Main points from Google's latest Qtrly results
Posted by Reggie James | October 16th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
- Total revenues grew 7% to $5.9bn, the fastest growth seen this year.
- Net income jumped 27% to $1.64bn.
- In search, the amount of paid clicks rose 14% year on year, with evidence of a recovery in search pricing, with cost per click up 5% from the second quarter, though it is still down 6% year on year.
- Money in bank $22bn.
Tags: Google results, Paid Search, PPC, Reggie James, revenues up
Posted by Reggie James | October 1st, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Twitter Logo
An excellent peice from Chris Crum at Web Pro News
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/29/an-equation-for-getting-retweets-and-traffic
Tags: Chris Crum, Reggie James, twitter
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Posted by Reggie James | September 30th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
Collaborative Messaging from Google – Wave – is this the future?
Interesting developments today regarding the new open platform – WAVE from Google. Early days but interesting.
Google WAVE
Tags: Google, Google Wave, Reggie James
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
Posted by Reggie James | September 23rd, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
BingHoo vs. Google: A battle of the Titans or 1st round KO?
The news that Yahoo and Microsoft have finally tied the knot and will provide advertisers with a combined search offering has been a long time coming. The dominant partner in the relationship — Microsoft, has been trying to drag Yahoo kicking and screaming down the aisle for the best part of a year and the on going saga has claimed many an exec along the way; not least founder and former CEO, Jerry Yang.
In essence, the fait accompli was almost inevitable given Google’s dominance in the search space. Alongside the worsening search ad revenues of the respective number two and three in the market, the Seattle giant really had to push this deal to appease shareholders. With both companies announcing poor recent results, the deal will also help boost morale and confidence at Microsoft, whose staff are probably sick and tired of playing 2nd (and 3rd) fiddle to the incumbent leader.
So why is Google so dominant and what’s it going to take the new ‘BingHoo’ to grab a slice of the Google pie? To answer this, lets take a quick look back to remember how we got here and how two major areas lie at the heart of this question –technology and reach.
Technology
Yahoo today is the combination of a variety of acquisitions, namely GoTo — the original pay-per-click auction-based engine that started the whole journey. This engine changed its name to Overture and then acquired AltaVista — the first text -based search engine — this was then all bolted together and has evolved to the Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) platform we have today. Google’s AdWords AJAX based software technology sitting on the open source Linux platform allowed the Mountain View Company to create a lighter front end and kept the process simple. It shared its vision with the development community and created an API allowing for large scale ad uploads and changes. Google also built its platform from scratch.
Yahoo, in essence didn’t. Along the way, YSM has desperately tried to update, change and integrate all the various technical platforms it had acquired and then had to overhaul all over again (via the Panama platform) when Google’s AdWords engine introduced a more intuitive and blind bidding based platform.
Reach
Augmented to this challenge of technology delivery for the Yahoo/Bing partnership is one of reach. The key question for advertisers is how can they justify running on any advertising platform which is clearly costing them more to facilitate than the return achievable as well as the volumes available.
Bing is making good headway and is very slowly chipping away at the vast Google search monopoly. Over the course of June and July, the site has jumped up 1 per cent to 8.9 per cent market share. Sadly, Bing’s 8.9 per cent market share still has a long way to go if it will dent Google’s dominant 64.7 per cent, but the seed has been sown and the fruits of this hard toil should start to show nearer the early part of next year when the combined force of the companies goes live.
Is this a good time for the combined Bing and Yahoo to make a wholesale dent in the Google traffic armoury? It would seem so. Google is currently looking to move a little further from search and into the more traditional areas of Microsoft’s domain — operating system software, programmes and ad serving as well as Yahoo’s old area of expertise: display advertising.
The reach question goes hand in hand with the technology question though in this case, not technology for the advertiser but technology for the end user of their platform — the consumer and business buyer — the basis on which the whole growth platform was built.
So what does the future hold?
Well, if the recent uptake of Bing and the ongoing rebrand of Yahoo, with its user-generated facility is anything to go by, the folks at Mountain View may want to re-examine where their focus lies. Mass investment in Android, Chrome OS, Maps/Street View etc., may be reviewed if the momentum in the tie-up gathers pace. Augmented to all the hoo-ha is the recent news that after three years, a $1billion investment made by Google for 5 per cent of AOL was finally bought back by AOL’s parent, Time Warner for a mere $283 million.
There is no doubt that if you use paid search as a part of your online marketing strategy, Google has been front and centre and an obvious choice for the past few years. On the other hand, Microsoft’s search engine has all-too-often been viewed by marketers as a peripheral option and a non-essential media buy with not enough traffic to justify the time you would have to spend implementing and managing it. Because of this, it was common to simply be left off of the schedule entirely.
Since the new deal could deliver Bing as much as 28 per cent of the U.S. search market share (according to comScore in June 2009), or around 4.1 billion monthly searches, from the perspective as a marketer, the question is this: is Bing now a must-have on the PPC media schedule?
Although the partnership will leave Bing far behind Google in terms of market share, Microsoft has eliminated a competitor and now has a fairly compelling argument to take to advertisers.
Assuming that Google does have to share the paid search media schedule with Bing, this perhaps leads to a more concerning question for the search giant; where is the budget going to come from?
Tags: BingHoo, Digital Clarity, Google, Interent, Reggie James
Bye Dawn – you are at peace because Death is nothing at all
Posted by Reggie James | July 13th, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
I sadly attended the funeral of my wife’s Aunt who sadly passed away last on Friday 6th July at the Trinity Hospice in Clapham, South West London.
The funeral was on the following Wednesday and I was asked by the family to read a few words as they were understandably too distraught with the death of this fine, caring and beautiful woman.
Dawn was a meticulous planner and in typical fashion had arranged all the funeral service so as not to be a burden to us in mourning her passing.
She had requested that the poem Death is nothing at all by Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral be read out at her service and this is what I read to the few that had gathered to see her on her final journey.
It was a moving experience and I thought I would share the poem with you.
Reggie
Death is nothing at all
Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
What is death but a negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost
One brief moment and all will be as it was before
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!
Canon Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral
Tags: Canon Henry Scott-Holland, Dawn Robinson, Death is nothing at all, Reggie James
The Budget, London April 2009
Posted by Reggie James | April 22nd, 2009 | Filed under Uncategorized
As Alastair Darling completed his wonderful budgetary plan and plunges the country into £175bn debt it has been reported on some of the trade wires that the Tory party has been quietly purchasing keyords on the major search engines related to todays budget.
Also, the term “Gordon Brown” with a link which sent people to a website called Sorryfromgordon.com.
I wonder who out the parties have bout the keywords, ‘sleaze’, ‘spin’ or ‘expenses’….
Reggie James
Tags: April 2009, key words google, London, Reggie James, The budget, £175bn debt
