Since Facebook started giving out customized Web addresses like facebook.com/yourname last Friday, some 9.5 million people have rushed to grab their top choice.
On Twitter, public fights have broken out over so-called impostor accounts, like those that should probably be in the hands of Kanye West or Bank of America.
And somewhere out there on the Web, another new service or social network is on the rise, threatening to start yet another online land grab.
Celebrities, companies and even regular people can be excused for feeling a bit of déjà vu. Staking out and protecting their names and trademarks on the Internet has become a seemingly never-ending battle. With the rise of social networks, registering a simple Web address like pepsi.com or mileycyrus .com is no longer enough to plant one’s flag firmly in the virtual terra firma.
When domain names first became hot properties in the ’90s, it was mostly companies that worried about claiming the right addresses. But in this more narcissistic Internet era, people who were once happily anonymous view themselves as online minicelebrities with their own brands to promote.
Those whose names are not unique may run into problems in trying to manage those brands. Chris Hardwick, a stand-up comedian and host on the tech-focused cable network G4, had no trouble registering chrishardwick.com a few years ago and securing the appropriate Gmail address. But he missed out on claiming his name on MySpace to a Chris Hardwick in Ohio. Last weekend, Mr. Hardwick got home from a performance too late to get his address of choice on Facebook; he said a high school student in England appeared to have grabbed it.
“It’s like a Wild West town full of Chris Hardwicks with their hands on their mouses getting ready to draw on each other,” he said.
To some, the rules of this new game are frustratingly hazy. Facebook has invited trademark holders and celebrities who find their names are taken to fill out a complaint form on the site. It says it will resolve disputes on a case-by-case basis. While Facebook’s social network has room for many people with the same name, the new vanity addresses are being distributed on a first-come-first-served basis.
Twitter has begun verifying the identities of well-known users, giving them a badge on their pages that serves to confirm that they are who they say they are. But it has revealed little about how that process works. A Twitter spokeswoman, Jenna Sampson, said the program was a small-scale test at this point.
Tony LaRussa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, recently sued Twitter, saying it did not do enough to prevent someone from tweeting under his name. Twitter has called the lawsuit “frivolous” and says the network shuts down accounts used by known impersonators.
Another problem is that no one knows whether any of this online terrain has any lasting value — only that accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to show up at the top of the list when people search the Web. So many people are plunging in — including so-called cybersquatters who hope to profit, financially or otherwise, from Web addresses and accounts.
Larry Winget, the author of four popular books on personal finance, has been quick over the years to get control of his name on the Web and on sites like MySpace. But last weekend, a professed fan beat him to facebook.com/larrywinget and then said he would turn it over in exchange for a face-to-face dinner.
“It’s this constant effort, this sprint, to stay ahead of the technology,” Mr. Winget said. “You’ve got to hire a person just to stay on top of it.”
Companies are feeling just as much anxiety over the online name game. RCN, a cable and telephone service based in Herndon, Va., submitted a request last week to Facebook to secure facebook.com/rcn. But then Facebook said companies would need to have more than 1,000 fans on their pages to be eligible for the custom address program. RCN’s recently created page had 527 fans as of Wednesday.
RCN executives say they are frustrated with Facebook’s rules and are worried that they could lose what they suspect could be valuable real estate. Possible competitors for the address include people and organizations with those initials, along with the dreaded squatters.
“This is a new world that we are having to step into in order to protect our brand, and they did not give us a huge window of time to prepare for it,” said Ashlie Ellison, a Web producer for RCN.
Social media sites give companies new ways to promote their brands, said Howard H. Weller, a trademark lawyer at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp in New York. But he added that “these are all new avenues for abuse, and it’s more resources trademark owners need to devote to policing and enforcement.”
The Facebook Web addresses in particular could be worth nothing — Facebook has said they will not be transferable, although users could quietly hand over the passwords to their accounts.
But digital squatters are still trying, creating potential headaches for companies. For example, Dell grabbed facebook.com/dell, but Jeremy Fancher, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, registered facebook.com/dellcomputer and plans to try to sell it. A Dell spokesman declined to comment.
“I think it would be sort of funny if another computer company buys it,” Mr. Fancher said. “It all illustrates how murky the water is when signing up for these accounts.”
[the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/technology/internet/18name.html]
Friday, June 19, 2009
Microsoft Says New Google Tool Interferes With Outlook Software
Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. clashed Wednesday, as the two giants traded barbs over a new Google software offering.
Microsoft said Google's new Apps Sync software disables the search capabilities of Microsoft's popular Outlook email program.
Google acknowledged an issue with its software, which it released last week. But Google disputed the severity of the problem, and said it is working to improve its software.
Apps Sync, which is aimed at businesses, allows users to merge data between Google's email and calendar service and Outlook.
The dispute illustrates the potential for tension between the two giants as Google seeks to encroach on the software turf of Microsoft while Microsoft attacks Google's search business.
In a post on a company blog, Microsoft's Outlook product manager, Dev Balasubramanian, said Apps Sync includes a "serious bug/flaw" that disables Outlook's ability to search data like emails and contacts.
Google product manager Chris Vander Mey said in a blog post that Apps Sync disables Windows Desktop Search, a separate piece of software, because it doesn't work properly with Google's software.
A Google spokesman said users can still use the search function within Outlook to search their emails and contacts.
[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124526980217124483.html]
Microsoft said Google's new Apps Sync software disables the search capabilities of Microsoft's popular Outlook email program.
Google acknowledged an issue with its software, which it released last week. But Google disputed the severity of the problem, and said it is working to improve its software.
Apps Sync, which is aimed at businesses, allows users to merge data between Google's email and calendar service and Outlook.
The dispute illustrates the potential for tension between the two giants as Google seeks to encroach on the software turf of Microsoft while Microsoft attacks Google's search business.
In a post on a company blog, Microsoft's Outlook product manager, Dev Balasubramanian, said Apps Sync includes a "serious bug/flaw" that disables Outlook's ability to search data like emails and contacts.
Google product manager Chris Vander Mey said in a blog post that Apps Sync disables Windows Desktop Search, a separate piece of software, because it doesn't work properly with Google's software.
A Google spokesman said users can still use the search function within Outlook to search their emails and contacts.
[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124526980217124483.html]
Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas at Home
Google Inc. is revamping how it develops and prioritizes new products, giving employees a pipeline to the company's top brass amid worries about losing its best people and promising ideas to start-ups.
The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.
"We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview.
Google can no longer afford to let promising ideas fall by the wayside. The Internet search giant's once-torrid growth has slowed. At the same time, it faces fresh competition from Microsoft Corp.'s new search engine, Bing, and start-ups such as Twitter Inc., which was founded by former Google employees.
In response, Google has recently started internal "innovation reviews," formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.
Employees at their desks inside Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., shown in March 2008.
The meetings are designed to "force management to focus" on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.
The efforts have been behind several services that Google has recently unveiled, including software that allows companies to use Microsoft's Outlook email and calendar software while storing their data with Google. Microsoft said Wednesday the Google software interferes with an Outlook search function; Google disputed the severity of the problem, but said it is working to improve its software.
Another project, an imaging product that is based on facial-recognition software developed inside Google, is expected to be released this summer.
Google has also begun to give a few engineers broad leeway to start big projects of their choosing, Mr. Schmidt said. One result of this effort: Google Wave, a collaboration tool that the company previewed last month.
The moves are a shift for Google. Previously, its early-stage projects weren't systematically vetted by top executives. Employees with a new idea would lobby their bosses for resources and time. Once approved, a project could linger or die without getting much attention from senior management.
Google needs new products to jumpstart its growth. While it remains a juggernaut with one-third of all U.S. advertising dollars spent online, its year-over-year revenue growth has slowed from 56% in 2007 to 31% in 2008 and was just 6% in the first quarter of this year.
What's more, employees continue to leave Google as it evolves into a mature company with 20,000 workers. "Most product managers evaluate [whether to stay] every six months," said Chris Vander Mey, a senior Google product manager who worked on the Microsoft Office integration.
While praising how Google has supported small projects like his own, he said he still expects to leave the company over time to explore other interests.
Google has taken cracks in the past at the retention problem. In March, it repriced millions of employee stock options whose value had been wiped out as Google's share price has fallen over the past two years. The company has also begun testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews.
David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who studies technology and e-commerce companies, said prioritizing is important for Google. While Google has launched hordes of new experiments, "in the absence of focus and promotion" few have turned into blockbusters, he said.
In the case of Google Wave, the company singled out Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen to test its approach to developing ideas.
The brothers, who are based in Australia, had been working on Google Maps. On the side, they were also thinking about creating a new communication system to replace email.
Messrs. Schmidt, Page and Brin were intrigued and gave the engineers a long leash. "We said go do something really interesting and take as many resources as you need," Mr. Schmidt said. They gave the Rasmussens dozens of employees, he added, substantially more people than most early-stage projects.
To allow the duo to stick to their vision for the product, the top executives kept Wave secret from the rest of the company. Wave wasn't opened up to broader employee feedback until later in the development cycle.
Lars Rasmussen said the conditions freed his team from concerns such as fighting for engineers and removed pressure to integrate with other Google products. "We knew we had to do something different," he said.
While Google has high hopes for Wave, which combines communications like email and messaging through a new service that updates in real-time, some are skeptical. Search analyst Danny Sullivan said he was "underwhelmed" by Wave and sees the service as a feature rather than a whole new way to share information. The service is scheduled to be released to the public later this year.
Other current and former Google employees see Wave as an exception. Sean Knapp, a former Google engineer, left the company in 2007 and started Ooyala Inc., a start-up that distributes and manages advertising around online video.
Mr. Knapp said Google managers offered him the chance to start the project within the company, but he declined. He worried he wouldn't feel the same pressure to succeed. "If you're really aggressive, you want that sink or swim environment," he said.
Mr. Schmidt said it is "a fact of life" that some Google employees will ultimately choose the risk and reward of a start-up. But he added the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."
[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528387214225641.html]
The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.
"We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview.
Google can no longer afford to let promising ideas fall by the wayside. The Internet search giant's once-torrid growth has slowed. At the same time, it faces fresh competition from Microsoft Corp.'s new search engine, Bing, and start-ups such as Twitter Inc., which was founded by former Google employees.
In response, Google has recently started internal "innovation reviews," formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.
Employees at their desks inside Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., shown in March 2008.
The meetings are designed to "force management to focus" on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.
The efforts have been behind several services that Google has recently unveiled, including software that allows companies to use Microsoft's Outlook email and calendar software while storing their data with Google. Microsoft said Wednesday the Google software interferes with an Outlook search function; Google disputed the severity of the problem, but said it is working to improve its software.
Another project, an imaging product that is based on facial-recognition software developed inside Google, is expected to be released this summer.
Google has also begun to give a few engineers broad leeway to start big projects of their choosing, Mr. Schmidt said. One result of this effort: Google Wave, a collaboration tool that the company previewed last month.
The moves are a shift for Google. Previously, its early-stage projects weren't systematically vetted by top executives. Employees with a new idea would lobby their bosses for resources and time. Once approved, a project could linger or die without getting much attention from senior management.
Google needs new products to jumpstart its growth. While it remains a juggernaut with one-third of all U.S. advertising dollars spent online, its year-over-year revenue growth has slowed from 56% in 2007 to 31% in 2008 and was just 6% in the first quarter of this year.
What's more, employees continue to leave Google as it evolves into a mature company with 20,000 workers. "Most product managers evaluate [whether to stay] every six months," said Chris Vander Mey, a senior Google product manager who worked on the Microsoft Office integration.
While praising how Google has supported small projects like his own, he said he still expects to leave the company over time to explore other interests.
Google has taken cracks in the past at the retention problem. In March, it repriced millions of employee stock options whose value had been wiped out as Google's share price has fallen over the past two years. The company has also begun testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews.
David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who studies technology and e-commerce companies, said prioritizing is important for Google. While Google has launched hordes of new experiments, "in the absence of focus and promotion" few have turned into blockbusters, he said.
In the case of Google Wave, the company singled out Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen to test its approach to developing ideas.
The brothers, who are based in Australia, had been working on Google Maps. On the side, they were also thinking about creating a new communication system to replace email.
Messrs. Schmidt, Page and Brin were intrigued and gave the engineers a long leash. "We said go do something really interesting and take as many resources as you need," Mr. Schmidt said. They gave the Rasmussens dozens of employees, he added, substantially more people than most early-stage projects.
To allow the duo to stick to their vision for the product, the top executives kept Wave secret from the rest of the company. Wave wasn't opened up to broader employee feedback until later in the development cycle.
Lars Rasmussen said the conditions freed his team from concerns such as fighting for engineers and removed pressure to integrate with other Google products. "We knew we had to do something different," he said.
While Google has high hopes for Wave, which combines communications like email and messaging through a new service that updates in real-time, some are skeptical. Search analyst Danny Sullivan said he was "underwhelmed" by Wave and sees the service as a feature rather than a whole new way to share information. The service is scheduled to be released to the public later this year.
Other current and former Google employees see Wave as an exception. Sean Knapp, a former Google engineer, left the company in 2007 and started Ooyala Inc., a start-up that distributes and manages advertising around online video.
Mr. Knapp said Google managers offered him the chance to start the project within the company, but he declined. He worried he wouldn't feel the same pressure to succeed. "If you're really aggressive, you want that sink or swim environment," he said.
Mr. Schmidt said it is "a fact of life" that some Google employees will ultimately choose the risk and reward of a start-up. But he added the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."
[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528387214225641.html]
Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement
The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time. (Read "The Iran Election: Twitter's Big Moment.")
When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After the election in Iran, cries of protest from supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi arose in all possible media, but the loudest cries were heard in a medium that didn't even exist the last time Iran had an election. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)
So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection. (Read about how Twitter is changing the way we live.)
This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time:
Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter
Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!
we hear 1dead in shiraz, livefire used in other cities RT
As is so often the case in the media world, Twitter's strengths are also its weaknesses. The vast body of information about current events in Iran that circulates on Twitter is chaotic, subjective and totally unverifiable. It's impossible to authenticate sources. It's also not clear who exactly is using Twitter within Iran, especially in English. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the bulk of tweets are coming from "hyphenated" Iranians not actually in the country who are getting the word out to Western observers, rather than from the protesters themselves, who favor other, less public media. This is, after all, a country where the government once debated the death penalty for dissident bloggers. (See pictures of daily life in Iran.)
Twitter isn't a magic bullet against dictators. As tempting as it is to think of the service as a purely anarchic weapon of the masses, too distributed to be stoppable, it is theoretically feasible for a government to shut it down, according to James Cowie, CTO of Renesys, a company that collects data on the status of the Internet in real time. While Iran has a rich and diverse Internet culture, data traffic into and out of Iran passes through a very small number of channels. It's technically relatively trivial for the state to take control of those choke points and block IP addresses delivering tweets through them. The SMS network is even more centralized and structured than the Internet, and hence even easier to censor.
But there are counter-countermeasures to this kind of censorship. Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites — coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic.
Rumors of the Iranian authorities' tampering with Twitter traffic are rampant. But very little hard data is available, and so far it's not clear that they've throttled Twitter completely. Why not is a matter of great speculation. It's quite possible that the government finds Twitter useful as a way of monitoring protesters, gathering data on them and even tracking them down. There are also signs that the Iranian government may be infiltrating the Twitter network itself, manipulating it to its own advantage. This tweet went out over the network earlier today, and was itself retweeted more than 200 times:
DO NOT RT anything U read from "NEW" tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo
Twitter didn't start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there's no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. President Ahmadinejad — who happened to visit Russia on Tuesday — now finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial. Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there's no such thing.
[the article was originally published at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html]
When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After the election in Iran, cries of protest from supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi arose in all possible media, but the loudest cries were heard in a medium that didn't even exist the last time Iran had an election. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)
So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection. (Read about how Twitter is changing the way we live.)
This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time:
Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter
Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!
we hear 1dead in shiraz, livefire used in other cities RT
As is so often the case in the media world, Twitter's strengths are also its weaknesses. The vast body of information about current events in Iran that circulates on Twitter is chaotic, subjective and totally unverifiable. It's impossible to authenticate sources. It's also not clear who exactly is using Twitter within Iran, especially in English. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the bulk of tweets are coming from "hyphenated" Iranians not actually in the country who are getting the word out to Western observers, rather than from the protesters themselves, who favor other, less public media. This is, after all, a country where the government once debated the death penalty for dissident bloggers. (See pictures of daily life in Iran.)
Twitter isn't a magic bullet against dictators. As tempting as it is to think of the service as a purely anarchic weapon of the masses, too distributed to be stoppable, it is theoretically feasible for a government to shut it down, according to James Cowie, CTO of Renesys, a company that collects data on the status of the Internet in real time. While Iran has a rich and diverse Internet culture, data traffic into and out of Iran passes through a very small number of channels. It's technically relatively trivial for the state to take control of those choke points and block IP addresses delivering tweets through them. The SMS network is even more centralized and structured than the Internet, and hence even easier to censor.
But there are counter-countermeasures to this kind of censorship. Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites — coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic.
Rumors of the Iranian authorities' tampering with Twitter traffic are rampant. But very little hard data is available, and so far it's not clear that they've throttled Twitter completely. Why not is a matter of great speculation. It's quite possible that the government finds Twitter useful as a way of monitoring protesters, gathering data on them and even tracking them down. There are also signs that the Iranian government may be infiltrating the Twitter network itself, manipulating it to its own advantage. This tweet went out over the network earlier today, and was itself retweeted more than 200 times:
DO NOT RT anything U read from "NEW" tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo
Twitter didn't start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there's no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. President Ahmadinejad — who happened to visit Russia on Tuesday — now finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial. Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there's no such thing.
[the article was originally published at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html]
Ruling on NightJack author Richard Horton kills blogger anonymity
Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.
In April Mr Horton was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were unaware that he was using information about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.
His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues.
The officer also criticised and ridiculed “a number of senior politicians” and advised members of the public under police investigation to “complain about every officer . . . show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it”.
Some of the blog’s best-read sections, which on occasion attracted half a million readers a week, were anecdotes about cases on which Mr Horton had worked. The people and places were made anonymous and details changed, but they could still be traced back to real prosecutions.
In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.
The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.
The police officer, the judge said, had argued that he should not be exposed because it could put him at risk of disciplinary action for breaching regulations. But Mr Justice Eady criticised that argument as “unattractive to say the least”.
He added: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”
He added: “It would seem to be quite legitimate for the public to be told who it was who was choosing to make, in some instances quite serious criticisms of police activities and, if it be the case, that frequent infringements of police discipline regulations were taking place.”
The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.
Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for Mr Horton, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers . . . would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”. Mr Tomlinson said that Mr Horton wished to remain anonymous and had taken steps to preserve his anonymity.
But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.
Antony White, QC, for The Times, argued that there was a public interest in non-compliance by a police officer with his obligations under the statutory code governing police behaviour and also with general public law duty on police officers not to reveal information obtained in the course of a police investigation other than for performing his public duties.
Lancashire Constabulary said: “He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.”
[the article was originally published at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece]
In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.
In April Mr Horton was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were unaware that he was using information about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.
His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues.
The officer also criticised and ridiculed “a number of senior politicians” and advised members of the public under police investigation to “complain about every officer . . . show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it”.
Some of the blog’s best-read sections, which on occasion attracted half a million readers a week, were anecdotes about cases on which Mr Horton had worked. The people and places were made anonymous and details changed, but they could still be traced back to real prosecutions.
In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.
The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.
The police officer, the judge said, had argued that he should not be exposed because it could put him at risk of disciplinary action for breaching regulations. But Mr Justice Eady criticised that argument as “unattractive to say the least”.
He added: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”
He added: “It would seem to be quite legitimate for the public to be told who it was who was choosing to make, in some instances quite serious criticisms of police activities and, if it be the case, that frequent infringements of police discipline regulations were taking place.”
The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.
Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for Mr Horton, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers . . . would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”. Mr Tomlinson said that Mr Horton wished to remain anonymous and had taken steps to preserve his anonymity.
But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.
Antony White, QC, for The Times, argued that there was a public interest in non-compliance by a police officer with his obligations under the statutory code governing police behaviour and also with general public law duty on police officers not to reveal information obtained in the course of a police investigation other than for performing his public duties.
Lancashire Constabulary said: “He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.”
[the article was originally published at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece]
How MySpace fell off the pace
MySpace is looking to do an about-face.
The once-red-hot social networking site acquired three years ago by septuagenarian mogul Rupert Murdoch, which landed him on the cover of Wired magazine and won News Corp. praise for embracing the Internet ahead of its old-media rivals, has cooled considerably.
New statistics released this week show MySpace has been surpassed by rival Facebook in the U.S. market, where it once dominated, and ad revenue for the site is projected to decline.
Signaling the depth of its problems, MySpace on Tuesday said it was laying off 420 people -- nearly one out of every three employees -- as part of an aggressive restructuring that seeks to make the company smaller and more agile. The action follows a management shake-up in April, in which MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe was replaced as chief executive by Facebook's former chief operating officer, Owen Van Natta.
"Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," Van Natta said in a statement. "I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace."
Van Natta's comments underscore just how troubled Murdoch's big Internet gamble has become in the rapidly changing world of social media. Highly touted initiatives, such as MySpace Music, failed to live up to expectations, even as the site's developers constantly play catch-up to the technological innovations of others.
"MySpace ended up not being the leader that it wanted to be in the social-networking realm, on the tech front, on the ad front -- and now on the usage front," said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with researcher eMarketer.
The perceived missteps are numerous. Some observers say it clung too long to a "portal strategy," in which it sought to amass an audience around entertainment content. By contrast, Facebook maintained its focus on features that enhance the social-networking experience, such as the "News Feed" that matches the immediacy of Twitter's staccato updates.
"The speed with which a company like Facebook is able to innovate and keep things fresh is the key to survival in this space," said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a research firm specializing in social networking. "There are new things like Twitter that come along. What does Facebook do? It does Twitter . . . and it does it better."
MySpace's miscalculations have cost it ground in its competition against Facebook.
Online audience measurement firm ComScore reported MySpace attracted 70.25 million users in May -- a loss of 3.4 million people from the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Facebook nearly doubled the number of users over the same period and overtook MySpace in the U.S., with 70.28 million users.
Still, as Microsoft Research ethnographer Danah Boyd points out, with 70 million users, MySpace has hardly disappeared. "They are still as large as they were a year ago. And a year ago we were in awe of their size."
As the number of MySpace users declines, so does advertising revenue. EMarketer projects that U.S. revenue will fall 15% to $495 million in 2009 from $585 million last year.
Although News Corp. doesn't break out financial details for MySpace, revenue for the media giant's Fox Interactive Media division was down 11% in the most recent quarter from a year earlier, reflecting a double-digit drop in advertising. FIM also includes IGN Entertainment and the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, although contributions from those businesses are modest compared with those from MySpace.
Murdoch tried to reassure investors about MySpace's direction during the company's earnings call last month, declaring that the management changes at MySpace "will help it regain its momentum."
That task may be harder than it looks. The history of social networks suggests that these sites have the fleeting popularity of a trendy nightclub. The site that's recognized as the birthplace of online communities, the Well, gave way to the more broadly available America Online, which was eclipsed by Friendster -- which itself became passe.
"Each of these services supplants the one before. It takes the golden ring and everyone loves that, and they forget about the last one," said Roger L. Kay, president of research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. "MySpace made sense at a particular date, that might have been 2003. At that moment, it was the place to be. . . . Now, they have to do some major spade work on the quality of the site if they want to maintain the eyeballs."
[the article was oroginally published at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-myspace17-2009jun17,0,6726077.story]
The once-red-hot social networking site acquired three years ago by septuagenarian mogul Rupert Murdoch, which landed him on the cover of Wired magazine and won News Corp. praise for embracing the Internet ahead of its old-media rivals, has cooled considerably.
New statistics released this week show MySpace has been surpassed by rival Facebook in the U.S. market, where it once dominated, and ad revenue for the site is projected to decline.
Signaling the depth of its problems, MySpace on Tuesday said it was laying off 420 people -- nearly one out of every three employees -- as part of an aggressive restructuring that seeks to make the company smaller and more agile. The action follows a management shake-up in April, in which MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe was replaced as chief executive by Facebook's former chief operating officer, Owen Van Natta.
"Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," Van Natta said in a statement. "I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace."
Van Natta's comments underscore just how troubled Murdoch's big Internet gamble has become in the rapidly changing world of social media. Highly touted initiatives, such as MySpace Music, failed to live up to expectations, even as the site's developers constantly play catch-up to the technological innovations of others.
"MySpace ended up not being the leader that it wanted to be in the social-networking realm, on the tech front, on the ad front -- and now on the usage front," said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with researcher eMarketer.
The perceived missteps are numerous. Some observers say it clung too long to a "portal strategy," in which it sought to amass an audience around entertainment content. By contrast, Facebook maintained its focus on features that enhance the social-networking experience, such as the "News Feed" that matches the immediacy of Twitter's staccato updates.
"The speed with which a company like Facebook is able to innovate and keep things fresh is the key to survival in this space," said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a research firm specializing in social networking. "There are new things like Twitter that come along. What does Facebook do? It does Twitter . . . and it does it better."
MySpace's miscalculations have cost it ground in its competition against Facebook.
Online audience measurement firm ComScore reported MySpace attracted 70.25 million users in May -- a loss of 3.4 million people from the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Facebook nearly doubled the number of users over the same period and overtook MySpace in the U.S., with 70.28 million users.
Still, as Microsoft Research ethnographer Danah Boyd points out, with 70 million users, MySpace has hardly disappeared. "They are still as large as they were a year ago. And a year ago we were in awe of their size."
As the number of MySpace users declines, so does advertising revenue. EMarketer projects that U.S. revenue will fall 15% to $495 million in 2009 from $585 million last year.
Although News Corp. doesn't break out financial details for MySpace, revenue for the media giant's Fox Interactive Media division was down 11% in the most recent quarter from a year earlier, reflecting a double-digit drop in advertising. FIM also includes IGN Entertainment and the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, although contributions from those businesses are modest compared with those from MySpace.
Murdoch tried to reassure investors about MySpace's direction during the company's earnings call last month, declaring that the management changes at MySpace "will help it regain its momentum."
That task may be harder than it looks. The history of social networks suggests that these sites have the fleeting popularity of a trendy nightclub. The site that's recognized as the birthplace of online communities, the Well, gave way to the more broadly available America Online, which was eclipsed by Friendster -- which itself became passe.
"Each of these services supplants the one before. It takes the golden ring and everyone loves that, and they forget about the last one," said Roger L. Kay, president of research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. "MySpace made sense at a particular date, that might have been 2003. At that moment, it was the place to be. . . . Now, they have to do some major spade work on the quality of the site if they want to maintain the eyeballs."
[the article was oroginally published at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-myspace17-2009jun17,0,6726077.story]
Check it Out : Wearing the Pants in a Social Media Setting
Think you can't make any real money marketing on social networks? Think they're really only branding tools? Think again.
I recently learned about a pretty cool online retailer and manufacturer of men's clothing that's gaining real marketing ROI from targeted ads on Facebook.
The company is called Bonobos, and it sells fashionable men's pants, shorts, swimsuits and shirts that cost less than most high-end brands.
The two-year-old company began using Facebook's online sales system in March 2008 to create ads targeted to demographic groups that were likely to be interested in its product lines. The Facebook presence works "incredibly well and is very easy to use," says Dave Eisenberg, the New York City-based e-retailer/manufacturer's chief of staff and acting vice president of marketing. "We could quickly create ads and target them to different regions, age groups, college backgrounds and work environments. We basically tailor our pitch to everybody in a unique way."
Bonobos also did some super targeting: Last spring, it launched a pair of pants with a Chicago Cubs theme in royal blue and targeted it to the demo that fit Cubs fans. The result? A grand slam: Bonobos sold 100 pairs and sold out within a month.
"This was the highest sales rate compared to any other advertising campaign we'd run before," Eisenberg says.
Right Clicking
Because Facebook's ad inventory isn't particularly expensive, clicks are a lot less expensive than any other form of online advertising Eisenberg's seen.
"With Facebook, you can find cost-per-thousand impressions for less than $1 for a very targeted, highly educated clientele, and that's not easy to find around the Web," he says. The system also allows for easy tracking. When customers click on Facebook ads, for example, they're directed to Bonobos' homepage or a landing page created for the ad that has a coupon affiliated with it. Bonobos adds a tracking code to the ad as well.
This past March, the company launched several styles of pants that it believed would work well with specific schools' sports teams. A pair of light blue pants, for example, was targeted to University of North Carolina fans.
"These all performed very well," Eisenberg says, adding that Bonobos plans to create similar promotions for the fall college football season as well.
Selling Via Social Media? Go On!
What we have here is proof that social media and social networking really work, especially if you use traditional direct marketing techniques in tandem with them — and if you target your ads to the right people.
[you can read more at http://www.allaboutroimag.com/article/targeted-facebook-marketing-pays-off-upstart-mens-apparel-merchant-407580_1.html]
I recently learned about a pretty cool online retailer and manufacturer of men's clothing that's gaining real marketing ROI from targeted ads on Facebook.
The company is called Bonobos, and it sells fashionable men's pants, shorts, swimsuits and shirts that cost less than most high-end brands.
The two-year-old company began using Facebook's online sales system in March 2008 to create ads targeted to demographic groups that were likely to be interested in its product lines. The Facebook presence works "incredibly well and is very easy to use," says Dave Eisenberg, the New York City-based e-retailer/manufacturer's chief of staff and acting vice president of marketing. "We could quickly create ads and target them to different regions, age groups, college backgrounds and work environments. We basically tailor our pitch to everybody in a unique way."
Bonobos also did some super targeting: Last spring, it launched a pair of pants with a Chicago Cubs theme in royal blue and targeted it to the demo that fit Cubs fans. The result? A grand slam: Bonobos sold 100 pairs and sold out within a month.
"This was the highest sales rate compared to any other advertising campaign we'd run before," Eisenberg says.
Right Clicking
Because Facebook's ad inventory isn't particularly expensive, clicks are a lot less expensive than any other form of online advertising Eisenberg's seen.
"With Facebook, you can find cost-per-thousand impressions for less than $1 for a very targeted, highly educated clientele, and that's not easy to find around the Web," he says. The system also allows for easy tracking. When customers click on Facebook ads, for example, they're directed to Bonobos' homepage or a landing page created for the ad that has a coupon affiliated with it. Bonobos adds a tracking code to the ad as well.
This past March, the company launched several styles of pants that it believed would work well with specific schools' sports teams. A pair of light blue pants, for example, was targeted to University of North Carolina fans.
"These all performed very well," Eisenberg says, adding that Bonobos plans to create similar promotions for the fall college football season as well.
Selling Via Social Media? Go On!
What we have here is proof that social media and social networking really work, especially if you use traditional direct marketing techniques in tandem with them — and if you target your ads to the right people.
[you can read more at http://www.allaboutroimag.com/article/targeted-facebook-marketing-pays-off-upstart-mens-apparel-merchant-407580_1.html]
IAB Proposes New In-Game Ad Measurement Guidelines
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a new draft of its in-game ad measurement guidelines yesterday. The release of the document, available on the IAB's site, begins a public comment period during which buyers and sellers will weigh in on proposed definitions and recording methods for PC, console, and Web-based game ad impressions.
In addition to providing a methodology for counting those impressions, the guidelines create a glossary of in-game advertising terms. These include "cool off period," which is similar in concept to frequency capping, and "occlusion," a visual obstruction to an ad. The document was released yesterday during the IAB Marketplace: Games event.
Little communication has come from the IAB's in-game advertising committee since it issued a Game Ad State of the Union report in the fall of 2007.
For logo-based ads, or ads containing a textual message, the document states an impression counts once a user has viewed an ad for a cumulative 10 seconds. However each fractional exposure has to be at least 0.5 seconds. The cumulative 10 second impression was first established by Massive several years ago, then became generally accepted in the industry.
"Ultimately this is something that the IAB put together to help sell in-game," said Dino Mytides, director, new media at Interpret LLC a measurement and market research firm that concentrates on the entertainment, media, and technology sectors. "It won't likely stay like this forever, but for now [the cumulative 10 seconds] is definitely where it should be."
(the article was originally published at http://www.clickz.com/3634095)
In addition to providing a methodology for counting those impressions, the guidelines create a glossary of in-game advertising terms. These include "cool off period," which is similar in concept to frequency capping, and "occlusion," a visual obstruction to an ad. The document was released yesterday during the IAB Marketplace: Games event.
Little communication has come from the IAB's in-game advertising committee since it issued a Game Ad State of the Union report in the fall of 2007.
For logo-based ads, or ads containing a textual message, the document states an impression counts once a user has viewed an ad for a cumulative 10 seconds. However each fractional exposure has to be at least 0.5 seconds. The cumulative 10 second impression was first established by Massive several years ago, then became generally accepted in the industry.
"Ultimately this is something that the IAB put together to help sell in-game," said Dino Mytides, director, new media at Interpret LLC a measurement and market research firm that concentrates on the entertainment, media, and technology sectors. "It won't likely stay like this forever, but for now [the cumulative 10 seconds] is definitely where it should be."
(the article was originally published at http://www.clickz.com/3634095)
Digital spending to fuel slower media growth - PwC
*Global spending growth seen accelerating in 2012-2013
*Digital growth seen taking share from non-digital forms
*US digital ad growth seen growing to 25 pct of total
By Gina Keating
LOS ANGELES, June 16 (Reuters) - Global spending on entertainment and media will reach $1.6 trillion in 2013 at a relatively sedate 2.7 percent annual average growth rate with growth in digital content offsetting declines in traditional media revenue models, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said on Tuesday.
The migration to digital entertainment will accelerate as companies seek efficiencies in advertising and distribution in a downturn and consumers want greater control and higher value, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013, released on Tuesday.
The report also showed declines in consumer and ad spending in some areas through 2011, with healthy growth returning in 2012-2013, and media companies struggling to attract revenue from fragmented and mobile audiences.
The U.S. entertainment and media market will ultimately grow at a 1.2 percent average annual rate to $495 billion in 2013, with Internet access and Internet ad sales leading the way, the five-year forecast for the media sector showed.
Growth of digital segments will sharply outpace the rest of the industry during the downturn and recovery, with digital revenues taking share from non-digital, the report showed.
Revenue declines throughout the forecast period were forecast for TV advertising, consumer and educational book and magazine publishing, recorded music, and newspaper publishing.
Overall U.S. advertising spending was expected to decline by a 1.7 percent annual average to $174 billion in 2013 from $189 billion in 2008, while global advertising in 2011 will be 13.3 percent lower than in 2008, the report said.
"The current decline in revenues is not because of declining demand," Bill Cobourn of PricewaterhouseCoopers' media and entertainment practice said. "In fact, demand for
(entertainment and media) appears to be increasing."
Mobile and digital platforms globally will expand at an average annual rate of 12.2 percent to reach $387 billion by 2013 while non-digital forms grow at a 1.2 percent annual average, the report said.
U.S. digital spending will rise to 25 percent of total industry revenues in 2013, from 17 percent in 2008, the report showed. Advertisers also will shift toward new media, boosting Internet advertising to 19 percent of U.S. advertising by 2013, from 13 percent in 2008, the report showed.
(you to read more at http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSN1524587120090616)
*Digital growth seen taking share from non-digital forms
*US digital ad growth seen growing to 25 pct of total
By Gina Keating
LOS ANGELES, June 16 (Reuters) - Global spending on entertainment and media will reach $1.6 trillion in 2013 at a relatively sedate 2.7 percent annual average growth rate with growth in digital content offsetting declines in traditional media revenue models, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said on Tuesday.
The migration to digital entertainment will accelerate as companies seek efficiencies in advertising and distribution in a downturn and consumers want greater control and higher value, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013, released on Tuesday.
The report also showed declines in consumer and ad spending in some areas through 2011, with healthy growth returning in 2012-2013, and media companies struggling to attract revenue from fragmented and mobile audiences.
The U.S. entertainment and media market will ultimately grow at a 1.2 percent average annual rate to $495 billion in 2013, with Internet access and Internet ad sales leading the way, the five-year forecast for the media sector showed.
Growth of digital segments will sharply outpace the rest of the industry during the downturn and recovery, with digital revenues taking share from non-digital, the report showed.
Revenue declines throughout the forecast period were forecast for TV advertising, consumer and educational book and magazine publishing, recorded music, and newspaper publishing.
Overall U.S. advertising spending was expected to decline by a 1.7 percent annual average to $174 billion in 2013 from $189 billion in 2008, while global advertising in 2011 will be 13.3 percent lower than in 2008, the report said.
"The current decline in revenues is not because of declining demand," Bill Cobourn of PricewaterhouseCoopers' media and entertainment practice said. "In fact, demand for
(entertainment and media) appears to be increasing."
Mobile and digital platforms globally will expand at an average annual rate of 12.2 percent to reach $387 billion by 2013 while non-digital forms grow at a 1.2 percent annual average, the report said.
U.S. digital spending will rise to 25 percent of total industry revenues in 2013, from 17 percent in 2008, the report showed. Advertisers also will shift toward new media, boosting Internet advertising to 19 percent of U.S. advertising by 2013, from 13 percent in 2008, the report showed.
(you to read more at http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSN1524587120090616)
Google's Grab for the Display Ad Market
For all its success selling text ads alongside search results, Google (GOOG) can't seem to make a go of it anywhere else in the ad world. In January, it shut down a two-year-old operation that sold print ads in newspapers. A few weeks later it abandoned an effort to buy and sell radio spots. And a TV ad project has been slow-going. To make matters worse, the economy has hit Google's mainstay search ads: First-quarter revenue growth of 6%, though better than many companies in the recession, is far below its high double-digit gains of years past.
In its hunt for new growth, the search giant is redoubling efforts to grab a bigger piece of the largest online ad market it doesn't control: display ads, the pictorial banners and videos that account for more than a third of the $40 billion online ad market. "Google has won the search battle, so its whole future is display," says Jay Sears, executive vice-president for strategic products and business development with online ad firm ContextWeb.
Google faces a tough challenge. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN have a huge lead in display ads, largely because they can put ads on their own pages of content, like Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Google hopes to place more display ads on its YouTube site as well as on thousands of partner sites, from small blogs to The New York Times.
MATCHING ADS TO BUYERS
But it aims to do more than simply help BMW, say, plaster brand ads on car videos or car sites. The fastest-growing kind of display ads, called performance ads, work more like search. They allow advertisers to use data analysis and user-tracking technologies to match ads more closely to likely buyers and measure mouse clicks and other actions so advertisers pay only when ads deliver. Google spies an opportunity to apply its mathematical wizardry to make those ads even more effective. The idea is to make display ads useful knowledge instead of visual clutter. "It's like search—matching people with information they want," says Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology. "It just happens to be promotional."
This summer, Google will begin demonstrating what may be its most potent weapon in this emerging battle: an overhauled version of the advertising exchange that it picked up in the $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick last year. Ad exchanges are sort of like stock exchanges for online ads. Web sites put ad space up for auction, and ad agencies, armed with demographic and behavioral data about the people who visit those sites, bid to place ads for their clients' campaigns. Yahoo, Microsoft, and others also run exchanges.
Until now, Google's and DoubleClick's ad-placement systems used different software, so ad agencies had to cobble together programs to place, monitor, and measure ads. In the revamped exchange, they'll be able to use the two systems seamlessly, making ad buys simpler. At the same time, Google is pushing Web publishers, which have been wary of putting prime ad space on the exchange for fear of turning it into a low-value commodity, to pony up more space. In return, Google is expected to give Web publishers more control over pricing and who can bid on the space.
Google will also help advertisers and agencies buy ads more easily and quickly: When ad space with price and audience demographics matches those advertisers set for a particular ad, the spot runs instantly. "The exchange will allow Google to make a go of it in display," says Michael Hayes, executive vice-president and managing director of digital for ad agency Initiative. "It really turns the business model on its head."
The exchange is part of Google's overriding goal to make display ads, which can be expensive to create and complex to manage, so easy that even the smallest businesses can use them. "Google's vision is to grow the pie for everybody," says Neal Mohan, Google's director of display products. For instance, Google introduced a free Display Ad Builder last fall that lets anyone use simple building blocks to create an ad.
(you could read more at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_25/b4136052151611.htm)
In its hunt for new growth, the search giant is redoubling efforts to grab a bigger piece of the largest online ad market it doesn't control: display ads, the pictorial banners and videos that account for more than a third of the $40 billion online ad market. "Google has won the search battle, so its whole future is display," says Jay Sears, executive vice-president for strategic products and business development with online ad firm ContextWeb.
Google faces a tough challenge. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN have a huge lead in display ads, largely because they can put ads on their own pages of content, like Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Google hopes to place more display ads on its YouTube site as well as on thousands of partner sites, from small blogs to The New York Times.
MATCHING ADS TO BUYERS
But it aims to do more than simply help BMW, say, plaster brand ads on car videos or car sites. The fastest-growing kind of display ads, called performance ads, work more like search. They allow advertisers to use data analysis and user-tracking technologies to match ads more closely to likely buyers and measure mouse clicks and other actions so advertisers pay only when ads deliver. Google spies an opportunity to apply its mathematical wizardry to make those ads even more effective. The idea is to make display ads useful knowledge instead of visual clutter. "It's like search—matching people with information they want," says Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology. "It just happens to be promotional."
This summer, Google will begin demonstrating what may be its most potent weapon in this emerging battle: an overhauled version of the advertising exchange that it picked up in the $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick last year. Ad exchanges are sort of like stock exchanges for online ads. Web sites put ad space up for auction, and ad agencies, armed with demographic and behavioral data about the people who visit those sites, bid to place ads for their clients' campaigns. Yahoo, Microsoft, and others also run exchanges.
Until now, Google's and DoubleClick's ad-placement systems used different software, so ad agencies had to cobble together programs to place, monitor, and measure ads. In the revamped exchange, they'll be able to use the two systems seamlessly, making ad buys simpler. At the same time, Google is pushing Web publishers, which have been wary of putting prime ad space on the exchange for fear of turning it into a low-value commodity, to pony up more space. In return, Google is expected to give Web publishers more control over pricing and who can bid on the space.
Google will also help advertisers and agencies buy ads more easily and quickly: When ad space with price and audience demographics matches those advertisers set for a particular ad, the spot runs instantly. "The exchange will allow Google to make a go of it in display," says Michael Hayes, executive vice-president and managing director of digital for ad agency Initiative. "It really turns the business model on its head."
The exchange is part of Google's overriding goal to make display ads, which can be expensive to create and complex to manage, so easy that even the smallest businesses can use them. "Google's vision is to grow the pie for everybody," says Neal Mohan, Google's director of display products. For instance, Google introduced a free Display Ad Builder last fall that lets anyone use simple building blocks to create an ad.
(you could read more at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_25/b4136052151611.htm)
Facebook to Begin Mediating Intractable Web Name Disputes
As has been widely noted in the blogosphere this week, Friday night Facebook will begin allowing users to register their own plain-language Facebook domain names, like facebook.com/bits.
Until now, Facebook’s profile pages were delineated by an awkward string of letters and numbers (”http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500019730&”), which isn’t handily printed on business cards and doesn’t play well in search engines like Google.
Anticipating a frenetic land rush for the best names, Facebook says it will assign the new addresses on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting Friday at midnight, Eastern time. It is allowing trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks and says it will internally mediate all disputes.
Which may not stop things from getting ugly.
Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been in the thick of quarrels over Web site names for more than a decade and has watched companies and lawyers generate waves of lawsuits over coveted URLs. Things became so ugly that in 1999, it began requiring Web site registrants to agree to participate in binding arbitration if any third party asserted a claim over the Web address in question.
Discussing the challenges ahead for Facebook, Tim Cole, Icann’s chief registrar liaison, said that even careful mediation processes will not prevent skirmishes from breaking out, and wondered if Facebook knew what it was getting itself into.
“This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving,” Mr. Cole said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened here.”
The creativity of Facebook users, said Mr. Cole (a member of Facebook himself), should not be underestimated. “When someone registers something like ‘Facebook.com/MicrosoftSucks,’ what happens then?” He added that Facebook itself could come under legal fire by an aggrieved party who is not interested in waiting for a perceived trademark infringement to be resolved.
“Unless they have a really distinctive way to prevent abuses from arising, I have to believe disputes will arise fairly quickly as soon as people start registering names,” he said.
(the article was oringinally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/facebook-to-begin-mediating-intractable-web-name-disputes/)
Until now, Facebook’s profile pages were delineated by an awkward string of letters and numbers (”http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500019730&”), which isn’t handily printed on business cards and doesn’t play well in search engines like Google.
Anticipating a frenetic land rush for the best names, Facebook says it will assign the new addresses on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting Friday at midnight, Eastern time. It is allowing trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks and says it will internally mediate all disputes.
Which may not stop things from getting ugly.
Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been in the thick of quarrels over Web site names for more than a decade and has watched companies and lawyers generate waves of lawsuits over coveted URLs. Things became so ugly that in 1999, it began requiring Web site registrants to agree to participate in binding arbitration if any third party asserted a claim over the Web address in question.
Discussing the challenges ahead for Facebook, Tim Cole, Icann’s chief registrar liaison, said that even careful mediation processes will not prevent skirmishes from breaking out, and wondered if Facebook knew what it was getting itself into.
“This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving,” Mr. Cole said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened here.”
The creativity of Facebook users, said Mr. Cole (a member of Facebook himself), should not be underestimated. “When someone registers something like ‘Facebook.com/MicrosoftSucks,’ what happens then?” He added that Facebook itself could come under legal fire by an aggrieved party who is not interested in waiting for a perceived trademark infringement to be resolved.
“Unless they have a really distinctive way to prevent abuses from arising, I have to believe disputes will arise fairly quickly as soon as people start registering names,” he said.
(the article was oringinally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/facebook-to-begin-mediating-intractable-web-name-disputes/)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Political Cues in China Web Filter
BEIJING - Web-filtering software that the Chinese government will require on all new personal computers includes data files containing political keywords and Web addresses, suggesting it could block more than just pornography, say people who have studied the program.
A notice sent to PC makers last month said they must include the software with all new PCs shipped in China as of July 1. Chinese officials and the main developer of the software have said the purpose of the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, is to enable parents to prevent their children from viewing online pornography. But foreign industry officials and free-speech advocates have criticized the plan as an effort by Beijing to expand its censorship powers.
Isaac Mao, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said Green Dam data files have a broad range of political content, "much more than Falun Gong," the banned spiritual group.
Mr. Mao, who has seen the program's coding, said the words in the lists aren't necessarily blocked by the software. He said the blocking will appear inconsistent to users because the program includes mechanisms that activate and deactivate various functions. The software also appears to communicate with a centralized server, he said.
Shi Zhao, a prominent Beijing blogger, said he found data files with Chinese phrases such as "6-4 massacre" -- a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989 -- and "the celebration of Tibetan people."
Keyword documents in the software related to political content "are very big -- much, much bigger than those related to pornographic content," Mr. Shi said.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issued the Green Dam requirement, didn't respond to requests to comment.
Wang Jingcheng, deputy general manager of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co., the developer responsible for Green Dam's keyword technology, declined to comment on reports the software blocks political content. He said earlier that it would block content "according to the law."
Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the primary developer of Green Dam, said the software serves no purpose other than filtering pornography. He said Jinhui compiled and maintains the list of blocked Web sites. "I know what is on my own blacklist," he said. Mr. Zhang declined to share the contents of the list of blocked sites, arguing that doing so would "promote" the Web sites.
Industry officials have also expressed concerns that the software could expose computers to viruses, or worse. Researchers at the University of Michigan, in a preliminary investigation, found programming errors creating "serious vulnerabilities that allow any Web site the user visits to take control of the PC," said J. Alex Halderman, a professor involved in the tests.
The government continued its defense of the software requirement on Thursday. State-run broadcaster China Central Television publicized a newspaper report that said a "vast number of parents and experts welcome the preinstalled green Internet surfing software."
But commentaries in prominent publications have expressed other views. On the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, a Peking University journalism professor, Xie Xinzhou, said blocking and filtering content shows the government is "treating all Internet users as children."
(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124474567529507107.html)
A notice sent to PC makers last month said they must include the software with all new PCs shipped in China as of July 1. Chinese officials and the main developer of the software have said the purpose of the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, is to enable parents to prevent their children from viewing online pornography. But foreign industry officials and free-speech advocates have criticized the plan as an effort by Beijing to expand its censorship powers.
Isaac Mao, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said Green Dam data files have a broad range of political content, "much more than Falun Gong," the banned spiritual group.
Mr. Mao, who has seen the program's coding, said the words in the lists aren't necessarily blocked by the software. He said the blocking will appear inconsistent to users because the program includes mechanisms that activate and deactivate various functions. The software also appears to communicate with a centralized server, he said.
Shi Zhao, a prominent Beijing blogger, said he found data files with Chinese phrases such as "6-4 massacre" -- a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989 -- and "the celebration of Tibetan people."
Keyword documents in the software related to political content "are very big -- much, much bigger than those related to pornographic content," Mr. Shi said.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issued the Green Dam requirement, didn't respond to requests to comment.
Wang Jingcheng, deputy general manager of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co., the developer responsible for Green Dam's keyword technology, declined to comment on reports the software blocks political content. He said earlier that it would block content "according to the law."
Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the primary developer of Green Dam, said the software serves no purpose other than filtering pornography. He said Jinhui compiled and maintains the list of blocked Web sites. "I know what is on my own blacklist," he said. Mr. Zhang declined to share the contents of the list of blocked sites, arguing that doing so would "promote" the Web sites.
Industry officials have also expressed concerns that the software could expose computers to viruses, or worse. Researchers at the University of Michigan, in a preliminary investigation, found programming errors creating "serious vulnerabilities that allow any Web site the user visits to take control of the PC," said J. Alex Halderman, a professor involved in the tests.
The government continued its defense of the software requirement on Thursday. State-run broadcaster China Central Television publicized a newspaper report that said a "vast number of parents and experts welcome the preinstalled green Internet surfing software."
But commentaries in prominent publications have expressed other views. On the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, a Peking University journalism professor, Xie Xinzhou, said blocking and filtering content shows the government is "treating all Internet users as children."
(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124474567529507107.html)
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Affluent Set Gets Selective
Affluent Internet users are more active than ever on PCs and mobile devices -- but their spending zeal has been somewhat tempered by the recession, according to an analysis of recent data by eMarketer.
The number of "affluents" continues to grow, even in a severe recession. In March, 50.1 million people in households with incomes of $100,000 or more were online, up 3.4 percent from March 2008, per comScore.
In 2009, affluent households are evaluating future purchases carefully and have reined in spending. Investment strategies have switched to preservation of assets rather than acquiring new ones. Global sales of luxury goods are predicted to slide 10 percent in 2009 to $201 billion, according to Bain & Co. However, the habits and patterns acquired since the start of the recession are not expected to quickly revert to normal.
Luxury brand marketers must stay top-of-mind with wealthy Internet users by offering superior customer service, personalized products and exclusive offers and invitations.
Other marketers hoping to entice affluent consumers that are "trading down" must raise the bar in their online efforts, not by advertising so much as taking care to explain how their products or services fit in with the affluent lifestyle.
(the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i4fb04ccd3a536c41bb519e44d941f41b)
Google Unveils a Conversation Service
Google Inc. previewed a new communications service that combines features of email, instant-messaging and document-sharing to facilitate multiperson conversations online.
The Google Wave service caps a years-long project to come up with a way to break down the barriers between different types of online communication services, said Lars Rasmussen, the Google engineer who led the development of the service along with his brother, Jens Rasmussen.
The service, which won't be open to the public for several months, will allow users to start a conversation, called a "wave," and to invite their contacts to join it. Any member of the wave can put photos, notes or other content into the group, which updates in near-real time.
People see an "in-box" with the most recent waves they have joined and whether others have added any new notes or content to them. They can click to scroll through the wave and see what content has been added to it.
Dozens of Internet companies, including Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are racing to come up with new methods for sharing and organizing online information.
Google, which announced the new service at its developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, envisions Wave as not only a way to share messages with friends and colleagues, but also to share and access a variety of information online. For instance, a user could create a wave that is an article he or she wrote and then invite people to read and comment on it.
Mr. Rasmussen said it is too early to tell how consumers will use Wave, but he expects that the various applications and services Google hopes developers will build on top of it will be a big draw. Videogame developers could build a game that began as a wave, for example, and Google will allow other Web sites to embed waves into their Web sites.
He added that Google hasn't thought much about how the service could generate revenue. "One of the great luxuries of Google is that we get to not think about that yet," he said.
(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124353647910863557.html)
The Google Wave service caps a years-long project to come up with a way to break down the barriers between different types of online communication services, said Lars Rasmussen, the Google engineer who led the development of the service along with his brother, Jens Rasmussen.
The service, which won't be open to the public for several months, will allow users to start a conversation, called a "wave," and to invite their contacts to join it. Any member of the wave can put photos, notes or other content into the group, which updates in near-real time.
People see an "in-box" with the most recent waves they have joined and whether others have added any new notes or content to them. They can click to scroll through the wave and see what content has been added to it.
Dozens of Internet companies, including Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are racing to come up with new methods for sharing and organizing online information.
Google, which announced the new service at its developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, envisions Wave as not only a way to share messages with friends and colleagues, but also to share and access a variety of information online. For instance, a user could create a wave that is an article he or she wrote and then invite people to read and comment on it.
Mr. Rasmussen said it is too early to tell how consumers will use Wave, but he expects that the various applications and services Google hopes developers will build on top of it will be a big draw. Videogame developers could build a game that began as a wave, for example, and Google will allow other Web sites to embed waves into their Web sites.
He added that Google hasn't thought much about how the service could generate revenue. "One of the great luxuries of Google is that we get to not think about that yet," he said.
(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124353647910863557.html)
Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends With a Bing
“Why don’t you Bing it?”
A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire.
That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.
Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.
“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”
Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that more directly connotes search.
“Bing has no equity; it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”
Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.
Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Wednesday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.”
Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”
(the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/internet/29bing.html?ref=technology)
A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire.
That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.
Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.
Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.
Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.
The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.
And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”
Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.
Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.
“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”
Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that more directly connotes search.
“Bing has no equity; it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”
Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.
Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Wednesday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.”
Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”
(the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/internet/29bing.html?ref=technology)
McAfee Lists Most Dangerous Search Terms
A report from McAfee that lists what it considers "The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms" includes a lot of terms that may surprise you.
The news comes shortly after a report from Panda Security revealed that malware writers have become adept at search engine optimization and are even building their own search engines. The McAfee report covers only legitimate search engines.
Users searching for downloadable content -- especially screen savers, music lyrics, and free digital music -- are at risk of downloading malware instead, the study concluded. The survey covered over 2,600 popular keywords from a wide variety of sources for the U.S. and from Google Zeitgeist for international search.
For each keyword, the company examined the safety of search results on the first five pages of the following five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Ask, and AOL for a total of 25 pages of results.
The McAfee study also touts two of its free services, SiteAdvisor (software that rates the riskiness of search engine links) and the Cybercrime Response Unit (which helps victims contact financial institutions and law enforcement).
The company counted the number of items marked dangerous (red or yellow) by SiteAdvisor and divided that by the total number of results to produce two numbers: the most risky page in all the results, and the average risk across the 25 pages. Across all results, the average risk was 1.7 percent and the maximum risk averaged out to 10 percent.
SiteAdvisor tracks the following risks: downloads, browser exploits, e-mail registration forms and ease of unsubscribing, phishing (define), excessive popups, and links to other risky sites. Sites that fail one or more of these tests get a red rating, and sites that "merit caution before using" get a yellow rating. Green ratings go to sites with no risk or only "very minor" risks.
It would have been interesting to compare the relative safety of these five search engines, but that was not the purpose of the study, said Shane Keats, McAfee research analyst, in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.
"This is a study that focuses on keywords, not search engines. We wanted consumers to have a simple take-away from this study: The Web is a great resource but consumers need to understand that it has risks, and those risks are magnified if you search in popular categories," he wrote.
He added that customers can avoid the risks as they would avoid risks while driving. "As with driving on highways, risks can be mitigated if you use safe rules of the road," he said.
Beware of downloads
The riskiest terms were those that involved downloading content. Around the world, "lyrics" was one of the most dangerous search terms, appearing in the top 10 in the U.S., Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.
In the U.S., the most dangerous search terms were "free music downloads" (20.7 percent average risk), "game cheats" (16.7 percent), "word unscambler" (16.1 percent), followed by "lyrics" (14.8 percent).
For further keyword analysis, McAfee contracted with Hitwise, an Internet data company, to collate risk levels from individual keywords into categories. The riskiest category by far was "screensavers," with an average risk of 34.4 percent, followed by "free games" (6.8 percent), "work from home" (3.1 percent), "Rihanna" (2.4 percent), "Wekbinz" (1.9 percent), "powerball" (1.5 percent) and "iPhone" and the "Jonas brothers," both at 1.2 percent.
Globally, the keywords with the worst average risk profiles were "free" sites (7.3 percent) and lyrics sites (5.1 percent).
The report said that it made sense that malware writers were targeting keywords associated with downloading. "One key tool cybercriminals use to snare victims is to get them to download a computer file or program that comes with a malicious payload," the report said.
Malware writers exploit current events. "Hackers are most successful when they can attract a large number of victims. One way to target big crowds online is to track current events -- everything from celebrity meltdowns and natural disasters to holidays and popular music," the report said.
"The best protection is to install a computer security suite and keep it up to date and to use a safe search tool like McAfee SiteAdvisor software," the report concluded.
(the article was originally published at http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3822611/McAfee+Lists+Webs+Most+Dangerous+Search+Terms.htm)
The news comes shortly after a report from Panda Security revealed that malware writers have become adept at search engine optimization and are even building their own search engines. The McAfee report covers only legitimate search engines.
Users searching for downloadable content -- especially screen savers, music lyrics, and free digital music -- are at risk of downloading malware instead, the study concluded. The survey covered over 2,600 popular keywords from a wide variety of sources for the U.S. and from Google Zeitgeist for international search.
For each keyword, the company examined the safety of search results on the first five pages of the following five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Ask, and AOL for a total of 25 pages of results.
The McAfee study also touts two of its free services, SiteAdvisor (software that rates the riskiness of search engine links) and the Cybercrime Response Unit (which helps victims contact financial institutions and law enforcement).
The company counted the number of items marked dangerous (red or yellow) by SiteAdvisor and divided that by the total number of results to produce two numbers: the most risky page in all the results, and the average risk across the 25 pages. Across all results, the average risk was 1.7 percent and the maximum risk averaged out to 10 percent.
SiteAdvisor tracks the following risks: downloads, browser exploits, e-mail registration forms and ease of unsubscribing, phishing (define), excessive popups, and links to other risky sites. Sites that fail one or more of these tests get a red rating, and sites that "merit caution before using" get a yellow rating. Green ratings go to sites with no risk or only "very minor" risks.
It would have been interesting to compare the relative safety of these five search engines, but that was not the purpose of the study, said Shane Keats, McAfee research analyst, in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.
"This is a study that focuses on keywords, not search engines. We wanted consumers to have a simple take-away from this study: The Web is a great resource but consumers need to understand that it has risks, and those risks are magnified if you search in popular categories," he wrote.
He added that customers can avoid the risks as they would avoid risks while driving. "As with driving on highways, risks can be mitigated if you use safe rules of the road," he said.
Beware of downloads
The riskiest terms were those that involved downloading content. Around the world, "lyrics" was one of the most dangerous search terms, appearing in the top 10 in the U.S., Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.
In the U.S., the most dangerous search terms were "free music downloads" (20.7 percent average risk), "game cheats" (16.7 percent), "word unscambler" (16.1 percent), followed by "lyrics" (14.8 percent).
For further keyword analysis, McAfee contracted with Hitwise, an Internet data company, to collate risk levels from individual keywords into categories. The riskiest category by far was "screensavers," with an average risk of 34.4 percent, followed by "free games" (6.8 percent), "work from home" (3.1 percent), "Rihanna" (2.4 percent), "Wekbinz" (1.9 percent), "powerball" (1.5 percent) and "iPhone" and the "Jonas brothers," both at 1.2 percent.
Globally, the keywords with the worst average risk profiles were "free" sites (7.3 percent) and lyrics sites (5.1 percent).
The report said that it made sense that malware writers were targeting keywords associated with downloading. "One key tool cybercriminals use to snare victims is to get them to download a computer file or program that comes with a malicious payload," the report said.
Malware writers exploit current events. "Hackers are most successful when they can attract a large number of victims. One way to target big crowds online is to track current events -- everything from celebrity meltdowns and natural disasters to holidays and popular music," the report said.
"The best protection is to install a computer security suite and keep it up to date and to use a safe search tool like McAfee SiteAdvisor software," the report concluded.
(the article was originally published at http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3822611/McAfee+Lists+Webs+Most+Dangerous+Search+Terms.htm)
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Optimizing For Natural And Paid Search, After The Click
At the Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Fla., Gord Hotchkiss hosted a panel and clinic on eye-tracking analysis of Web sites suggested by attendees, specifically addressing the topic of post-click optimization. This session preceded several related breakout discussions, including the "Branding and Post-Click Strategies" roundtable session that I moderated.
Overall, this is a critical topic at a time where more and more marketers are looking for ways to show a higher return on investment for spending in SEO, PPC and other online channels. So in this column I'll cover some of the highlights in the breakout session.
For the panel, a small lab was set up to monitor eye-tracking on three sites, to see if users could complete a specific task. While it is worth noting that the testers (conference attendees) were not your average users because of their knowledge of interactive marketing, the exercise illustrated the importance of testing for conversion and search performance. If there was one single takeaway, it was this: enable this type of testing early in the discovery and design process of Web site and landing page development, testing multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging on groups that represent targeted users, in addition to testing the pages with a paid search campaign.
The discussion begins.
There were several immediate points made by the assembled group of agencies, media professionals, client-side interactive marketers and enterprise optimization consultants. With a user originating from paid search, the consensus was that the most effective types of pages were specifically targeted landing pages (though the pages reviewed by the panel were from various Web sites). Ultimately the marketer has more control to experiment with conversion performance of multiple pages and messaging.
The conversation then turned toward various challenges of using a site's own pages as paid search landers, as well as the search user experience from an organic result. While using a site's pages is often not ideal (in absence of specific landing pages used only for paid search), the reality is that many brand and DR marketers use their site pages as landing pages for very large spends, even though many of these sites were developed without the search user experience and conversion process in mind. Again, the difference here is in using a Web site page designed generally for multiple purposes, while paid search landing pages are designed specifically for direct conversions coming from paid search.
The paid landing page approach can also become a bit more challenging to scale to catalog sites, or other large-scale publishers. On top of this issue, even the slightest landing page tweaks on enterprise sites can be problematic in a post-deployment situation. Marketers are ultimately stuck with a conversion process that doesn't perform as well as it could, and the result is the lower conversion performance of both the landing page and ad spend.
Most people at the table agreed that getting in front of search and usability issues in the early design and strategy phases of page development will help improve experience and conversions, and increase the return on paid and natural search efforts. Here are a few other takeaways from the discussion:
Set up a testing lab, or hire someone to do it for you. Use focus groups, grab your colleagues or friends, or hire an agency or research group to test before moving forward with a particular concept. Even if only a small sample can be pulled in for a test, you could still gain new findings to influence design and better inform the conversion approach.
Get media stakeholders involved early in the development process. If your Web development team or agency is designing a site that will ultimately be used as a landing page for paid media spends, it is imperative to get them involved to anticipate campaign goals and strategies. The effectiveness of search campaigns often hinge on the effectiveness of the pages themselves. Investing even a small portion of media dollars in testing and development of multiple comps can increase effectiveness of those spends.
Test multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging with your target group, for both direct navigation experience, and also effectiveness in paid search. Consider varied approaches to testing in terms of messaging and layout. It is important to do this upfront, so you will have a solid starting point for any tweaks down the road. Overall, testing multiple concepts provides a better view of what is really going to work.
Use prior performance knowledge to inform redesign or landing pages. While the post-click session was largely focused on user site activity, our group noted that actual performance data is also crucial to informing future efforts. Take your performance history from paid or natural search, and ask "What worked?" Did particular terms convert better than others? Did the landing pages for higher converting terms have better language or call-to-action than lower performing pages? Did particular layouts perform better than others? Were there gaps in relevance for your existing landing pages, when compared to your targeted keyword list?
Build in the ability to test and change. One of the other challenges of page-tuning is that the process for changing an existing site is often not fluid enough to meet the needs of ongoing optimization. When you enable the modification of page areas like a heading or opening paragraph, you help provide the post-launch flexibility needed to optimize search campaigns down the road.
Again, these were just a few group discussion points on a major marketing topic that deserves a great deal of consideration. (If you were present at the discussion or panel and would like to add your feedback, please comment on the blog version of this column). As both the panel and roundtable discussion made very clear: Rethinking the conversion process early on can only help maximize and optimize the value of natural and paid search campaigns.
(the article was originally published at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=106821)
Overall, this is a critical topic at a time where more and more marketers are looking for ways to show a higher return on investment for spending in SEO, PPC and other online channels. So in this column I'll cover some of the highlights in the breakout session.
For the panel, a small lab was set up to monitor eye-tracking on three sites, to see if users could complete a specific task. While it is worth noting that the testers (conference attendees) were not your average users because of their knowledge of interactive marketing, the exercise illustrated the importance of testing for conversion and search performance. If there was one single takeaway, it was this: enable this type of testing early in the discovery and design process of Web site and landing page development, testing multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging on groups that represent targeted users, in addition to testing the pages with a paid search campaign.
The discussion begins.
There were several immediate points made by the assembled group of agencies, media professionals, client-side interactive marketers and enterprise optimization consultants. With a user originating from paid search, the consensus was that the most effective types of pages were specifically targeted landing pages (though the pages reviewed by the panel were from various Web sites). Ultimately the marketer has more control to experiment with conversion performance of multiple pages and messaging.
The conversation then turned toward various challenges of using a site's own pages as paid search landers, as well as the search user experience from an organic result. While using a site's pages is often not ideal (in absence of specific landing pages used only for paid search), the reality is that many brand and DR marketers use their site pages as landing pages for very large spends, even though many of these sites were developed without the search user experience and conversion process in mind. Again, the difference here is in using a Web site page designed generally for multiple purposes, while paid search landing pages are designed specifically for direct conversions coming from paid search.
The paid landing page approach can also become a bit more challenging to scale to catalog sites, or other large-scale publishers. On top of this issue, even the slightest landing page tweaks on enterprise sites can be problematic in a post-deployment situation. Marketers are ultimately stuck with a conversion process that doesn't perform as well as it could, and the result is the lower conversion performance of both the landing page and ad spend.
Most people at the table agreed that getting in front of search and usability issues in the early design and strategy phases of page development will help improve experience and conversions, and increase the return on paid and natural search efforts. Here are a few other takeaways from the discussion:
Set up a testing lab, or hire someone to do it for you. Use focus groups, grab your colleagues or friends, or hire an agency or research group to test before moving forward with a particular concept. Even if only a small sample can be pulled in for a test, you could still gain new findings to influence design and better inform the conversion approach.
Get media stakeholders involved early in the development process. If your Web development team or agency is designing a site that will ultimately be used as a landing page for paid media spends, it is imperative to get them involved to anticipate campaign goals and strategies. The effectiveness of search campaigns often hinge on the effectiveness of the pages themselves. Investing even a small portion of media dollars in testing and development of multiple comps can increase effectiveness of those spends.
Test multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging with your target group, for both direct navigation experience, and also effectiveness in paid search. Consider varied approaches to testing in terms of messaging and layout. It is important to do this upfront, so you will have a solid starting point for any tweaks down the road. Overall, testing multiple concepts provides a better view of what is really going to work.
Use prior performance knowledge to inform redesign or landing pages. While the post-click session was largely focused on user site activity, our group noted that actual performance data is also crucial to informing future efforts. Take your performance history from paid or natural search, and ask "What worked?" Did particular terms convert better than others? Did the landing pages for higher converting terms have better language or call-to-action than lower performing pages? Did particular layouts perform better than others? Were there gaps in relevance for your existing landing pages, when compared to your targeted keyword list?
Build in the ability to test and change. One of the other challenges of page-tuning is that the process for changing an existing site is often not fluid enough to meet the needs of ongoing optimization. When you enable the modification of page areas like a heading or opening paragraph, you help provide the post-launch flexibility needed to optimize search campaigns down the road.
Again, these were just a few group discussion points on a major marketing topic that deserves a great deal of consideration. (If you were present at the discussion or panel and would like to add your feedback, please comment on the blog version of this column). As both the panel and roundtable discussion made very clear: Rethinking the conversion process early on can only help maximize and optimize the value of natural and paid search campaigns.
(the article was originally published at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=106821)
How Facebook Will Upend Advertising
The guessing games over Facebook's worth are back on again. They were reignited by the news on May 26 that Facebook has accepted a $200 million investment that values the company at $10 billion.
Much of the discussion centers on the ability, or lack thereof, of Facebook and other social networks to sell advertising and deliver advertising results. People get on Facebook to socialize, not hunt for products—or so the argument runs.
But that argument misses the point. The question isn't how advertising will work on Facebook but rather how Facebook and social networks like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace are changing advertising. I'm loath to affix the 2.0 moniker to yet another phrase, but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it's advertising.
Almost a century ago, retailer John Wannamaker is reported to have said: "Half of all advertising works, I just don't know which half." Today the percentage may be far lower. On the Internet, click-through rates have fallen precipitously as clutter has replaced clarity. These days an ad has performed exceptionally well if at least 1 in 10 people who see it click on it. Much of the time click-through rates that once approached 3% are more like 0.3%.
The Holy Grail of ads: word of mouth
The good news is that we're on the verge of a major rethinking of advertising's fundamental premises. One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers is ad credibility. Consumers typically rate advertising as their least credible information channel. However, businesses have continued to invest in advertising because they could compensate for the lack of credibility through broad distribution and high-impact messaging.
Today that trade-off is being turned on its head. Word of mouth—peer opinion—has consistently been rated the most credible source of information. But traditionally there's been a limit as to how widely you could distribute a friend's point of view. Readers of a certain age will remember the Fabergé Organics commercial from the 1970s depicting a shampoo user who "told two friends," who in turn "told two friends, and so on, and so on." Three decades ago, telling a lot of friends wasn't nearly as easy as it is now.
Credibility now has a channel for mass distribution. It's called the Web and it particularly thrives in social networks. Such distribution will have profound implications for how we "advertise."
Obviously, we can use social networks to reach friends. But social tools woven into various sites can deliver the opinions and reviews of a group—"people like me"—whose views may be just as credible as those of my friends.
Say I'm a chief information officer. I may find the opinions of fellow CIOs I've never met every bit as credible as the ones I know—perhaps even more so, in that I'm less willing to denigrate the opinions of people I don't know. After all, I know the biases and shortcomings of the people in my friendship circle.
deploying social maps
These tools are showing up in a variety of online destinations. Facebook's Connect and other similar technologies let people bring their social map with them as they traverse the Internet. Businesses have to be thinking about how they might incorporate the social map into the way they deal with customers and prospects. This is going to be huge—and the opportunities are immediate.
I'm a big fan of Loomia's SeenThis application. While it was designed for Facebook, I actually "use" it elsewhere. You're probably familiar with the boxes on such newspapers sites as The Wall Street Journal that show what stories other readers have read. This "most read" designation rarely interests me. However, the Loomia tool gives me an additional box that shows me what stories my Facebook friends and groups have read. Generally I end up clicking through on most or all of those articles. The "recommendation" from my peer group is much more interesting and relevant to me than those of the general WSJ readership or editorial board.
In sum, social networks and related tools are transforming the way companies communicate with consumers and potential consumers in profoundly interesting ways. In this light, questions of Facebook's valuation are at best mildly amusing to me. If, as I suspect, Facebook is at the vanguard of transforming how companies reach consumers, $10 billion will some day seem laughably small.
Now it's up to the advertising industry to get its collective head out of the sand and exploit this transformation to its advantage.
(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090527_635562.htm)
Much of the discussion centers on the ability, or lack thereof, of Facebook and other social networks to sell advertising and deliver advertising results. People get on Facebook to socialize, not hunt for products—or so the argument runs.
But that argument misses the point. The question isn't how advertising will work on Facebook but rather how Facebook and social networks like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace are changing advertising. I'm loath to affix the 2.0 moniker to yet another phrase, but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it's advertising.
Almost a century ago, retailer John Wannamaker is reported to have said: "Half of all advertising works, I just don't know which half." Today the percentage may be far lower. On the Internet, click-through rates have fallen precipitously as clutter has replaced clarity. These days an ad has performed exceptionally well if at least 1 in 10 people who see it click on it. Much of the time click-through rates that once approached 3% are more like 0.3%.
The Holy Grail of ads: word of mouth
The good news is that we're on the verge of a major rethinking of advertising's fundamental premises. One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers is ad credibility. Consumers typically rate advertising as their least credible information channel. However, businesses have continued to invest in advertising because they could compensate for the lack of credibility through broad distribution and high-impact messaging.
Today that trade-off is being turned on its head. Word of mouth—peer opinion—has consistently been rated the most credible source of information. But traditionally there's been a limit as to how widely you could distribute a friend's point of view. Readers of a certain age will remember the Fabergé Organics commercial from the 1970s depicting a shampoo user who "told two friends," who in turn "told two friends, and so on, and so on." Three decades ago, telling a lot of friends wasn't nearly as easy as it is now.
Credibility now has a channel for mass distribution. It's called the Web and it particularly thrives in social networks. Such distribution will have profound implications for how we "advertise."
Obviously, we can use social networks to reach friends. But social tools woven into various sites can deliver the opinions and reviews of a group—"people like me"—whose views may be just as credible as those of my friends.
Say I'm a chief information officer. I may find the opinions of fellow CIOs I've never met every bit as credible as the ones I know—perhaps even more so, in that I'm less willing to denigrate the opinions of people I don't know. After all, I know the biases and shortcomings of the people in my friendship circle.
deploying social maps
These tools are showing up in a variety of online destinations. Facebook's Connect and other similar technologies let people bring their social map with them as they traverse the Internet. Businesses have to be thinking about how they might incorporate the social map into the way they deal with customers and prospects. This is going to be huge—and the opportunities are immediate.
I'm a big fan of Loomia's SeenThis application. While it was designed for Facebook, I actually "use" it elsewhere. You're probably familiar with the boxes on such newspapers sites as The Wall Street Journal that show what stories other readers have read. This "most read" designation rarely interests me. However, the Loomia tool gives me an additional box that shows me what stories my Facebook friends and groups have read. Generally I end up clicking through on most or all of those articles. The "recommendation" from my peer group is much more interesting and relevant to me than those of the general WSJ readership or editorial board.
In sum, social networks and related tools are transforming the way companies communicate with consumers and potential consumers in profoundly interesting ways. In this light, questions of Facebook's valuation are at best mildly amusing to me. If, as I suspect, Facebook is at the vanguard of transforming how companies reach consumers, $10 billion will some day seem laughably small.
Now it's up to the advertising industry to get its collective head out of the sand and exploit this transformation to its advantage.
(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090527_635562.htm)
Former Yahoo exec launches online ad rival
Silicon Valley venture capital firm DAG Ventures has joined the backers of online advertising startup OpenX, leading a series C funding round of $10 million that takes total investment in the company to $31 million.
OpenX is an independent competitor to advertising services offered by Google (GOOG.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Time Warner's (TWX.N) AOL. It is run by industry veteran and former head of Yahoo's search business, Tim Cadogan,
The company said on Tuesday it would use some of the new funding to accelerate development of an online ad marketplace it launched last month that is designed to make it easier for smaller Web publishers and advertisers to find each other.
Advertisers are faced with an explosion in the number of Websites run by small publishers, some of whom have valuable niche audiences, while the publishers often find it hard to get the best value from ad platforms run by the likes of Google.
Cadogan said OpenX, whose more than 300 billion ad impressions per month put it in the same league as Google's DoubleClick in terms of volume, would now be able to explore other forms of online advertising, such as video and mobile.
"We increasingly see a range of opportunities - new markets, related markets, new product lines that we could get into," he told Reuters by telephone from OpenX's headquarters in California. The company also has offices in London and Poland.
Publishers are increasingly turning to Internet advertising as they chase dwindling audiences for their print products, who are racing online. Some, like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), are considering charging consumers for online content.
Cadogan said he believed those publishers who could survive the next year or two would have many more possibilities to make money out of their online offers than they currently do.
"I think we're on the cusp of a renaissance in online advertising outside of search," he said.
"The next year is definitely tough, but I do think within the next one to two years you're going to see a new level of quality, value, and consumer value of ads."
Existing investors in OpenX -- Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and company Chairman Jonathan Miller -- also participated in the latest funding round.
Miller has recently been appointed News Corp's new digital media chief.
(the article was originally published at http://www.reuters.com/article/smallBusinessNews/idUSTRE54P2PR20090526)
OpenX is an independent competitor to advertising services offered by Google (GOOG.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Time Warner's (TWX.N) AOL. It is run by industry veteran and former head of Yahoo's search business, Tim Cadogan,
The company said on Tuesday it would use some of the new funding to accelerate development of an online ad marketplace it launched last month that is designed to make it easier for smaller Web publishers and advertisers to find each other.
Advertisers are faced with an explosion in the number of Websites run by small publishers, some of whom have valuable niche audiences, while the publishers often find it hard to get the best value from ad platforms run by the likes of Google.
Cadogan said OpenX, whose more than 300 billion ad impressions per month put it in the same league as Google's DoubleClick in terms of volume, would now be able to explore other forms of online advertising, such as video and mobile.
"We increasingly see a range of opportunities - new markets, related markets, new product lines that we could get into," he told Reuters by telephone from OpenX's headquarters in California. The company also has offices in London and Poland.
Publishers are increasingly turning to Internet advertising as they chase dwindling audiences for their print products, who are racing online. Some, like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), are considering charging consumers for online content.
Cadogan said he believed those publishers who could survive the next year or two would have many more possibilities to make money out of their online offers than they currently do.
"I think we're on the cusp of a renaissance in online advertising outside of search," he said.
"The next year is definitely tough, but I do think within the next one to two years you're going to see a new level of quality, value, and consumer value of ads."
Existing investors in OpenX -- Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and company Chairman Jonathan Miller -- also participated in the latest funding round.
Miller has recently been appointed News Corp's new digital media chief.
(the article was originally published at http://www.reuters.com/article/smallBusinessNews/idUSTRE54P2PR20090526)
Facebook Lands $200 Million in Funding
Ending months of fevered speculation over whether it would raise more money, social network Facebook said on May 26 that it will take a $200 million investment from Russia's Digital Sky Technologies.
In return, DST is getting preferred stock worth 1.96% of Facebook, valuing the social network at $10 billion. This is the first time Facebook has raised major equity funding since late 2007, when Microsoft (MSFT) invested $240 million in exchange for a 1.6% stake that valued the site at $15 billion.
In a move that will help Facebook employees unlock some of the value of their shares before the company goes public or is sold, DST will purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from current or former Facebook employees. DST co-founder Yuri Milner tells BusinessWeek that the agreement to buy common stock was not a precondition of the equity investment. "These are two separate transactions," Milner says in an interview. DST and Facebook say they will release details of the plan this summer.
Zuckerberg: No shift in strategy
Facebook considers the investment a "good buffer" and will use it for expansion, rather than to fund existing operations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview. "It might come in handy if we want to expand," Zuckerberg says. "We felt the valuation was good. Having additional money will allow us to explore new things, such as building data centers or acquiring companies." Sales are rising, and the company has no concrete plans to spend the cash, he adds. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said as recently as April that the company did not need additional financing.
Over the past year, while most companies have grown cautious and cut back on expansion, the social networking Web site has pressed ahead with aggressive growth plans. However, Zuckerberg says, the investment does not portend a strategic change. "This doesn't signal any shift in strategy," he says.
Zuckerberg also reiterated that Facebook has no plans to sell shares to the public soon. "For a lot of start-ups, you get the feeling that the IPO is really the end goal," he says. "That's really not the case for us. We view that as one milestone along the way. We don't see it happening in the immediate horizon. It's not something we're rushing toward. We'll do it when it's the right thing for the company."
DST: dozens of Web investments
On a conference call following the announcement, Zuckerberg also reiterated the company's forecast for sales to rise 70% this year. Some analysts remain skeptical that the company can achieve such growth during a recession. For instance, eMarketer speculates that Facebook's main source of revenue—global advertising—will increase 20%, to $300 million, from $250 million. "Where is that [70%] going to come from?" says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst. "I can't see it coming solely from advertising. Either he has some new revenue stream up his sleeve or he is crazy."
On the call, Zuckerberg said Facebook was drawn by DST's expertise in developing business models that help social networks make money. Based in London and Moscow, DST is a four-year-old investment group. According to its Web site, DST has raised and invested more than $1 billion in over 30 companies, including Russian Web portal Mail.ru, Russian social network Vkontakte.ru, and Forticom Group, which owns and operates other social networks in Russia and Eastern Europe.
While other private investors have offered to buy Facebook shares for valuations in the range of $4 billion to $6 billion, DST co-founder Yuri Milner expressed confidence in the company's ability to make money on its Facebook stake. Although Facebook and other U.S.-based social networks have had a hard time making money from their growing number of users, Milner said the social networks he has invested in are making much more money per user than Facebook is now. Milner said Facebook would be able to generate more money from advertising and forms of e-commerce, such as micropayments for virtual gifts given to a person's friends. "We see monetization patterns that will be very applicable to Facebook going forward," he said. "For us it was almost a no-brainer."
A Soviet at Wharton in 1990
Milner says he does not need to use only traditional metrics, such as price-to-earnings multiples, in valuing his Internet investments. "That's not how we look at it," said Milner. "We see things that others don't see."
Milner, who received part of his education in America, founded DST in 2005 along with fellow Russian businessman Gregory Finger. A 1990 article in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, said Milner was "the first Soviet citizen ever to study at Wharton," Penn's prestigious business school.
In the story, Milner said his goal was to return with his degree to the Soviet Union to take advantage of the developing free markets and serve as a bridge between his native country and the West. "My idea is to be in the most useful place in the proper time," Milner said.
Almost two decades later, Milner is hoping he has found that place in Facebook.
(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090526_070168.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story)
In return, DST is getting preferred stock worth 1.96% of Facebook, valuing the social network at $10 billion. This is the first time Facebook has raised major equity funding since late 2007, when Microsoft (MSFT) invested $240 million in exchange for a 1.6% stake that valued the site at $15 billion.
In a move that will help Facebook employees unlock some of the value of their shares before the company goes public or is sold, DST will purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from current or former Facebook employees. DST co-founder Yuri Milner tells BusinessWeek that the agreement to buy common stock was not a precondition of the equity investment. "These are two separate transactions," Milner says in an interview. DST and Facebook say they will release details of the plan this summer.
Zuckerberg: No shift in strategy
Facebook considers the investment a "good buffer" and will use it for expansion, rather than to fund existing operations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview. "It might come in handy if we want to expand," Zuckerberg says. "We felt the valuation was good. Having additional money will allow us to explore new things, such as building data centers or acquiring companies." Sales are rising, and the company has no concrete plans to spend the cash, he adds. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said as recently as April that the company did not need additional financing.
Over the past year, while most companies have grown cautious and cut back on expansion, the social networking Web site has pressed ahead with aggressive growth plans. However, Zuckerberg says, the investment does not portend a strategic change. "This doesn't signal any shift in strategy," he says.
Zuckerberg also reiterated that Facebook has no plans to sell shares to the public soon. "For a lot of start-ups, you get the feeling that the IPO is really the end goal," he says. "That's really not the case for us. We view that as one milestone along the way. We don't see it happening in the immediate horizon. It's not something we're rushing toward. We'll do it when it's the right thing for the company."
DST: dozens of Web investments
On a conference call following the announcement, Zuckerberg also reiterated the company's forecast for sales to rise 70% this year. Some analysts remain skeptical that the company can achieve such growth during a recession. For instance, eMarketer speculates that Facebook's main source of revenue—global advertising—will increase 20%, to $300 million, from $250 million. "Where is that [70%] going to come from?" says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst. "I can't see it coming solely from advertising. Either he has some new revenue stream up his sleeve or he is crazy."
On the call, Zuckerberg said Facebook was drawn by DST's expertise in developing business models that help social networks make money. Based in London and Moscow, DST is a four-year-old investment group. According to its Web site, DST has raised and invested more than $1 billion in over 30 companies, including Russian Web portal Mail.ru, Russian social network Vkontakte.ru, and Forticom Group, which owns and operates other social networks in Russia and Eastern Europe.
While other private investors have offered to buy Facebook shares for valuations in the range of $4 billion to $6 billion, DST co-founder Yuri Milner expressed confidence in the company's ability to make money on its Facebook stake. Although Facebook and other U.S.-based social networks have had a hard time making money from their growing number of users, Milner said the social networks he has invested in are making much more money per user than Facebook is now. Milner said Facebook would be able to generate more money from advertising and forms of e-commerce, such as micropayments for virtual gifts given to a person's friends. "We see monetization patterns that will be very applicable to Facebook going forward," he said. "For us it was almost a no-brainer."
A Soviet at Wharton in 1990
Milner says he does not need to use only traditional metrics, such as price-to-earnings multiples, in valuing his Internet investments. "That's not how we look at it," said Milner. "We see things that others don't see."
Milner, who received part of his education in America, founded DST in 2005 along with fellow Russian businessman Gregory Finger. A 1990 article in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, said Milner was "the first Soviet citizen ever to study at Wharton," Penn's prestigious business school.
In the story, Milner said his goal was to return with his degree to the Soviet Union to take advantage of the developing free markets and serve as a bridge between his native country and the West. "My idea is to be in the most useful place in the proper time," Milner said.
Almost two decades later, Milner is hoping he has found that place in Facebook.
(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090526_070168.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story)
Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google, Asks Consumers to Rethink Search
Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.
The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.
JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.
People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.
"If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, 'Does search suck?' I think they'd say no. They don't know what else can be done," said Shashi Seth, a former Google executive who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris. "They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that's differentiated, people will sit up and take notice."
Case for refinement
Indeed, data show that about 65% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with online search. But Microsoft sees an opening on its own proprietary search data: 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button.
That's why Mr. Seth likens the Bing marketing challenge to that of the Apple iPhone before it was introduced. Most people, pre-iPhone, didn't know they were missing a multi-touch screen, or an application that would enable them to detect what song was playing wherever they were. But Apple, through its ads, showed how markedly different the experience was and created a new de facto standard for phones.
Many will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference -- the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.
But that's not necessarily true anymore, as the quality of search engines has approached parity. Sure, there are no switching costs, and it's easy to simply type in a new web address should a better engine come along, but the psychological pull of the leading brand in the space overrides those factors for many consumers.
Consider that Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine's search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they're not Google results. Or consider that a revamped Ask.com made its debut in 2007 to a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who said it "holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches." Two years later? Ask's share of search is down 28%.
'Better mousetrap'
"I don't think they can win this game with a better mousetrap," said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, New York. "They have to compete with Google on a brand front -- there's no other way to skin this but go head on against the Google brand."
Obviously Microsoft has not shied away from "going head on" in its Windows campaign. Its chief attack on Apple -- that it's too expensive and not worth the high price -- is showing some signs of working. Apple's value perception among 18- to 34-year-olds has dropped significantly since the campaign launched in late March, which might be a testament to the right message at the right time.
Still, advertising isn't a panacea, as even the most self-absorbed ad man knows, especially when it's not the right advertising. Ask.com famously spent $57 million in 2007 to market its engine, and another $22 million last year, according to TNS. The 2007 campaign was an oddball execution from Crispin Porter & Bogusky that touted "the algorithm" -- a concept unlikely to grab anyone not already entrenched in the world of digital marketing. What Microsoft needs to do is go after people who don't know and probably don't care what an algorithm is.
And all the advertising in the world only works if the product backs it up. People who've seen the Microsoft product suggest it's useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it's not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search (some of the multimedia search results, however, do look quite different from how Google currently displays them).
"It doesn't take a lot to switch people from one type to another and usually it's a unique feature that gets people excited," said David Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier and former head of sales for Yahoo. He reflected on his days at AltaVista, which Google supplanted. "Google got people excited because it got people and places right early on. That got people to really start to switch, and once developed the habit of using Google, it was hard to get them to switch back."
(you can read more at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136847)
The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.
JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.
People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.
"If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, 'Does search suck?' I think they'd say no. They don't know what else can be done," said Shashi Seth, a former Google executive who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris. "They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that's differentiated, people will sit up and take notice."
Case for refinement
Indeed, data show that about 65% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with online search. But Microsoft sees an opening on its own proprietary search data: 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button.
That's why Mr. Seth likens the Bing marketing challenge to that of the Apple iPhone before it was introduced. Most people, pre-iPhone, didn't know they were missing a multi-touch screen, or an application that would enable them to detect what song was playing wherever they were. But Apple, through its ads, showed how markedly different the experience was and created a new de facto standard for phones.
Many will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference -- the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.
But that's not necessarily true anymore, as the quality of search engines has approached parity. Sure, there are no switching costs, and it's easy to simply type in a new web address should a better engine come along, but the psychological pull of the leading brand in the space overrides those factors for many consumers.
Consider that Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine's search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they're not Google results. Or consider that a revamped Ask.com made its debut in 2007 to a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who said it "holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches." Two years later? Ask's share of search is down 28%.
'Better mousetrap'
"I don't think they can win this game with a better mousetrap," said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, New York. "They have to compete with Google on a brand front -- there's no other way to skin this but go head on against the Google brand."
Obviously Microsoft has not shied away from "going head on" in its Windows campaign. Its chief attack on Apple -- that it's too expensive and not worth the high price -- is showing some signs of working. Apple's value perception among 18- to 34-year-olds has dropped significantly since the campaign launched in late March, which might be a testament to the right message at the right time.
Still, advertising isn't a panacea, as even the most self-absorbed ad man knows, especially when it's not the right advertising. Ask.com famously spent $57 million in 2007 to market its engine, and another $22 million last year, according to TNS. The 2007 campaign was an oddball execution from Crispin Porter & Bogusky that touted "the algorithm" -- a concept unlikely to grab anyone not already entrenched in the world of digital marketing. What Microsoft needs to do is go after people who don't know and probably don't care what an algorithm is.
And all the advertising in the world only works if the product backs it up. People who've seen the Microsoft product suggest it's useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it's not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search (some of the multimedia search results, however, do look quite different from how Google currently displays them).
"It doesn't take a lot to switch people from one type to another and usually it's a unique feature that gets people excited," said David Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier and former head of sales for Yahoo. He reflected on his days at AltaVista, which Google supplanted. "Google got people excited because it got people and places right early on. That got people to really start to switch, and once developed the habit of using Google, it was hard to get them to switch back."
(you can read more at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136847)
Real Time: The Web's New Prime Time
The Internet was always fast. Google made a point during its rise to prominence to detail -- to the millisecond -- just how quickly it delivered a search result. And, as we all know, the Web has gotten even faster.
Real-time communications channels like Twitter are pushing the Internet into "real time," where communication and information flow nonstop. This presents advertisers with a dizzying array of opportunities -- and a daunting number of challenges.
Marketers "are built like battleships for long, sustained warfare, [but] this is guerrilla warfare," said Lisa Bradner, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
One of the most intense challenges is the new speed with which messages need to be crafted. Think of display advertising, which is in the doldrums thanks to a nearly limitless supply of space outstripping ad demand. With a large chunk of the market transitioning to a marketplace-driven dynamic where advertisers, networks and agencies bid on ad placements based on people, not pages, a message -- and its permutations -- increasingly needs to be made on the fly. And this, in turn, means extra work up front.
HP, for instance, using tools from Yahoo and Tumri, recently ran a campaign with more than 20,000 ad permutations. To do this, said Catherine Paschkewitz, director of demand generation, HP Direct, "you need to take the time to think of your testing framework and the different things you want to test. It's having an up-front process as you're launching and refreshing campaigns."
Another way to make display ads more real time is to use live video. Visa, for instance, ran live video in banner ads earlier this year that showed scenes from cities worldwide. Last month, Intel embedded live chat in its banners. Earlier this month, GE CEO Jeff Immelt delivered a Webcast address on healthcare issues live in a banner ad on top sites. And Volvo and Intuit have piped Twitter into ad units.
Another challenge for brands is that consumers now expect instant gratification when it comes to customer service, which is why marketers like Apple, Bank of America and Overstock.com now provide live customer service on their sites. Kevin Kohn, evp of marketing at LivePerson, which worked with BoA and Overstock, said this is nearly a requirement in a real-time world.
(You can read more at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i15f4e2b3b4a487b3b5cd5347ebd07cbf)
Real-time communications channels like Twitter are pushing the Internet into "real time," where communication and information flow nonstop. This presents advertisers with a dizzying array of opportunities -- and a daunting number of challenges.
Marketers "are built like battleships for long, sustained warfare, [but] this is guerrilla warfare," said Lisa Bradner, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
One of the most intense challenges is the new speed with which messages need to be crafted. Think of display advertising, which is in the doldrums thanks to a nearly limitless supply of space outstripping ad demand. With a large chunk of the market transitioning to a marketplace-driven dynamic where advertisers, networks and agencies bid on ad placements based on people, not pages, a message -- and its permutations -- increasingly needs to be made on the fly. And this, in turn, means extra work up front.
HP, for instance, using tools from Yahoo and Tumri, recently ran a campaign with more than 20,000 ad permutations. To do this, said Catherine Paschkewitz, director of demand generation, HP Direct, "you need to take the time to think of your testing framework and the different things you want to test. It's having an up-front process as you're launching and refreshing campaigns."
Another way to make display ads more real time is to use live video. Visa, for instance, ran live video in banner ads earlier this year that showed scenes from cities worldwide. Last month, Intel embedded live chat in its banners. Earlier this month, GE CEO Jeff Immelt delivered a Webcast address on healthcare issues live in a banner ad on top sites. And Volvo and Intuit have piped Twitter into ad units.
Another challenge for brands is that consumers now expect instant gratification when it comes to customer service, which is why marketers like Apple, Bank of America and Overstock.com now provide live customer service on their sites. Kevin Kohn, evp of marketing at LivePerson, which worked with BoA and Overstock, said this is nearly a requirement in a real-time world.
(You can read more at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i15f4e2b3b4a487b3b5cd5347ebd07cbf)
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