New Traffick article: Everything I Know About Marketing, I Learned from Seinfeld
"Chicken salad, on rye, untoasted ... and a cup of tea." From the annals of Seinfeld reruns come timeless truths and contemporary observations on how business really works. There's no telling what can happen from this.
Posted by Andrew
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Thursday, September 11, 2003
Raise Your Hand if You've Ever Checked Your E-mail by Phone
I really don't understand the portals' fascination with offering services to check your e-mail by phone. AOL is now touting its AOLbyPhone package, as reported by News.com.
Gee willickers, you can pay an extra four bucks a month and be able to hear spam on the other line. Ain't technology grand?
Posted by Cory
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Spam Fighters, Rejoice!
The number of resources devoted to fighting spam is increasing every day, which is both good and bad. It's bad because we shouldn't have to waste time on this junk, but it's good because people are starting to arm themselves with knowledge. And together we can win the war!
PCWorld has launched Spam Watch, a portal page for spam-fighting information, downloads and other resources. Most of the time, these "topic centers" offered by computing magazines are lame and end up stagnating after a few months. Still, I'm hopeful that PCWorld will actually maintain and nurture this spam portal for many years to come.
Posted by Cory
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Overture and Homestore
The race for distribution of contextually-placed keyword-targeted text ads continues as Overture inks a deal with Homestore.
Posted by Andrew
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Snowball Your Traffic... or Burn for All Eternity?
I got a nice little email from Cory Rudl tonight. Luckily, it didn't catch me with my defenses down, since it was addressed to "Albert." When I sign up for these kinds of things with a name like "Albert," or "schmuck," it reminds me later on that the email really isn't personalized and that the correspondent isn't really my friend. To say the least.
There's been a resurgence of lying liars lying about search engine traffic lately. I hear the phone lines crackling with hope as SEM newbies (often experienced in many other facets of business) tell me about so-and-so and his world-class Google-foolin' tool. Sigh. The fact that so-and-so made half a million bucks selling the tool is supposed to be all the validation the tool needs, and the cycle of ignorance and time-wasting continues.
Rudl's communique included this little gem of a come-on:
"So you can finally submit your web site to 150 search engines and directories automatically, and...
"Snowball your traffic and sales with top-ranking positions in search engine "Giants" -- like Yahoo!, Google, and AltaVista!"
It doesn't take a day-long seminar to show how wrong this all is - two minutes is all it would take. Let's just start with the obvious: AltaVista is not a "giant," it's a once-mighty fallen giant currently resembling a drunken fruit fly, and rarely shows up in your server logs, no matter what you do, because users don't use AltaVista anymore. Might be nice if they did, but wishing don't make it so.
In fact, there are fewer than five, and for my money, really one or two, non-paid web indexes of note today. For most businesses, Google is it. (I happen to love Teoma too, and its parent company Ask Jeeves has 3% or more of total search market share, so they're definitely worth a mention.) Both Google and Teoma do a good job of making life hard on optimizers. Type "the real thing" into Teoma and in the resources list on the right hand side, you get some surprising stuff: a critique of Coca-Cola from a labor perspective. Aren't search engines cool? They sure are, but they have to be pretty smart to be this useful, lest they be overrun by spam. So you're never going to see 150 or even 20 viable unpaid search indexes. It's hard to run a search engine. That seems pretty obvious given that arguably the #2 pure non-paid search index in the world (yes Teoma offers a paid guaranteed inclusion option but it seems worth ignoring this) has at best 3% market share.
The mighty portals, controllers of considerable search traffic, run either Google results, paid inclusion indexes, or pay-per-click (generally a mix of all three). So again, the old submission tool will do diddly to get you "into" AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Repeat after me: there is no free lunch.
So to all the bamboozlers out there still trying to shovel those useless search engine submission tools out the door, remember Elaine's evocative words: "The worst place in the world! With devils and those caves and the ragged clothing! And the heat! My god, the heat!"
Posted by Andrew
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Overture Gets Local
Overture Research, the recently announced experimental technology division of Overture, is toying with local advertising, according to News.com. The premise is to display pay-per-click ads for local businesses when performing a general search for "shoes," as an example.
Instead of being forced to wade through ads that may not represent companies local to your area, you would see ads for companies just down the street, which would be very helpful when doing research for products and then seeking local merchants that carry such products. This is a segment of PPC advertising that has yet to be tapped, and would be another good way for businesses to find and attract local consumers.
Overture's local search demo, while promising, leaves much to be desired. For example, in addition to entering their desired keywords, testers must also specify a zip code or city and state. Obviously, the benefit of the local angle is only realized if the search is transparent and elegant, not one that requires too much input from the user. This demo is more akin to a yellow pages search. My guess is that once this is rolled out, the algorithm behind it will detect your IP address or some other way for you to tell the search engine where you are, and it will do the rest. But, that's not happening yet.
Of course, Overture must struggle with how to determine when a user is searching for a local business and when a non-local source is sought, and that's an important detail.
This was a hot topic at SES in San Jose last month, and I wouldn't quarrel with estimates that this will be a $1 billion segment within five years. Advertisers should reap the benefits of lower competition for these local ads, and therefore, a lower cost-per-click. Should be fun to watch!
Posted by Cory
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Sunday, September 07, 2003
I Saw a Deadhead Sticker on an iMac
This study about the news consumption patterns of the "younger tech elite" (18 to 29) vs. the "older tech elite" (42 to 62) is presented the same way in this online story as it was in the televised news report I saw.
Notice anyone missing?
Posted by Andrew
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