead Quality: “A Two Way Street”
A few months ago, I was talking about the state of online lead quality with the head of performance marketing for one of the top interactive agencies. I asked him to sum up his view on the type of relationship that lead sellers and buyers... More...

AD:TECH: A Collision of Marketing and Technology
Ad:tech is not the place to sell or pitch, but to inform and share the happenings of the fifteen billion dollar Interactive Marketing and Advertising Industry. The three-day conference and two-day expo in New York City was dedicated to the... More...

FTC Raises Fist Against ERG Ventures
About a week after Zango settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $3 million concerning its adware installation procedures, the FTC has its eyes set on a similar battle with ERG Ventures and Timothy P. Taylor, one of its... More...

Online Marketing Jobs: What You Can Earn, What You Can Learn
Folio, a B-to-B review about the magazine industry, held its annual conference in New York City last week. Among the workshops offered at the well-attended conference was, “Search-Engine Optimization as a Marketing Tool”, and the... More...

Lead Quality: Click Fraud vs. CPA Fraud
I picked up the recent copy of Business Week that had a cover story on click fraud and quickly scanned it last week. Now is it just me or can none of the major business magazines in this country resist doing a story on this topic without including the... More...

DigitalLife: Where the hard-core gamers and gadget geeks gather.
DigitalLife is “the ultimate consumer technology, gaming & entertainment event of the year”. The four-day event is dedicated to exposing the digital culture of tomorrow to the consumers of today. Products showcased include... More...

Video Games, Ads, and Nielsen
Sony’s PlayStation 3 is set to release in North America on November 17, in Japan on November 11, and in Europe during March of 2007. This is good news not only for gamers who are drooling over the highly anticipated gaming... More...

U.S. Lags Behind Europe in Mobile Web Access
On Monday, comScore Networks released its findings from the comScore Mobile Tracking Study. The results indicated that 29% of European Internet users access the Web through mobile devices on a regular basis, while only... More...

Out-of-Context the Way to Go for Ads?
A recent study conducted by BL Labs, the research arm of ad network BlueLithium, revealed some surprising information regarding behavioral ads and their performances in context and out of context. More...

The Plan or the Trash Can II: An Email Marketing Guide
The first installment of this email marketing walkthrough covered dividing your email master list into targeted subgroups. This week you can sit back, relax, and learn how to increase the open rates of your email campaigns through sender name optimization. More...

Pixsy and PureVideo Team Up
On Monday, a day that was owned by Google and YouTube’s big news, Pixsy, a “visual search” site that looks for images and videos across thousands of content providers on the Web, announced a partnership with new video search... More...

Microsoft, Ingenio to Deliver Pay-Per-Call Ads
The mobile advertising game got more interesting on Monday when Microsoft and Ingenio, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in delivering pay-per-call ads to mobile device users, announced a deal. More...

Search Engine Marketers to See Big Holiday Season
According to DoubleClick’s affiliate network arm, Performics, online marketers could be in for a huge holiday season. This is assuming that a general rule remains true to form. 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...

Google Tinkering with Sponsored Results
Would someone who never clicks on sponsored results when searching on Google be better served if those blue ads on top of the search results were moved to the right side of the page? 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...

The Plan or the Trash Can: An Email Marketing Guide
There’s no doubt that email marketing has gotten a bum rap from abusive spammers. Several thoughts, such as long prison sentences for wide scale spammers instantly come to mind in a vague jumble when this practice is... 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...

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...

Zune to Add to Apple’s Growing Headache
Apple’s dominating iPod devices have quickly grown into the face of portable music, but with recent news about Microsoft’s impending line of Zune gadgets and with the recent unveiling of SanDisk’s 8GB Sansa e280 music player, it... More...

AOL and Userplane Have a Future Together
On Monday AOL announced that it had acquired Userplane, a provider of private chat and instant messaging software for online communities. More...

Marketing to the MySpace Generation & The Economics of Social Networking
Examine the history of online social networking and the circumstances which led to the development of MySpace and its subsequent acquisition by ... More...

Futuristic Fashion Goes Viral
No matter how good (or should I say busy?) times are for professionals in the interactive sector, we can never take any status quo in our profession for granted; I believe the old adage “if you snooze, you lose” is applicable... More...

Lead Generation: Pay-Per-Action
The June 20th cocktail party for Exchange Place could have doubled as a movie set. I was an invited guest representing ICMediaDirect.com and among some advertising professionals thoroughly enjoying views of the Manhattan... More...

Gotuit Starts Video Portal with Search and Ad Implications
Gotuit Media, a video-on-demand content provider, recently unveiled Gotuit.com, which is an ad-supported broadband video portal. It hopes to use a tagging system as well as a sleek interface to give users a pleasant... More...

U.S. Still Leads ‘Dirty Dozen’ of Spam
In its most recent “Dirty Dozen” report concerning the top twelve spam-relaying countries and continents during the second quarter of 2006, threat management solutions leader Sophos indicates that the U.S., once again, is... More...

Advertisers Eyeing Podcasts
Nielsen Analytics released a report titled “The Economics of Podcasting” last week. In the report it was indicated that podcasts are garnering an increasing audience of listeners, which has caught the eyes of advertisers... More...

Microsoft to Battle iPod with Zune
Microsoft revealed the obvious, late last week, when they announced their intentions of entering the handheld entertainment market with products under a brand named “Zune.” The Zune brand is expected to be introduced next... More...

Twisting Your Keywords in the Wind
While studying the creatives of competitors throughout my years in the paid search industry, as any self-respecting SEM should, too often have I witnessed the same thing: It seems as though countless search engine advertisers use the same... More...

I’d Like to Teach the World to Blog
The Coca-Cola jingle is one of television’s classics: “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony…” Through the years its message of togetherness hasn’t lost an iota of relevance. The songwriters were alluding to elements of... More...

Google Eyeing Radio Ads
It seems that Google’s futile meddling in print advertising hasn’t perturbed their desire to expand AdWords into areas outside of the Internet. Now Google appears set to make a run at the radio advertising market... More...

Google Making Headway into Video Ads
Last week Google announced that they would begin selling click-to-play advertisements to advertisers in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. It will be a computerized auction service that will allow marketers to place these video... More...

Now I see it
I went to the Optometrist for an eye exam and to get a new prescription for contact lenses (exciting start to an article, I know). I decided to get a six month supply from my doctor, and get a six month supply from the Internet...