US magazines are much thinner than they used to be, with advertising pages down more than 40 percent this year. The financial crisis has hit Conde Nast’s magazine empire more heavily than others. Let’s see who survives the downturn.
There is a fascinating article in the Canadian Financial Post on Geosign, a company that took in $160M in venture capital funding in March 2007 only to fall apart a year later because their business model consisted of gaming the search engines, known as “search arbitrage” which is nothing more than sending people who click on a Google ad to a web page that seems to have content, but is nothing more than a page with lots of online ads linking to the original search term. To read more, click here.
This is similar to the link farms a few years ago, a business model that Google also killed by simply changing its algorithm.
Google is in the business of ensuring that searches have integrity. In other words, if I search for a boutique hotel in Paris, I want to see sites that talk about or review boutique hotels, and boutique hotels themselves. Now Google can place ads for boutique hotels or hotels bookings sites on the right-hand side. These ads are paid for by those businesses. That’s okay. We understand that the right-hand side is for paid placements. But the left-hand side should give the user what he or she expects and that is good content that is not high up on the list simply because someone paid for it.
Thus, when companies like Geosearch “dirty” up the search universe, Google has to change its algorithm to prevent Geosearch websites from rising above sites that actually deliver high quality content.
There is no shortcut to creating a website or blog that brings a lot of traffic. You must create content that people want to read or watch regularly. This takes time and it is, at the core, a publishing business. Companies that try to get around this in a lazy fashion by using technology will not succeed.
[via Techcrunch]
Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo (the human-powered search engine) gave one of the best presentations at the Le Web 3.0 conference in Paris which took place from December 11-12, 2007. Jason’s presentation was entitled “Internet Pollution and How to Stop It”. He points out that much of the content on the Internet is spam and is utterly unreliable and downright harmful. From fake blogs (or splogs for spam blogs), search results filed with spam and disguised malware, the Internet has become a giant garbage can instead of the informative, fascinating medium that we thought it would become.
The problem is that people are building products that contribute to Internet pollution when they should be trying to help people weed out the junk (which is what he hopes to achieve with his new search engine called Mahalo).
Jason makes the following points in his presentation:
(1) We all bought into the ideal of a democratic, open Internet. He cites to Usenet as an example, except 15 years after it was created, Usenet groups came the target of the world’s first spam mailing (the green card spam from a law firm). Usenet became polluted shortly after that. Indeed if you go to one of the Usenet groups for travel in Europe, every single entry is spam. Usenet has become unusable; it’s worthless today. The things that make the Internet great: free, open, level playing field, those are the things that make it so easily gamed and destroyed. And it’s not just Usenet.
(2) Search results on Google are also untrustworthy. He showed a slide with search results that point people to a web page that contains malware. If you were to click on them, they would load an ActiveX plugin that would put porn onto your computer. Search is another one of the mediums that about to be destroyed like Usenet. We let all these things be destroyed and we did nothing — we (the entrepreneurs) are all to blame, he says.
(3) The problem is the free, open ecosystem. Seth Godin is a smart guy, a genius at marketing, and a friend, but he created, with good intentions, Squidoo. Much of the content on it is stolen, many of the links are actually affiliate spam, undisclosed “paid” links. How is it that a genius at marketing created a platform for spamming the web? Good intentions. But Seth does not go back and look at what he has done, he does not police what he has made. One cannot build these open platforms, expect it not to be abused, and pretend you do not see the abuse . . . all so you can make money. That is really what’s going on here. A lot of people are pretending they don’t see the abuse and the pollution of the Internet, so they can make money. They’re doing deceptive advertising, they’re spamming the hell out of it.
(4) Dave Sifry (founder of Technorati), who is smart and super nice, and a friend, believed that spam on Technorati could be controlled. Evan Williams, another good friend and the founder of Blogger and Twitter, is a very smart guy. If you go to Technorati and search for Paris hotels, the results are spam. It’s all spam from Blogger sites. So how can Dave Sifry and Ev Williams create systems that are causing massive pollution on the Internet? They’re both not running these things anymore. But these systems are open because if you close them you don’t get as many page views and therefore don’t get as much money. That’s the underlying truth and that’s why people are letting these things progress. This is very short term gain.
You can watch his presentation here: http://www.calacanis.com/2007/12/24/le-web-3-talk/.
The arguments made by Calacanis are similar to those in Andrew Keen‘s book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen goes one step further, however, to assert that all this free and “open” stuff is actually ruining culture. Wikipedia, Craigslist and YouTube are the villains in his book.
NEXT WEEK: Is Web 2.0 really ruining culture? A review of Andrew Keen’s book.
Not a day goes by without some kind of revelation about what’s being done with our user-generated content and our personal information on social networking sites and blog networks. The scandal around Facebook’s Beacon project, whose aim is to track and broadcast what Facebook users are doing on the Web, forced Facebook to back down.
In France, there’s a mini-scandal brewing over a blog network called Ladies Room (www.ladiesroom.fr), whose members create the content for the site. It turns out that Ladies Room is owned by a marketing agency called Heaven. A lot of people are upset because this was not clearly disclosed and had it been, several users would probably have never opted to become members. The French newspaper, Le Monde, talks about a strike among the contributors, but one of the commenters to the article says only a few members actually went on “strike” (i.e. refuse to post any more content). And again, one wonders who exactly this commenter is, whether she is really a member of the site or someone from the marketing agency (or a friend of the agency).
This is the biggest problem with these free services, whether they are social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, blogging services, or applications like Twitter. How are they supposed to make money to cover the cost of doing business? Advertising. They must cater to the desires of those who pay them — the advertisers — even if it means using our personal data and content in a way that we did not envision or desire. There is a built-in aversion towards transparency, openness and honesty.
The solution: give members the option to remain on the free service (with the knowledge that their personal data and everything else they do on the site will be sold to the highest bidder); or pay (for privacy).
Deloitte’s annual media consumption report says 66% of Internet users would click on more online ads if they were better targeted to them, younger users don’t mind ads as much as older users since they are less likely to pay for content. What must surprise and annoy video portals like YouTube is that people hate ads in video clips. Only 17% of users say they would watch an ad that plays in a video.
The most effective ads are those that appear during keyword searches. 78% of the respondents found the most useful ads by performing keyword searches. No wonder Google continues to do well.
The findings contradict a study conducted last summer in the Netherlands by Dutch research firm Qrius. In that study, they found that only 11 and 13 percent of those surveyed (ages 6 through 29) gave a positive or neutral reaction to ads on chat and game sites. Ads on websites and in emails received a positive/neutral rating among 13 and 15 percent, respectively. Oddly, 33 and 41 percent of young people consider ads in traditional media, TV and newspapers, not to be irritating.
