The jobless rate is up again, Toyota’s issued a warning about a $5 billion operating loss, and a watchdog panel believes at least $78 billion in bailout money was wasted. But Yahoo wants advertisers to know the situation isn’t all bad.
Google Grabs 76% Of Search Spend In Q4
U.S. search advertising spending was relatively flat for most of the year and declined by 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier.
Breaking it down by search engine, Google grabbed 76 percent of search spending in Q4. Spending on Google Search and its syndicated networks dipped 4 percent year-over-year (YOY).
Despite that, Google gained 2 percent market share from Google Content, which saw a robust 63 percent YOY growth in 2008 due to its improved targeting and monetization efforts across the AdSense network.
Meebo Gets Facebook Back
UPDATE: Meebo has now announced that Facebook is back on. Seth at the Meebo Blog writes:
After some hard work from the folks here at Meebo and help from a whole host of people at Facebook, we now have Facebook back in Meebo.
Plus, Meebo is now the first launch partner of the “alpha” version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration. That’s pretty cool.
Social Networks Need To Figure Out Revenue Models Soon
It’s been said several times our favorite social networks have really struggled to turn a profit. YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook all are in this same boat, though they must not be a total money sink since they’re still around. The bigger ones do have advertising programs in place at least.
YouTube, AP, Hurting Fair Use
“This is what it’s come to,” writes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann. “Teenagers singing ‘Winter Wonderland’ being censored on YouTube.
Using Advanced Segments in Google Analytics
I had a chat with E-Nor President Feras Alhlou after reading a guest post of his on the Official Google Analytics Blog. He was asked by Google to make a post, as E-Nor is a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant and is very active on a number of Google Analytics (GA) support fronts.
Super Bowl Ads Drive Fans Online
The role the Internet plays surrounding Super Bowl Sunday activities continues to be an important one, with two-thirds of those who watched the game reporting they went online at some point during the day, according to comScore.
Around 41 percent of respondents said they used the Internet during the actual game, while 33 percent logged on during halftime. Some of their Internet-related activities on game day included going online to watch this years Super Bowl ads (12%), while 8 percent said they viewed previous years ads.
Google Optimizes Book Search for Mobile
Google has launched a long overdue mobile version of Book Search for the iPhone and Android. This includes access to over 1.5 million mobile public domain books.
Digg Crowd Starts Seeing Itchy Trigger Finger Warnings
Recently, very active Digg.com users digging at a fairly rapid pace have been met with an error message advising them to slow down and actually read the story they’re digging.
An image of the message was dugg up to the front page. It reads:
“Whoa there cowboy! Itchy trigger finger? Digging so fast is lame. How about reading some stories instead?”
Web Video Advertising Ready for Takeoff
Contentinople Insider has released a report looking at the web video boom, and traffic to sites that offer video has taken off tremendously. This means that we will likely see a massive shift in web video advertising in the approaching future.