Ask.com launched a free mobile app that allows anyone to create a poll, representing a change of culture at the question-and-answer search engine. Pictures can accompany each poll, whether snapped from the smartphone's camera or chosen from a library of images. Friends can share the polls on Facebook or Twitter. Location-based services allow the user to see what others nearby think about any question, such as a favorite restaurant or clothing store. The PollRoll app provides a place for comments. While the app provides a bit of entertainment for those willing to download it on their iPhone, it really represents Ask.com's move toward creativity, similar to the culture found at Google, Facebook and Twitter. The PollRoll app emerged from a hackathon, one of several mobile applications the company is pursuing. A second screen app to support television will likely emerge as the next series of mobile applications. Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds said the entertainment focus surfaced from feedback on the Q&A site, along with the need to help employees become less afraid of innovation and sharing their ideas. Leeds set out to change the culture of the company. "I needed to find a way to plant seeds and challenge employees to come up with new ideas," he said. "Ideas were stagnant. People were afraid to speak up." Since October, company employees, nearly 300, meet each Friday afternoon in groups for business-related improvisation classes to stir their creative side. The PollRoll application is the first born from one of those sessions. That change in culture may have prompted both analysts and users to jump-start the search engine. Core searches and revenue for Ask continues to climb. Ask Network accounted for 3.0% of explicit core searches in January 2012, up from 2.9% in December and November 2011, according to comScore. More than 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in January, up from 18.2 billion in December. Citi Group analyst Mark Mahaney published a report in January explaining how the company's revenue grew 22% in Q4 compared with the prior year's quarter -- slightly less than the 23% it grew sequentially. He put a "buy rating" for Ask's parent company, IACI, based on its search business.
The majority of Web users say they don't want to receive ads targeted based on behavior or search results personalized based on their prior activity, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. For the study, released today, Pew asked around 800 Web users how they would feel about a search engine remembering their prior queries and using that data to personalize future results. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they "would not be okay with it" because they feel it's an invasion of privacy. But privacy isn't respondents' only concern. Pew also asked a different group of 800 Web users whether they thought that personalization of results was "a bad thing because it may limit the information you get online and what search results you see" or "a good thing because it gives you results that are more relevant to you." Around two out of three respondents (65%) answered that it would be a bad thing, while just 29% said personalization would be a good thing. Pew also reports that most Web users don't like targeted ads. When researchers asked around 1,700 Web users how they felt about receiving targeted ads, 68% of respondents said they were "not okay with it" because they don't want to be tracked and profiled. Only 28% said they were "okay with it" because they received ads and information relevant to their interests. Those results are consistent with a studyreleased in September of 2009 by professors at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. That report found that two out of three Web users don't want customized ads. Despite the ad industry's efforts to tell people how to opt out of online ad targeting, only 38% of Web users said they are "generally aware" of ways to limit the information that's collected about them. Of that group, 75% say they use privacy settings at publishers' sites, and 65% say they change their browser settings. The report comes just one week after Google changed its privacy policy to allow it to combine data about signed-in users across a variety of products and services, including Gmail, Android and YouTube. Google plans to use this data for targeted advertising and personalized services. The report was based on a survey earlier this year of 2,253 U.S. adults total. Of that group, around 1,700 were Internet users and more than 90% used search engines.
Marketers could find a gold mine in Pinterest, but could have challenges with copyright laws. Last month the site sent more referral traffic to publishers than Google and Twitter, according to a traffic report released this week. Shareaholic, which aggregates data from 200,000 publishers reaching more than 270 million monthly unique visitors, estimates that in February Pinterest referred 1.05% of visitors to publisher Web sites, outpacing Google at 0.91% and Twitter at 0.82%. It turns out that Pinterest outpaced LinkedIn, Google Plus and YouTube combined in referral traffic. Facebook at 6.83% and StumbleUpon at 1.29% were the two sites that outpaced Pinterest for referral traffic. Google Plus referral traffic held steady at .05% of all traffic from January to February. Putting that into context, Shareaholic found that was the same traffic percentage referred by Yahoo Answers. "Referral traffic is interesting to follow," said eMarketer Analyst Kimberly Maul. "Pinterest and StumbleUpon allow you to go from site to site to site quickly, but Google, Facebook and Twitter require a little more effort because you have to click the 'Like' or the 'Share' button." Pinterest isn't only driving more referral traffic to publisher Web sites -- content seems to keep users on the site longer. An eMarketer report reveals that Pinterest users in the U.S. spent on average 88.3 minutes on the site in November 2011. Compare that with Facebook at 394 minutes, Tumblr at 141.7, and Twitter at 24.4. Maul points to comScore numbers that estimate time spent on Pinterest rose more than 500% between May and October 2011. She wrote that "comScore pegged unique U.S. visitors at 11.7 million in January 2012, with the average visitor spending more than an hour and a half on the site that month." The opportunity for marketers lies not only in posting information from their company, but also easily pinning photos and information from partners. The challenge, however, has become copyrights -- determining who holds the copyrights to the photos, Maul said. "With Facebook you post your own photos, but with Pinterest and Tumblr it's more about sharing things that's interesting," she said. "There must be a way to create the author of the photo." Referral traffic remains one part of the equation. The other belongs to organic search traffic that dominated with more than half coming from search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing.