20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber

Popular Mechanics: "When we decide to launch something, we have a weekly meeting where all those things come together and we look at all the evaluations and we make decisions—revenues and any effects on ads do not come into those meetings. We don’t even know what the effects are. We make the decisions solely based on how good it is for search, how good it is for users. The ads are on a different part of the page, and the ad people, I assume, do the same kind of thing and try to improve the ads."

Most Bloggers Don't Deserve Any Ad Revenue

louisgray.com: "In a recent discussion on this topic, a blogging peer of mine said, 'What's 'fair' to me is making enough to cover hosting costs and buy myself some toys every once in a while. I do that, which is enough. But if I couldn't even cover hosting costs, I'd stop blogging.'

And to me, I don't possibly see how the word 'fair' can come into play. As bloggers, the ad industry, and our readers, truly owe us nothing. If we have opted to start writing, it is on our own choice. What we write about? Again, our choice. Where we opt to be hosted? Usually our choice. Our page layouts? Our choice. Our blogging platform or schedule? Our choice. So how does 'fair' come into it? The goals must be somewhere else, whatever they may be for the individual, be it a hobby, setting up for the 'next' job, continued writing practice, or enjoying the community."

Bezos On Innovation

BusinessWeek: "Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is 'why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area.' That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with 'what do my customers need?' Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company."

Rules Of Engagement: Time Spent And New Metrics

MediaPost: "In April 2007, Web tracking company Compete.com added an 'Attention' metric to their analytics, which takes into account time spent on a site. In July of last year, Nielsen//NetRatings followed suit, and began using time spent as the primary metric of popularity. In search, text-dominated search engine results pages are making way for universal search results that include more 'engaged' formats for search listings.

Similarly, Yahoo and Google recently added video ads to their paid search programs--a change that favors time spent with the ad rather than impressions or clicks. And YouTube recently announced YouTube Insight--an analytics product that measures the length of users' interaction with videos. Over the last few months, time spent has clearly become an established metric, and it provides one gauge for engagement."

Habit-Forming Blogs: New Research Into Why People Read

WSJ: "When University of California at Irvine researchers delved into usage patterns, they found study participants who labeled their blog-reading time as “chilling out” and “doing nothing,” with one describing his impulse to read blogs as similar to his cigarette habit. Another talked about following through on her blog-reading routine even when she wasn’t interested in some of the content.

In other words, when it comes to some blog readers, keeping them may be much easier than getting them in the first place–a finding that suggests the importance of good marketing for blogs."

An Open Letter to CEOs of Social-Network Sites: Get a Relationship Point Person

Advertising Age: "Banners alone aren't going to cut it. Regardless of how much inventory you have, CPMs are going to continue to decrease because those banners lack effectiveness. And the advertisers that are willing to buy only that inventory are not going to be the brands you want to have long, big-revenue relationships with. Not that revenue from the same dating-site-shilling, mortgage-brokering, free-iPod-offering advertisers you're getting (and consumers are ignoring) now is a bad thing, but it won't be the difference in helping your property fulfill its true potential.

You need a new position: chief relationship officer. The fact that you've had chief revenue officers without this position is, frankly, disturbing. If you want major brands to commit to long-term relationships with you, you're going to need to commit to long-term relationships with them -- and help them create relationships with your users."

US sees drop in number of newspaper journalists

Press Gazette: "The number of newspaper journalists in the US fell last year by almost 5 per cent to a low of 52,600, the lowest it has been for almost 25 years and the biggest drop in 30 years.

The new figures, released by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, reflects the attrition going on in the America media."

Google Expands TV Advertising Service on Dish Network

Bloomberg: "Advertisers can buy spots of 15, 30, 45 or 60 seconds, choosing what stations they appear on and when they run. Google's technology also allows advertisers to see what percentage of viewers watched ads until the end."

Twitter Testing Advertising In Twitter Streams

TechCrunch: "Twitter was down tonight, nothing really unusual for the San Francisco based startup (to be fair though downtime has improved since they dumped Joyent), but what was different is some reports of users spotting ads in their Twitter stream during the service difficulties. There were no ads evident when I visited Twitter, which may indicate testing only in preparation for a broad-scale rollout"

Rubicon Project Takes On Google For Free Ad Serving

MediaPost: "GOOGLE DIPPED ITS TOE INTO the free ad-serving market when it rolled out the DoubleClick-backed Google Ad Manager service in March, but the giant is far from the leader in what is an increasingly crowded space.

Companies like Exponential Interactive and OpenX already offer free ad serving, tracking and reporting, and now there's a newcomer that aims to take on Google: The Rubicon Project."

Sizing Up a Post-Yahoo Ad Landscape

WSJ.com: "If all of a sudden the cost-per-click prices go very high for Google and the return on investment goes down, you can instantaneously move money away from Google and into Yahoo. If you lose that option to move money into Yahoo or a Yahoo-Microsoft combination, the only option is to retreat from the search market, lower your spend, or grin and bear it"

MySpace Plans More Merchandise Sales After Music Deal

Bloomberg.com: "The company is in talks with Internet retailers and also plans to add a check-out feature, DeWolfe said. He declined to identify the companies or reveal revenue targets. MySpace last week forged a deal with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. to share revenue from sponsorships, sales of concert tickets, mobile- phone ring tones, music and related merchandise."

Yahoo to Test Google Ads As It Mulls Broader Deal

WSJ.com: "Yahoo Inc. said it plans to carry search advertising from Google Inc. as part of a test that could lead to a broader partnership.

The two-week test, which will be limited to U.S. traffic and no more than 3% of Yahoo's Web search queries, is designed for the two sides to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader search ad outsourcing arrangement. They have been discussing such an arrangement as part of Yahoo's pursuit of alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited acquisition offer, according to people familiar with the matter."

Are Facebook Apps The New Brand Wasteland?

Three Minds @ Organic: "Second Life today, post-hype-apocalypse, contains scattered groupings of people in a whole sea of empty space, containing a number of eerily abandoned brand islands. When recently digging through every press release I could find about a brand launching a new Facebook App, I started to wonder if this was the new brand wasteland. At the front of the Facebook list are a myriad of highly social applications with hundreds of thousands, even millions of active users. But to the back are all of the big names (Coke, Honda, Adidas, Verizon) with applications drawing in... 12 active users?"

Courts chip away at Web sites' decade-old legal shield

CNET: "For more than a decade, Web site operators have enjoyed a broad legal shield against lawsuits filed over material posted by their users, which has let user-driven sites like YouTube and MySpace.com flourish.

But a pair of recent rulings by federal district judges have chipped away at that protective shield. If those decisions are upheld on appeal, and if more judges follow suit, Web site operators and Internet service providers may find themselves compelled to police what their users post--or face the unsettling prospect of being held liable for the contents."

Yahoo previews online ad management platform

InfoWorld: Yahoo said Monday it will have a Web-based system in place to buy online ad space across some 600 newspapers and other online sites as soon as July. The system is designed to let publishers quickly find available ad space on their own sites for advertisers, and when none is available, on other sites.

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In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

New York Times: "A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment."

ITunes records a sales milestone

Los Angeles Times: "Apple sold more albums in January and February than any other U.S. retailer, market research firm NPD Group said Thursday, underscoring how the music industry is on the front edge of a digital media shift that is upending businesses as diverse as bookstores and video game makers."

MySpace Music Store: Where's the Long Tail?

ReadWriteWeb: "MySpace doesn't just cater to the major acts -- much of the appeal of the social network is in the ability to connect directly with local, long tail acts. That's where its true roots lie. As Matt Rosoff writes on CNET's Crossfade blog, 'major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience... MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world.'"

Internet Ad Spend Grows in 2007 as U.S. Lags Overall

ClickZ: "Among all media categories, Internet spending showed by far the largest increase: a jump of 18.9 percent over the previous year.

Overall spending for the year grew just 0.6 percent. The softening economy may have played a role, as the U.S. lagged other countries in overall spending. Asia-Pacific reported a 12.1 percent increase, while the EMEA went up nearly 5 percent.

Other U.S. categories that showed an increase in 2007 were national magazines (7.6 percent), national Sunday supplements (4.9 percent) and outdoor (7.2 percent), which continued its five year climb. Newspapers continued their steady decline in the U.S., despite increasing in all other countries measured by Nielsen."

Google's Gamble

BusinessWeek: "Google supporters warn that the number of clicks doesn't necessarily correlate with the revenue generated from those clicks. The company has been working to improve what it calls the 'quality' of clicks, minimizing the number of clicks that don't lead to revenue for advertisers. The result, at least in theory, is that advertisers may be willing to pay more for each click because the chances that a click will result in a sale will be higher. Clicks may go down. But Google's revenue would go up."

Musicians take social networking into their own hands

Reuters: "'The thing that separates Thisis50 from MySpace is we control the e-mail database,' says Chris 'Broadway' Romero, director for new media at G-Unit Records, which handles Thisis50. 'We can e-mail members if we want to.'"

The New Rules of Media

MediaShift | PBS: "I’m one of the few people in journalism who actually has a positive outlook for new graduates getting out into the job market. If you can learn multi-platform skills, learn how to deal with an online community, learn new ways of doing journalism in collaboration with the audience, you will be in demand at traditional media outlets."