• Marketing To Millennials
    Niche marketing is "a hot idea" says Nilson report publisher David Robertson, especially when it comes to reaching Millennials. One example is Facecard.com, an electronic card that allows users to borrow, lend, or give away money to their friends. For a fee, retailers can send Facecard owners "prewards", or small donations of store credit, based on their age, location and personal interests. These $2-$3 gifts are redeemable via credit card, making it easy to track consumer response. During a test in June, more than 5,000 Millennials signed up for Facecard. One 16-year-old describes the promotional service as "free money" and …
  • Yahoo Seeks To Expand Yahoo News
    Yahoo is aiming to turn Yahoo News into a major news organization, a la Reuters or The Associated Press. According to AFP, the Web giant is moving away from aggregating others' news content and is instead cutting deals with wire services and investing heavily in its own roster of reporters. "We have been doing a lot of original reporting and we are going to be doing a lot more," director of editorial programming Jessica Barron told AFP in an interview. Yahoo News already reaches about half a billion people worldwide. "Our aim is to reach these bigger names and use …
  • MySpace: More Than Just A Social Network
  • Are Kids Spending Too Much Time Online?
  • LinkedIn Looks To Hollywood
  • Video Wars: Silverlight Vs. Flash
    Microsoft's Silverlight technology is locked in a battle with Adobe's Flash over the future of Web video. Microsoft received a huge boost when NBC decided to use Silverlight as its video player. More than 40 million U.S. viewers have gone to NBC's Olympics site to watch some of the 2,200 hours of live footage from the Beijing games. Silverlight, a free download, is required to stream the events live. By bulking up its user base, Microsoft is also looking to win over developers, too. "It's quickly becoming a very popular way to build next generation applications. There's a lot …
  • American Social Nets Struggle In China
    China has the world's largest Internet audience. As such, it should be the holy grail for social networking sites, but the likes of MySpace and Facebook have found the going rather tough in China. This is partly due to the country's "perilous" regulatory environment, which renders social networks responsible for any piece of content on their site. Indeed, if a site doesn't comply with government regulations, authorities have the right to shut it down. Unaccustomed to this, MySpace and Facebook trail Chinese social networks, whose elaborate censorship technologies block or delete politically sensitive material. As Forbes reports, these "social networks …
  • Google Tweaks Bidding System
    Google is updating the system it uses for judging ad quality to calculate results in real-time, Cnet reports. The so-called ad quality score is a critical measurement that influences how ads are placed next to search results. Google weighs both the ad quality score and the amount the advertiser is willing to pay in determining which ad to place. For ads with low quality scores, which are determined using criteria like click-through rate and the speed with which the advertisers' landing page loads, Google raises the minimum bid requirement. But changes are coming to this system, too. According to …
  • Why MySpace Is Still Top In The U.S.
    Thanks to a brilliant international expansion policy, whereby users do language translations for them, Facebook has quickly surpassed News Corp.'s MySpace as the largest social network on the Web. However, TechCrunch notes that Mark Zuckerberg and co. are still 36 million users behind MySpace in the U.S., and that at current growth rates, it would take 18 years to make up that kind of ground. As far as money goes, MySpace has a more monetizable user base. While Facebook has more overall users, the most lucrative audiences come from the U.S., U.K., and Japan, where the online ad market is …
  • Yahoo Shares Slump To Seven-Month Low
    Now, the Microhoo saga really has come full circle: Bloomberg News reports that Yahoo's stock on Thursday slumped to its lowest level since Microsoft launched the unsuccessful takeover seven months ago. Prior to the sell-off, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Jeff Lindsay issued a report citing a softening display ad market. "What is different between now and when the first bid happened is the environment has gotten a lot worse," Lindsay said, adding that he expects Yahoo shares to perform in line with the market. "The immediate way forward and upwards is unclear." Yahoo dropped 6 cents to $19.11 …
« Previous EntriesNext Entries »