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Category Archives: yahoo
Markus is one insightful Canadian Web Guy
One of the great things about the internet business space is how one person can build an empire with the same revenues / impact / influence as a very large company.
Markus is such a fellow and I’m glad to see he’s blogging about his ongoing adventures creating and running one of the top dating sites in the world – PlentyofFish.com. Markus provides a lot of detail and insight into how he created the site almost as a lark and now effectively competes with major corporations in the social network/dating space.
With 200 Million page views monthly and climbing, Markus really knows his stuff. One observation he makes I’m still trying to digest suggests that eventually *only* small companies will rule the internet due to their much greater flexibility and effeciency. Yahoo, Google, MSN are betting billions that they’ll maintain the huge stakes in the online world rather than small niche companies. Frankly, I’m guessing there is room for everybody in the expanding online business space.
Yahoo 2.0 Trumps Google 2.0 …. again.
As Jeremy has noted, microformats are slowly but profoundly moving the web to the open, data rich, info cornucopia we’ve all been dreaming about. Yahoo is clearly the leader as “Web 2.0 Stylist” and one wonders if Google is going to be left wondering what hit them as developers and users move increasingly towards the simple but data rich environments Yahoo’s been creating for some time.
I’m beginning to wonder if Yahoo’s challenge in increasing market share, and thus stock price, is counterintuitive. Yahoo has effectively matched Google in search quality and has created a LOT of excellent applications and rich APIs while Google has simply stuck to a few great basics like gmail and search.
Perhaps the choice is simply overwhelming people who are thus choosing to stick with Google’s search interface (still simpler than Yahoo’s). Malcolm Gladwell has noted that when presented with too many purchase options people actually may choose fewer items than if presented with a smaller number of options. Could Yahoo’s problem be that they simply are doing too GOOD of a job ushering in Web 2.0 ?
Update: When Jeremy over at Yahoo took me to task on this post I realized I’d not expressed myself clearly and it looked like I was talking about a search comparison. (I’m leaving the post intact since he references it with a lot of comments.) I was not talking about Yahoo vs Google in search as much as Yahoo vs Google in the many other 2.0 projects like Flickr, APIs, and social networking features where I think Yahoo is beating out Google but not getting enough credit for seeing the future of the internet more clearly than most.
Fortune Magazine: Is Slashdot the Future?
Back in February David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine's senior editor, raved about Slashdot and SourceForge as the future of media. He focuses on the power of content and communities generated by users and notes how effectively and powerfully Slashdot manages content and community with minimal staff.
Kirkpatrick ponders the implications of open source "revolution" noting that open source is:
… Creating something of tremendous widespread utility for the ego value …
How powerful will ego be in shaping the media landscape of the future? I've been noting at events like Mashup Camp as well as chats with people from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc that large numbers of extremely bright people are motivated to a very large extent by pride and virtuosity rather than a narrow focus on money. It's not just coincidence that corporate giants Yahoo and Google began in academia as non-commercial projects. Both were inspired more by the interests of their creators than by a quest for dollars, yet rose to become two of the most successful companies in the history of commerce.
Of course profits and selfishness will play significant roles in the future of almost all companies, but perhaps the ability of the internet to leverage time, skills, and social connections so effectively is also generating more ego-based economic activity than ever before.
Online vs Offline Advertising – an epidemic of irrationality.
Matt McAlister is unimpressed with online advertising.
OK, but take a look at OFFLINE dude! I replied to him over at his blog:
I think you may be overestimating the abysmal stats behind conventional advertising. Online, the 1% of people clicking into an advertiser's site at a cost of perhaps .15-.25 is very good. For example if you advertise a website prominently in a print publication you should expect perhaps 1/10th to 1/100th that level of performance (1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 readers) clicking to the site. I've tested this result using unique URLs and large print ads and the results were…underwhelming. I've seen no study to contradict my own results though I've noted many ad buyers tend to evaluate ad effectiveness in very questionable ways, such as when a $20,000 print campaign results in a few thousand leads and the conclusion is that it was a huge success.
Context ads have redefined the relationship between content and advertising in a positive way for both advertisers and publishers, and until a LOT more money flows from absurdly overpriced offline media to online, and thus starts to close the ROI gap, I think it is unreasonable to expect online ad models to change much, although do see them moving away from PPC and towards pay per action models which make performance measures somewhat more straightforward and PPC fraud almost impossible.
I think many online folks simply have no idea about the incredibly poor performance of offline advertising. My working hypothesis is that most advertising buys have negative ROI but that media companies and sales reps have done a very good job of convincing ad buyers that their advertising is working.
This article suggets that Google's failure to get high bids for print ads was an anomoly. On the contrary I think this is a glimpse of the future of advertising, which will continue to move online until relative ROIs balance out.
Google selling print failed because print advertising is *dramatically* inferior to online and Google customers know this. Even online campaigns generally have negative ROI, but I suggest that most large, image driven print campaigns have negative ROI unless flimsy methodologies are used to measure ROI.
Few clients measure print effects well if at all, allowing advertising reps and companies to BS their way to keeping TV and print in play which is the main funding source for large media companies.
Based on my observations and experiments with print and online advertising in the travel sector It's an epidemic of irrationality, where few bother to measure ad effectiveness and those few who do measure it, and find print generally fails to deliver positive ROI, simply turn to subjective justifications for continuing failed campaigns.
Yahoo Maps “Go ahead, commercialize me”
Jeremy via the Yahoo Developer Blog clues us in that Yahoo has "lifted many of the restrictions associated with the Yahoo! Maps APIs. Until today, the APIs were available only for non-commercial use unless you applied for an exception. The concept of commercial and non-commercial has gone away and exceptions are no longer necessary in most cases". [bolding and italics added by bold Italian Renaissance Artists]
Although I'm not surprised about this (Yahoo and Google reps at Mashup Camp in February were indicating that the future for API use was going to move along these lines) I think it's superb and cool and a huge hat tip to Yahoo for, as usual, getting the big Web 2.0 picture right and right on.
The concept is echoed by Eric Schmidt at Google in his recent LA Times interview:
We don't do our own content. We get you to someone else's content faster.
As a publisher I'm loving this. Give me simple but robust tools and an advertising network and I'm happy to find content and work to create sites and share the revenues with those who manage the network and the APIs.
Microsoft and Yahoo? What would you call THAT search?
Reports are swirling of a possible Microsoft Yahoo deal that would fight Google with new search cleverness and strategies. What would we call a hybrid MS/Live/Yahoo search engine?
MooCroHa!
MYooHaHa!
YaLive!
LiveYoo!
None of those work for me, but I think I like: YaMoo!
Especially good when OEMd on Gateway Computers.
Let’s have more OPEN conferences – a LOT more.
I've been to all or portions of about 7 internet conferences in the past year, and without a doubt Mashup Camp was my favorite in terms of the quality of the information and the way it was delivered.
Unlike the highly structured MIX06, WebmasterWorld, AD TECH, and Search Engine Strategies, MashupCamp lets attendees decide the topics, interact via wiki and other features, and in my favorite session had developers present their stuff to small roving groups in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions.
Rather than take a nap because the topics were rehashes of what I knew, I had to take a walk outside to cool my brain from the firehose of Web 2.0 information overloading me in Mountain View during the 2 day conference.
I think and hope that events like Foo Camp, Bar Camps, and Mashup Camps are the future of power networking, because this type of conference builds a much stronger type of relationship between attendees and powers more effective idea building than the traditional "lecture/session/track" model. It's a wild west out there and the conferences should reflect that.
Conspicuous is the fact that this conference charged nothing to attend, cleverly getting corporates to sponsor the meals and other needed items. I did chip in a few hundred because that was helpful but I don't think it'll be needed at the upcoming conferences, which now have even more active support of Yahoo, Google, MSN, ASK, and many more key industry players.
Huge KUDOS to David Berlind, Doug Gold, Mary Hodder and Doc Searles who not only put on a great event but are doing it again in July and expaning the camp to include "Mashup University".
Another one bites the dust.com?
It’s spring and people in the travel sector are all buzzing about revamping their websites. In many cases this will happen with little regard to quality information or navigation and will wind up with the site losing traffic thanks to deep sixing pages that have been indexed for years. Even with 301 redirection it’s not clear you can recapture old page ranks easily after revamping sites. The best advice for travel sites? CHANGE little with your old indexed pages unless you are having problems within search indexes. Add NEW PAGES to the existing site with information in mind rather than “improving the look”.
For reasons I simply can’t understand people in travel cannot get beyond “image” and therefore almost completely misperceive the value of designing websites not for “looks”, but for info richness. Although nice looks are not totally incompatible with nice info, one sees few sites that blend them in ways that will optimize the intended result (more travel related business in the area).
Errors like flash introductions and splash pages are simply too dang common in the travel sector which ironically still has simply staggering potential for sites that are built to help users find usable information.
PPC campaigns are far more common at the mom and pop business level than at the higher level destination management level where they’d have ROIs of ten to ONE HUNDRED times that of TV and print campaigns where the travel ad spend is largely wasted. There is still a very common notion that you can drive people to a URL using print advertising as effectively as with online ads. In fact the cost to drive people online with print is about 10-100x the online cost (I know this from extensive experiments I did in my past life as webmaster for Southern Oregon Visitors Association).
I’m finally coming to understand that as human primates we have a tendency to be stubborn and hold old ideas dear until the consequences become so severe and negataive or the evidence so overwhelming we simply MUST change course. Combine this with most people’s mathematical illiteracy and you’ve got what we’ve got – a LOT of wasted advertising buys in the travel sector, not to mention waste, waste, and more waste in all areas where human stubborness prevails over reason.
Tipping point of choices leading to actions.
Malcolm Gladwell, the clever author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point", spoke to Webmasterworld Boston. One observation was that having too many choices can inhibit our actions, as in the case where a company that offered FEWER retirement plans found this INCREASED participation.
Noting how many super applications Yahoo has been spinning out over the past few years I'm wondering if other users, like me, are simply overwhelmed with the choices and therefore NOT taking advantage of what appears to be the best suite of options in the online universe.
I stopped using Yahoo 360 not because of problems – it's excellent – but because there are only so many routines to absorb when they are not part of your core set of work tools or interests. Also, unlike Myspace, 360 did not seem to be creating an "exploding community" and thus time spent setting it up might have been wasted if it fell off the map as a community place.
I think I'm like many users who are not yet ready to tie into highly personalized programs though I'm getting ready for that now that I want to tap more effectively into RSS and the power of online communities.
Yahoo 360 (and my Yahoo) are such good tools that I'm planning to go back and figure out how to use each more effectively, but the trick as a user is to pick the best combination of quality and community. Good applications that have small or shrinking communities are problematic for social reasons. Bad applications with big communities have problems as well, though for different reasons.
Joe Duck 