Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings?
SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches, Wikipedia owns proper nouns, and a smattering of other obvious sites own various common query categories. Interestingly, Amazon is trending upwards: whether this is due to better SEO or a broader range of products is open to debate.
Meanwhile, Amazon has acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse logistics company. Amazon has also pushed their local deal service with a $10 for $5 coupon deal. $5 leads for a local ad service is actually quite cheap, especially if the “$5″ consists of money they’ll have to spend at the same parent company, regardless. Amazon remains a few chess-moves behind local deal competitor Groupon, which recently acquired a small business credit card processing company. If Groupon is in the coupon business, that’s a meaningless gesture; if the coupon business was a way to get into the business of using software to fix problems that vex local businesses, it fits right in.
eBay Divests Rent.com
eBay has sold Rent.com to Primedia. While Rent.com is an interesting property, it’s gradually losing ground in search results. Since eBay doesn’t have a strategic focus on this kind of commerce lately, the deal makes sense.
Pew: Social Media is Not For News
Part of the problem with the news business is their obsession with building a better distribution model for news. Facebook and Twitter have built a fantastic system for sharing news, but a new Pew study reveals that most people get news from non-social sites. One easy explanation: this great medium reveals that most people aren’t interested in traditional news—the industry thrived because distribution was broken, not because it worked.
In semi-related news, AOL is launching a new iPad magazine: “Huffington.”
A Data-Driven Approach to Local Rankings
Andrew Shotland has a nice summary of statistically valid Google Places ranking strategies. Some of the heuristics are pretty simplistic—five reviews matter, four don’t—but others are clever. For example, Google Local doesn’t care much about the actual reviews, unless they’re extremely negative. That’s a good way to avoid gaming.
Free 4G from NetZero?
NetZero, the unnaturally hardy budget ISP, has launched some free 4G plans, with rapidly escalating prices for higher bandwidth. NetZero’s parent company, United Online, has a surprising amount of cash on hand, and solid earnings; they’re gradually shrinking, but it’s interesting that they’ve chosen to experiment with this. Their target market isn’t obvious, though; smartphones tend to get sold with data access, and tablets tend to get sold either with data access from the tablet owner’s smartphone account or with Wifi-only data. NetZero’s place in this system isn’t obvious.
Pew: Texting Rises Among Teens
The Pew Research Center reports that texting is up among American teens. That might not be surprising, but it’s down year-over-year in Finland and other markets, which could be a negative harbinger for American markets.
Google Continues Blog Network Crackdown
Google is still shutting down private blog networks (i.e. collections of poorly-written or obviously-spun articles). One blogger offers a list of some of the recently-hit sites, and another tries to explain why Google cracked down. And Warrior Forum has a few posts from panicked link-buyers wondering why their sites no longer rank.
Interestingly enough, blogger AffHelper claims that his site was demoted because a competitor bought links pointing to it. While this is a common hypothetical claim—and typically the main reason some people argue against “outing” sites that use black-hat tactics—this may be the first case in which someone plausibly claims that it actually happened to a specific site. Even so, the economics don’t favor outing sites: no one competitor will exact a big portion of the benefit from this.
Validated Display Ads: Micro-Significant, not Macro-Significant
Forbes is now among the sites using ComScore’s validated Campaign Essentials. ComScore put out a major PR push a few weeks ago, highlighting the fact that many banner ads aren’t loaded, and many of the ads that are loaded aren’t seen. Which is true, but not that interesting since advertisers are ultimately paying for user actions, not ad views: overall, it will mean a lower number of impressions, a commensurately higher CPM, and roughly the same level of spend and ROI. It will mean a slight shift in where ads are deployed, but even that’s easy to overstate: most of the obvious candidates for lower budgets—user-generated sites, sites with pirated content, and adult sites—already attract low CPMs. They certainly won’t “improve ROI for advertisers by approximately 68%,” though.
Google Updates
- Firefox may encrypt all Google searches which would be painful for a large number of sites. This would likely reduce the number of search referral keywords available in any given day by another 25% (accounting for Firefox users’ search proclivities and likelihood of being logged into Google already). While that’s not a complete disaster, it will slow down sites’ ability to adapt to changing search behavior.
- Google’s location-based customization is getting a little too trigger-happy by showing sub-pages for branded queries when the sub-pages have links that mention specific places.
- Google is rolling out yet another Panda update, though there’s no word on whether or not this is connected to the blog network crackdown.
- Google now integrates display ad buying with AdWords, which could encourage more synergistic ad campaigns: using display to influence searches, then capturing the effects of those searches.
Facebook Updates:
- Facebook is promising to fight back against employers demanding Facebook passwords before employment. (In a somewhat sleazy gesture, ZDNet willfully misinterpreted this as a promise that Facebook would sue people who asked for passwords, and ran that as their headline—then got another inflammatory headline out of announcing that this was not, in fact, what Facebook intended to do.)
- Facebook is pricing homepage and logout ads at $710K per day: $550K for the homepage and $160K for the logout screen.
- Facebook has lost its top position on job review site Glassdoor. The new winner? Google.
- Facebook is shrinking ad copy and image sizes on its standard ads, perhaps in an effort to push marketers towards new formats.
How Netflix Uses Its Own Servers And Amazon
ZDNet interviews Netflix’s “Cloud Architect” on how he uses Netflix’s in-house assets in combination with Amazon’s cloud services. It’s largely what one would expect, but underscores a broader point: now that cloud computing has a spot price, it’s possible to distribute calculations over time to in a far more market-aware manner.
Is Apple Really Enterprise?
One outsourced IT service provider says no. Sample error may be an issue, though.
A Skimlinks API
Skimlinks, whose business model we find confusing, has released some APIs. Given what they’re currently doing, this makes sense: as long as they can take a piece of existing transactions, they should insert themselves into those transactions as cheaply as possible.
Zynga Pays $210mm for #1 Game Maker Status
Zynga purchased OMGPOP for about $210 million, based on OMGPOP’s enormously popular “Draw Something” game. “Draw Something” is a huge success—as app store watchers relentlessly note, it’s the #1 free app, the #1 paid app, and the #1 top-grossing app. And it hit that status far faster than other products. $210mm is expensive for a single hit game, but it’s a cheap way to remain the top hitmaker.
DST Raising $1bn
DST, infamous for their very late-stage investments in Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, and Groupon, is raising $1bn. One interesting tidbit: ” DST first invested in the social-networking site in May 2009 and purchased “substantially” every Facebook common share that was traded from September 2009 to February 2010, according to the investor presentation.” This timing implies that DST might have been almost singlehandedly responsible for the growth of SecondMarket’s private company stock market, though DST might not have executed transactions through them.
Monster Tries to Sell Out
Monster’s CEO is interested in selling the company. In what is surely unrelated news, they are trotting out some of their software products to impress unspecified parties. Monster is an interesting asset, but it will be hard to sell: the most optimistic story about it is that its decline will be slower than some investors might anticipate.
What AOL Should do with AIM
AIM has just laid off a substantial number of staffers, and is now running into login issues. It’s obvious that AOL can’t do anything interesting with AIM other than monetize the pageviews. And yet, AIM has a large legacy userbase. The smartest solution: sell it to Bloomberg. AIM and Bloomberg are probably two of the top four communications tools for investment professionals (the other two being phone and email). And while AIM is expensive as a standalone product, it’s cheap as a lead generator. Bloomberg could trivially identify AIM accounts belonging to prospective Bloomberg users, at which point the only question is whether house ads are a better deal than targeted ads from third parties.