Google Banned My Site
Well its not strictly my site, its a JV I am involved with. Google have dropped a domain from the index that has been parked on a Y! feed for about two years now. Here’s how I intend to get it back on:
The fisrt step (I am reliably informed) is to ensure that the content on the domain comes up to this standard:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en
Then I will submit a reconsideration request (in Google webmaster tools) and provide a begging letter to Google so that they can be happy that I am not going to spam their index. The begging letter must answer the following point precisely.
If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.
Google Wants Yahoo, Antitrust? Not A Problem.
How would you like 90% market share? Well Google would it seems, they announced yesterday that they would be pressing ahead, like a big advertising juggernaught to effectively control the US Ad market completely.
Should they not get the antitrust blessing (which is very very unlikely) then this will open the door for other companies to fight for the market space thats made available.
The Goohoo deal is worth around $250m (£126m) and $450m (£227m) to Yahoo, who must be very glad that Google are even knocking at their door.
Eric Schmidt is not worried about the antitrust case, he says:
“We are going to move forward. We are in the process of talking to the government. They’ve not indicated one way or the other how they’re dealing with us.”
Which I think translates to:
“We are going to make enough money out of this deal to fight whatever case we have to, so lets just do it anyway”
TV Advertising is Dead, Long Live AdCasting
The previous push format of program, adbreak, program adbreak etc… is (not surprisingly) under threat from the push/pull internet methodology.
Forrester publish a report this week outlining what we all will be doing in about 5 to 6 years time to get our TV, it looks much like the current online model. TiVo was the beginning of this revolution as far as I am concerned. Mediacasting (as I call it) is a divergent idea and requires a completely new behaviour pattern for advertisers to push their wares.
The only idea that I can see surviving is product placement, all other forms are intrusive and ruin to some extent the push pull relationship with whatever device you are using. Imagine your x-box stopping to show you an ad for a new game in the middle of your game (extreme example of course). As we are increasingly immune to large scale push ad campaigns, the new Internet style advertising is all about product placement, ask Google (who are currently pushing their TV advertising through the Dish Network).
This is not to say that push advertising will die. I predict that large scale TV ad campaigns will become more expensive and exclusive in the long term – a kind of badge of membership, only there for top brands at a national level. This will probably happen after the price war that kills off a lot of ‘too slow to catch up’ ad companies happens in the short term.
There is a new behaviour realm for Ad companies wishing to reach audiences, lets call it AdCasting. AdCasting is all about placing your product ‘next’ to, or wrapping it around the content that your audience is interacting with. It’s about granular campaigns that are technical, behavioural and contextual and that deliver simple messages over many mediums. It can be seen as exciting because there are not many rules and a big knowledge gap. The wide net of ads cast (AdCasting 
) will be multi-format and multi-platform and measured individually for perfomance criterias – relevance, coverage and effect.
This is possible because of a few things: statistics (which advertisers now expect to be completely accurate, no more guesswork), data portability (XML) and building experience of the typical conversion rates for each format (text unit, flash unit, video unit, radio/podcast placement etc…). These combine to provide a powerful alternative to traditional media push, whatever the medium. The real power here is accurately measuring the holy cow of ROI. If your advertising medium cannot support these kind of accurate stats, it will simply become a gateway to a medium that can.
Global Ad Revenue Set to Pinch
UK and US marketers are set for a pinching time as the global slowdown makes us all look to where the next ad dollar or ad pound is coming from. On the flip side, this is an excellent time for startups, as advertising will be cheaper and you will be competing less with larger brands.
According to an ANA survey 53% percent of those polled said they were looking at a cutback within the next six months; 87% are already riding-out the storm.
Yahoo/Samsung Roll Out New Brainwave – WebTV
Someone tries WebTV at least once every six months. Yahoo!/Samsung being the most recent. Its a shame to see companies wasting money on convergence projects such as this. Apple, Microsoft et al have all had a go in their past, but the problem is very fundamental, intricate and complicated. It requires a company with guts, intelligence, an ability to create new standards for both industries (web and TV), and above all lots of time and lots and lots of patience.
The J/V will release InfoLive a service that provides news, finance and weather information from Yahoo!. The question begs, to the product managers for things like this. Why? Why create something that is not needed? who NEEDS finance information on their TV? Weather info yes, but CeeFax had that covered 20 years ago. OK you may say “the information available via the internet is more granular and requires a more sophisticated UI than Ceefax” – a querty keyboard and a monitor is fine for this. And since people have laptops now, and will happily sit in front of the TV with a laptop (that has no UI limitations) I really do not see what NEED this product is addressing.
Yahoo! has not learned anything from Google at all. They live in a web world, not a push media one.
Branson £3m Antitrust Campaign
If both deals are inked, Virgin claims BA and AA would have nearly half of all take-off and landing slots at London’s Heathrow airport.
Credit crunching, fuel crisis laden merger talk has Branson reaching for the back pocket to pull out an anti-trust campaign. His beef is with the British Airways management who see this current turmoil as a chance to secure more landing slots at its self appointed base in London Heathrow, by merging with AA and buying out Iberia
Just goes to show that turbulent times can affect market conditions not only in the short term, but does also have the effect of clearing away smaller competition from the longer term picture, like a mass cull, or ‘weeding’ as the big brands would probably not like to admit. Virgin has always, admirably championed consumer choice, over aggressive market grabbing tactics, this being the biggest thorn in BA’s side.
Indias AdMedia Growth Spurt
Price Waterhouse Coopers predict that India and not China will be the media spend darling by 2012. China’s spend is set to increase a modest 15%, whereas India goes a lot further with an impressive 19%.
This marks a shift from uncomplicated advertising, advertising drawn from bland, faceless international campaigns, into the territory we are more familiar with in the west; targeted advertising.
Smaller agencies are emerging in a largely untapped marketplace to take a stake in the territory created by this growth, but it also will lead to opportunities for western agencies more familiar with the concepts and practices of more complex campaigns.
BBC ‘I Steal’, OfCom ‘Fine’
“The investigations found that in some cases, the production team had taken premeditated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning.”
I’m sorry, but the BBC has committed fraud. Why are they not being taken to court? Shouldn’t OfCom ask the BBC for the actual numbers of the people that were ripped off and send them the money that was stolen? instead of bagging it for themselves?
As for the £400k – I find the words ‘RECORD FINE’ funny – its actually not a record fine. It Just means inflation has made the figure bigger. Perhaps they should post the fine in Zimbabwean dollars instead? Now imagine the number of zeroes!
Gootube gets tapped up by Mob
“This is an area ripe for a major test case, which may reach the European Court of Justice, as courts across Europe are not being consistent in their approach,”
Joel Smith (Herbert Smith) on Berlusconi’s attempt to derail the YouTube copyright gravy train. It will only take a few more large lawsuits to break the spell that Google seems to have over ‘under the radar’ copyright and TM infringement – Law people – sharpen your pencils!.
Amazon Codes Paypal Clone
Amazon thinks it can take a bite from the paypal cherry by introducing a payment processor. The problem with competing with early adopters of internet specific functions or processors such as paypal, is that they have worked their way into to vernacular. If i send you a paypal, you know what I mean. What would you think if I said I was going to send you an Amazon?
