eMarketer released search forecasts on Wednesday suggesting it could take more than innovation at Yahoo to gain back any market share lost to Microsoft Bing and Google in the past few years. Some believe that Yahoo's newly announced feature, Search Direct, could drive up bid prices for keywords on the site. For those not following releases, Yahoo has unveiled Search Direct, a feature it will integrate into select Yahoo sites, giving searchers answers to questions and lists of trending topics as queries are typed. The feature rolls out in the U.S. first, and later this year, internationally. Not many advertising and marketing execs think Yahoo's new feature will have a positive impact on the company's search market share. "Yahoo sold itself to the devil when it allowed Bing to power the back-end of their search engine," says Jason Hennessey, CEO at SEO agency Everspark Interactive. "In 2009, Yahoo had a 29% market share, and Google a 63% market share. In the past two years, Google has continued to innovate in local search, whereas Yahoo essentially gave up." The decline, however, might have more to do with marketing and timing of product releases and less with the technology Yahoo delivers on. Yahoo's search engine is fast becoming a distant third in market share, according to David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. He points to Bing's rise in market share as one factor among several that have contributed to Yahoo's decline. "Yahoo has experienced a downhill side of revenue during the last few years," Hallerman says. "Even if Yahoo's year-over-year revenue turns around and becomes flat for a few years, the company will still lose market share compared with the entire market." Yahoo's share of the $12.37 billion U.S. search advertising market fell from 13.7% in 2009 to 10.4% in 2010, according to eMarketer. This year, the analyst firm estimates Yahoo's share of overall U.S. search ad revenue should fall further to 8.1%. But could the new format force keyword bid prices to rise if Yahoo allows advertisers to sponsor paid links in the initial search results? One feature related to Yahoo Direct could prompt an uptick in keyword bid prices. Hallerman points to the limited number of organic or paid results that serve up when queries are typed in the box without clicking on the search button. If those become sponsored lists based on keyword bids, it could increase prices. Taking into consideration that eMarketer numbers were compiled prior to Yahoo releasing Search Direct, Hallerman says "search engines are slow-turning vessels." His point: people don't typically jump from one search engine to another quickly. Marketers are attracted to volume when it comes to bidding on paid-search ads, so consumers would need to begin using Yahoo search for market share to change. "The new format might suggest, if a brand doesn't appear in the top three results you might as well forget it," Hallerman says. Experian Hitwise also published a Web page listing the top 20 Web sites driving search. Facebook ranked No. 1 with 10.52% of searches ranked by visits for the week ending March 19, 2011, followed by Google with 7.74%; YouTube, 3.27%; Yahoo Mail, 3.10%; Yahoo, 2.53%; Bing, 1.57%; and Yahoo Search, 1.43%. Experian Hitwise also ranks search.yahoo.com as the No. 2 search engine in the "All Categories," ranked by Volume of Searches during the same four weeks.
With competition heating up in the Q&A space from Quora and LinkedIn Answers, Facebook has revamped its Questions service to make it faster and easier to use. You didn't know Facebook even had its own Q&A offering? If not, that's because since July, the company has only been testing it with a small group of beta users. Even so, it gained little traction. Facebook began rolling out the updated version today with the same test users, but the service is also available for other Facebook members to try on an opt-in basis. The changes are mainly designed to make Questions more streamlined and better integrated into the Facebook network. The service is now geared toward allowing people to quickly poll friends and get practical recommendations, like suggestions for a good local restaurant, rather than seeking long-form answers to factual questions. In a blog post today, project manager Adrian Graham explained that during testing, it became clear that people were mainly using questions to ask for opinions, and finding friends and acquaintances, rather than experts, as the best sources of advice. With that in mind, speeding up the process was key. "With the updated Questions, you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses," wrote Graham. The redesign also lets users cast a wider net, so when friends answer one of your questions, their friends can answer it also. Plus, answers can be linked to things on a Facebook brand page or Facebook Place page, which could provide another avenue for marketers to generate traffic from a user's social graph. People can submit queries that are open-ended or in poll format through the Question tab in the News Feed. When a friend sees the question in their stream and clicks on it, a pop-up appears, allowing them to answer -- either endorsing an existing reply or entering a new one. In the polling format, typing in an additional choice opens up a drop-down menu of matching Facebook Pages and Places. One caveat: "Questions will not appear on Pages that happen to be answer choices, and there will be no Insights analytics for the product, limiting its potential as a marketing tool. Pages may ask and answer questions, though, leading them to appear on their wall," according to the Inside Facebook blog. Answers that get the most endorsements from friends will rank highest. Users are notified when friends respond to their questions. "The redesign brings Questions back within the core functionality of Facebook, rather tacking it on as a stodgy, high-minded knowledge base," noted Inside Facebook. Facebook said it plans to roll out Questions more widely soon.
Six months after expanding overseas, Interpublic's Huge has scored its biggest international business to date -- being named by sister creative agency Lowe & Partners as "preferred global digital partner" for the latter's roster of Unilever brands. Those brands, accounting for about half of all Unilever AOR business, have virtually no presence in North America, so Huge's work on them will be done out of the agency's new offices in London, Singapore, Stockholm and Sao Paulo, Brazil, says Huge CEO Aaron Shapiro. The brands include food and beverage giant Knorr; the partnership begins with Huge working on household cleaning products Cif and Sunlight for the European, Middle East, African, Latin Americas and Asian markets. Shapiro -- himself elevated to CEO just five months ago, after the departure of Huge founders David Skokna and Sasha Kirovski -- called the Lowe partnership "a tremendous validation of our strategy of expanding globally" and "a strong testament to the way marketing is going in the future." Shapiro said that while international now accounts for just 25 of Huge's 300 total employees -- or just 8% -- he expects the split to eventually be 50/50. Prior to teaming with Huge, Lowe used a mix of ad hoc shops and some in-house for its digital needs, Shapiro said. It will now have the advantage of one touchpoint: "a single, tight integration of traditional and digital." Huge's U.S. offices are in Brooklyn, NY, and Los Angeles.
With the launch of its pay wall approaching, The New York Times seems to be inspiring some industry consolidation. R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co. on Thursday announced the acquisition of Journalism Online and its Press+ paid content management system. News Corp. took a minority stake in the company last year, which debuted less than two years ago by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery Jr. Tangled in what he called "a form of group suicide," serial entrepreneur Brill has spent the past few years imploring media publishers to shed their collective "inferiority complex" and begin charging subscription fees for content. That mission, Brill said on Thursday, can now better be achieved under the wing of R.R. Donnelley. "RR Donnelley has been enabling publishers to reach their customers with a viable, cost-effective business model," said Steven Brill, founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV. Despite agreements with various publishers, Journalism Online was unable to establish itself as a major player in the subscription-based marketplace. The coming launch of The New York Times' metered pay wall appears to have sealed the company's fate. Still a viable product, however, Press+ enables publishers to offer readers a mix of options for subscribing to premium content, including metered, mobile and tablet, and out-of-market access. "Our experience demonstrates that publishers using Press+ for metered access to Web sites and other digital products retain their online ad revenue and readership, while adding a valuable revenue stream from online subscriptions," said L. Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher. In April 2009, Journalism Online launched with an undisclosed amount of funding from Hindery's InterMedia Advisors, LLP.
Two digital media industry pioneers - Adam Gerber and Joe Marchese - officially jumped to senior marketing roles at traditional media companies Thursday, marking a bit of a mini exodus. Gerber, who most recently was CMO of Web site analytics firm Quantcast, and was a veteran Madison Avenue digital media buyer before that, landed as vice president-sales development and marketing for Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Television Network (see related story in MediaDailyNews). Marchese, founder and president of online social media marketing platform SocialVibe.com and SVnetwork, was named senior vice president-digital and marketing strategy at Madison Square Garden's FUSE music TV network. The moves came just two days after another digital media pioneer, Tacoda Founder Dave Morgan, delivered a sobering keynote at the OMMA Behavioral conference in New York explaining to the digerati why he has abandoned the digital media industry to launch Simulmedia, a company focused on developing better ways for advertisers to target TV viewers. Marchese, who recently took a hiatus from his weekly column on MediaPost's "Online Spin Board" in order to make the transition, said the move was part of a long-term strategy to broaden his personal perspective in managing media companies. In a symbolic gesture, his move was announced the day after he turned 30.
A federal judge has dismissed lawsuits against Yahoo and Microsoft by the email mass marketer Holomaxx, which alleged that its messages were wrongly filtered as spam. U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose, Calif. ruled that the Web companies' spam filtering efforts were protected by the federal Communications Decency Act's "good samaritan" provisions. Those provisions immunize Web companies from liability for blocking objectionable material, provided the companies act in good faith. Holomaxx sued both companies last October for allegedly violating a host of laws, including the federal wiretap law, by refusing to deliver some messages it sent to Microsoft and Yahoo email addresses. The company said in its court papers that it sends 6 million messages a day through Yahoo's servers and 3 million a day through Microsoft's. Holomaxx asserted that the marketers it works with comply with the federal anti-spam law. But the company nonetheless acknowledged that at least 0.5% of the emails it sent through Microsoft, and 0.1% of emails it sent via Yahoo, went to invalid addresses or to users who had opted-out of receiving messages, according to Fogel's written opinion. Microsoft and Yahoo asked Fogel to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that they were immune from liability. Holomaxx countered that the companies shouldn't be able to claim immunity because their filtering technology was "faulty," their decisions about filtering were "motivated by profit," and because they refused to discuss the reasons for their decisions. But Fogel wrote that none of those allegations were sufficient to show that Microsoft and Yahoo acted in bad faith. "Holomaxx alleges no facts in support of its conclusory claim that Yahoo's filtering program is faulty, nor does it identify an objective industry standard that Yahoo fails to meet," he wrote. Fogel's decision regarding the claim against Microsoft contained nearly identical language. Fogel said that Holomaxx can amend its complaint and try again, but it's not clear whether the company will do so. A lawyer for the company did not respond to a request for comment from Online Media Daily.
Among all of the breathless coverage of Groupon's success, Business Insider stands out as the most skeptical on the sustainability of the Groupon business model. Already the deal-of-the-day market is getting crowded with Groupon wannabes, from local Web sites to demo-targeted offers to moms and young men, and high-end offers like Gilt. I have tried a number of deal-of-the-day programs (including Groupon) and eventually canceled them all because they began to feel more like spam than good deals. While I can be as impulsive as the next guy, I found that the time spent calculating and comparing the offers to the usual on-sale prices on the retailer's own site was pretty much a waste of time. I came to regard each email not as "Hey, here's a deal you might like," but rather "Here is a bunch of shit you don't really want or need that we are being paid to push to you, so spend a few minutes looking at this stuff and make sure you really don't want any of it." I didn't. I'm sure the theory sold to advertisers is that this is a great way to introduce your business to new customers through a generous discount they won't be able to resist. Once in the door, consumers will either buy more than the discounted item or have such a cool experience that they will become repeat customers. Everybody wins. But there are plenty of stories about customers doing just the opposite: not buying more and never coming back. I should know, since I'm one of them. Just as there are people who relentlessly clip (or download) coupons from the local newspapers to save a bundle when they grocery shop, I suppose there are those turned on by deal-of-the-day discounts. But are these folks building loyalty to the businesses in the offering -- or to the email discounter provider? When you take advantage of sales before and after Christmas, do you really make a mental note to reward the retailer with future business because of the savings? Or, like me, do you think: "OK, I am helping reduce the inventory they overbought or am taking discontinued models or lines off their hands. With their mark-ups they are still at least breaking even. And what the hell, the only thing left is XXXL!" The only loyalty being built there is to wait out the next sale instead of ever paying sticker price. What was supposed to be "local" to my hometown so I could run out and get a $50 meal for $25 was often 20 miles away (not an insignificant distance at $4 a gallon at the pump), and the meals I bought were pretty mediocre at best. I would say 99% of the "local retail" offers held absolutely no geographic interest for me. During the time I was a Groupon subscriber, I never saw one offer from a merchant in my hometown. In addition, most of the offers were for stuff that I would never buy anyway (like $20 worth of candy for $10). With deal-of-the-day offers from national retailers that would have been delivered through the mail, I too often found limited sizes and colors used as a tease to sell colors that would not provoke your wife to ask "What the hell...?" And most of the time the offers were no different from what you would have gotten just wandering into the retailer's "outlet," "discontinued" or "on sale" section of their Web sites. Now, to be honest, I am not a shopper (like most other men I know). I don't wander the aisles of stores seeing what's what. I walk in, buy what I intended to buy, and walk out. Last weekend my son said we set a world record for getting in and out of Home Depot. I research online nearly everything I buy that costs more than about $100, to get a sense of what I should be paying before buying locally or online. Perhaps that mentality makes me a bad candidate for deal-of-the-day offers, which certainly must count on impulse to drive much of their business. My rule of thumb is pretty much "Did I wake up this morning and put this item on a shopping list?" The answer for deal-of-the-day offers is nearly always "No" -- a word I think these businesses will start hearing more and more.