Google Australia plans to add more original content to its video website YouTube in a bid to appeal to marketers’ rising interest in online video advertisements.
According to Nick Leeder, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, the company has built a solid stable of marquee advertisers for YouTube over the past year. “To get more revenue, YouTube needs more content. We need to figure out what it is that users want more of and then find a way to give it to them,” Leeder said in a statement. “A lot of the content people look at on YouTube is short-form. Is that the nature of YouTube or can we run long-form video on it?”
Google does not run advertisements in or next to user-generated content on YouTube. However, if someone posts content that is extremely popular, Google asks them to become a “partner”. Partner agreements allow Google to run ads with content. It’s been reported that Google’s head office in the United States plans to spend $US100 million on original content for 20 new channels on YouTube.
Leeder said while Google Australia is unlikely to invest in original video content, he “wouldn’t rule it out”. According to research company Nielsen Online, YouTube’s Australian audience has grown strongly over the past year, rising from 6.55 million in May 2010 to 7.25 million in May this year. It now ranks as the fourth most popular website in Australia, with Google at number one.
Nielsen research also reveals almost three quarters of Australian businesses are dedicating at least 10% of their budgets to social media marketing, with YouTube forming an increasingly important part of this.
This is a good article on the high level things that can cause online marketing programs to fail, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Online marketing isn’t something you can just through in. These campaigns, just like traditional marketing, require thought.
Online marketing demands that entrepreneurs continue to innovate and evolve. Be it creatively repackaging products, promotions of services etc, a bit of freshness is sure to create an interest in your business. However, entrepreneurs are often found to refrain or limit their creativity unknowingly.
TJ Philpott, blogger and Internet entrepreneur, believes that the opportunities for creative online marketing are unlimited, and that small or medium business owners need to explore and to come up with new ideas to get the strategy right.
Studies have proved that there is a pattern to these creative inhibitions. The most common reasons are:
Lack of focus on creation
When creativity is flowing, multi-tasking has to stop, as it disrupts, dilutes focus and does not allow free flow of creative thoughts. Hence, at the first flashes of creativity entrepreneurs need to concentrate and let the ideas seep through and evaluate at a later point of time. Experts say set goals and pursue them, “For this month, I want to see my business bring in $100.” Then begins the process of ideation and motivation, inspiration will flow and creativity is optimized.
Read more:
Google draws over 1 billion visits to its websites each month, making it the world’s largest Web property. But what it might do with that market share has helped Google become federal regulators’ target in a massive antitrust investigation.
It is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly — what experts say is illegal is how a company uses its monopoly.
“Have they unfairly excluded competitors in a way that will hurt consumers?” asks Bob Lande, a director at the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit research group. He’s watching the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of Google closely.
“Google has this enormous power, and they have the incentive to unfairly exclude competitors in a way that could harm consumers,” he says. “And the FTC wants to see whether this has happened.”
It will be a difficult case to make: Google says the site is free to users, and if you don’t like its results, you can go elsewhere for information.
And despite its dominant market share, Google argues it doesn’t have a monopoly, pointing out there are other search engines like Bing. But more important, it says the FTC’s notion of search is antiquated.
Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, explains that search is no longer relegated to just search engines.
Google has this enormous power, and they have the incentive to unfairly exclude competitors in a way that could harm consumers. And the FTC wants to see whether this has happened.
- Bob Lande, director of the American Antitrust Institute
“You can go online and ask your friends — whether on Twitter or Facebook — y’know, ‘Hey, I need a recommendation for a good bicycle’ or something like that,” he says. “It’s not probably always going to be about the Web. It might be bringing in things like social [networks]. It might be bringing in trusted experts.”
Stifling Competition?
Gary Reback, an antitrust attorney in the Silicon Valley, is credited with spearheading the government’s massive antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s.
He says in the case of Google, the government is also investigating whether the search engine unfairly puts its own results at the top. For example, if a user Googled “map of Pasadena,” a Google map might come up above MapQuest.
“Press Release, Jun 20, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Dex One Corporation and Google announced today a strategic agreement that will elevate Dex One to a select group of companies around the world who serve as Google AdWords(TM) Certified Partners. This partnership is part of Dex One’s overall efforts to drive the company’s digital sales to 30 percent of total revenue by the end of 2012.
Through the partnership, Dex One customers will be better positioned to optimize their lead generation activities, leverage local search, enhance their digital presence and better compete in a changing marketplace.”
This is most impressive sounding. Dex One desperately needs to gain a competitive edge in the ad products they can offer small businesses. Google is the biggest online ad seller of them all. Dex One has just become one of Google’s key strategic ad sales partners. That sure sounds like a deal that will lead to “a marked competitive edge”. What extensive requirements need to be met to become an elite Google AdWords Certified partner? Manage millions of dollars of ad spend? Have offices in 50 countries? According to Google:
So how many companies are in this “select group of companies”? At least 720 in the US and 1240 if we count international agencies that service US clients.
The fact is Dex still sends click traffic to landing pages on the dexknows.com domain, and not the clients business website. The technology that Dex will use is the same technology Google provides to all adwords clients around optimization. Training to local sales reps in the field will be helpful, however, that sales representative will not be certified, nor will they develop the adwords campaign.
I expect that my previous dexknows post will remain the same.
Looking at properties as individual assets is not how Forbes looks at net worth, why should Google be any different?
We continue to hear about Facebook’s 700 million users, on the way to a billion worldwide. According to comScore Google is already there, at least looking across all its websites.
The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company’s network of web sites over the past year:
comScore gets its data from a global panel of roughly two million internet users from which it extrapolates findings to the entire online population. This sampling methodology has been much criticized but remains the standard in the industry.
The visitors that comScore counts aren’t the same as the active visitor numbers that Facebook self-reports (see Has Facebook’s Active User Growth Dropped 25% to 50%? for more on that), but the numbers do seem to be close to Facebook’s own statistics.
Search engine advertising or pay per click is something that every business can and should do. Even with terrific organic placement on searched that make the most sense to your business, 40% or greater (depending on the study) still buy from paid inclusion.
Looking at the search engine results page as a piece of virtual real estate puts you in the right mind set to see the advantages of search engine advertising. In a best case scenario, you are listed on the top in the paid area, listed in the local maps position, and your site shows up in the organic position, followed by a blog post that belongs to you as well. The fact is most customers will make their decision from the first page, showing up as many times as you can on the first page removes positions for you competitors websites to appear.
Dell, Pizza Hut, Dr Martens, and many other big companies have realized the value of search engine advertising and even on searches that they dominate the entire page will pay for placement in the paid inclusion. The red box shows the search engine advertising, and the highlighted yellow shows same site in organic placement.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Dominating the search engine results page allows for many benefits:
Just about every SEO expert will tell you that you have the ability to dominate on approximately five to 10 keyword strings, that said, think of how many ways a person could search for your product offering. Let use an example of a plumber in Denver Colorado. I might search for plumber in Denver, or Denver Plumber, it might be more pointed like toilet plumbing, or toilet plumbing in Denver or Denver toilet plumber. What I’m getting at is search engine advertising in paid inclusion allows this plumber to ensure that he shows up regardless of how the search is done. The same plumber with organic placement or SEO would be lucky to show up on the first page for all searches.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
If a searcher doesn’t qualify their search with a geographic location like “Plumber Denver” and only enters “Plumber,” the natural or organic search results show nationally. The local Maps & paid inclusion results will rely on the location of the physical computer to show local results, but the organic changes to national. You can see in the example below how the amount of search results changes.
With search engine marketing a business can have more complete coverage as it relates to keyword terms, locality, and predictability in frequency of exposure.
Mobile advertising is finally beginning to come of age as phones transform the relationship brands have with their customers in new, and sometimes unexpected, ways. The rate of growth is astounding, and the pace of change so rapid it is now difficult to believe that many companies greeted the predicted inexorable growth of mobile advertising with barely disguised scepticism a decade or so ago.
The UK market was worth £83m in 2010, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), up from £37.6m the previous year, an 116% like-for-like increase. Online market research company comScore says that in 2010 there were 19.1 million monthly mobile internet users in this country, up by 4.6 million from the same month the previous year. US investment bank Morgan Stanley said this year that “online advertising may finally be entering a golden age”.
The bank believes that the mobile advertising market in western countries is set to reach the recent growth rates seen in Japan, where mobile ad spend rose threefold from 2006 to 2009, to stand at $1bn (£610m). FirstPartner, a consultancy company, predicts that the UK market will be valued at £992m by 2015.
Much of that growth has been driven by the mobile internet and, latterly, by smartphones. Jon Mew, head of mobile at the IAB, points out that 41% of the population already have a smartphone. “By next year that should be half of the population,” he says, “and it shows no sign of slowing.”
Rik Haslam, chief creative officer at leading digital advertising agency RAPP, says: “Clients sometimes ask me whether mobile advertising is really something they should focus on. I tell them that right now more smartphones are being built than laptops and desktops combined, that mobile internet use is ramping up almost 300% faster than desktop internet access did, and that more than 50% of people use a mobile device while watching TV. So yes, it’s something clients should focus on.” He adds: “If the internet revolution disrupted business norms, then the smartphone revolution is devastating business norms.”
Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimate that by 2020 there will be about 10bn mobile internet devices worldwide – 10 times the number of PCs currently in use.
But the story can’t be told by statistics alone, as compelling as they are. The arrival of tablets, Apple’s iPad in particular, and the popularity of location-based services, which use the GPS functionality of a smartphone to offer users services based on their location, have transformed the user experience – and the aesthetics – of mobile advertising. Put simply: it has become sexy.
“Traditional brands didn’t do much on mobile, but it’s changed dramatically in the last year,” says Mew.
In recent years, around two thirds of online advertising spend has traditionally been on ringtones and downloads, but 12% of spend last year came from companies that sell fast-moving consumer goods.
The look, feel and size, of the iPad, one of the fastest-selling new computer devices in history (it took just one month to sell 1m iPads; the iPhone reached the same target in 74 days), has prompted fashion brands and car companies to create sumptuous online campaigns that were only seen in glossy magazines or expensive television adverts until recently.
According to Wikipedia (which we all know is the most trusted source for college students everywhere), inbound marketing is defined as “…a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.” Instead of outbound marketing that incorporates traditional forms of marketing like newspaper or television advertising where a company is reaching out to the consumer, inbound marketing is all about getting the customer to come to you. The term “inbound marketing” is relatively new jargon and was coined by the company HubSpot.
Inbound marketing centers on three main marketing tactics: content marketing, SEO and social media marketing. In a sense, inbound marketing is really integrated marketing; connecting various marketing methods and channels together to develop a stronger online presence and more powerful brand.
The idea of inbound marketing was developed as a response to the recent changes in consumer behavior. Consumers are no longer passive recipients, willingly ingesting countless marketing messages a day. In fact, many consumers (especially the younger generations) have learned to tune out traditional marketing efforts. The Internet is the great equalizer, where everyone can become a publisher of information. Social networking allows people unprecedented opportunities for expressing their opinions on everything—from who their NFL team should draft, the best places to stay in Las Vegas, and whether or not your products are any good. Blogging allows anyone to become an expert in what they are passionate about. Vegan moms who love to cook; there is a blogging community for them. Vintage car owners in Chicago; there are leading bloggers for them too. Each societal niche has an outlet online.
Yesterday the FCC issued a report saying that, despite that Internet thing with all those “websites,” there’s less news being created at the local level. But you already knew that, right? (The report was also supposed to give recommendations for righting the trend, but it didn’t really.)
So just how bad is it? Let’s take a look at some of the numbers contained in that 470-plus-page—1.8 inches-thick—study on shrinkage.
“It has been tempting to think that Americans are paying less for content.”
But in 2003, people spent on average $740 a year to consume media and information—on cable and Internet service bills, for print, and on their mobile packages. In 2008, that went up to $882. Most of the increase comes from paying more for TV and radio—about $130 more, on average—as well as some from rising spending on cell phones. So it’s the mobile service providers, cable companies and Internet-providing cable companies who are getting the largest portion of the money for content.
Newspaper advertising revenue in 2005: $48,435 million.
In 2010? $25,838 million.
The good news: Between 2005 and 2009, newspapers’ online traffic went from 1.6 billion page views a month to 3 billion.
Yes, people are going online more to access their news instead of whatever those flimsy, flappy things were. And what does this mean? Ads! Newspapers made $716 million more from online ads over those four years; local TV stations’ online ad revenue went up between 2008 and 2009 too, even though most ads now appear in search engine results.
The bad: But ad rates for primetime broadcast news and larger market newspapers pay about seven times as much as an online ad.
What does this mean? $716 million don’t make up for the $22.5 billion print ad revenue drop. Which means, budget cuts.
13,400 newspaper newsroom jobs were lost in the past four years.
And over 60 percent of local TV newsroom staffs were fired.
And half of some of the “hottest start-ups” make less than $50K in annual revenue.
They aren’t making bubkis. The report points out that ad rates for primetime broadcast news and larger market newspapers pay about seven times as much as an online ad. For bloggers with 100,000 pageviews on their sites, seven times less money for an ad is the difference between a hobby and a job. (But that’s not what Patch.com is complaining about.)
“The bundle is broken.”
The thing about the Internet is that instead of buying the entire paper for that one story about your friend’s kid doing something almost interesting and therefore effectively paying the newspaper for the services of that reporter as well as for all the other reporters writing about important topics, you can now go online and get that single story and not really pay anyone.
An Ohio hospital paid local stations $100,000+ to air stories that benefited them.
For a small number of TV stations, the lack of money has meant that they’ve actually let advertisers dictate content. In addition to that Ohio TV station, the report documents a Wisconsin TV station that allowed a local hospital to pick two health stories a week in return for their advertising and a Florida morning show that solicited $2,500 from guests. Yes, this is only a few stations, but as the director of the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism Tom Rosenstiel said, “The evidence we’ve seen suggests that this is much more widespread than a few years ago.” Burn.
eMarketer announced their updated advertising spending projections yesterday with some enlightening news about display ads. Within the next five years spend for display advertising is predicted to overtake search as the largest online spending category. Over the past year spending for display advertising has increased almost 5% more than search. Marketers are funneling nearly 25% more money to display than they were in 2010.
The unpredicted climb of online advertising spending for both search and display is detailed in eMarketer’s statement changing their projections from six months ago for the growth of the online advertising market from 10.5% to 20.2% by 2015.
Display ads are commonly known as banner ads but they account for any advertising where space is purchased on a webpage and an ad is placed in that space. This advertising can come in several different forms including graphic images, video, and text. They can be presented through rich media using motion to capture attention, static, and expandable designs.
