Thursday, September 13, 2007
Barstool Racing and Search Engine Races
Barstool Racing, Bar Stool Racing, Bar Stool Races, and Search Engine Races
I admit that I had not heard of barstool racing before hearing a commercial on the radio for Ask.com. In the commercial, the woman speaking is in customer support and talks about how popular Ask is getting and that she is getting more emails. Then she reads one and her voice changes to that of a young man. Yeah, somewhat surreal.
Anyway, his letter is to say how awesome Ask is, because he told his friend about something called "barstool racing" and his friend bet that it didn't exist. When his friend did a search on "his" search engine, all he found was some links. When the young man searched in Ask, he found listings, photos, blogs, and other things.
In my search for "barstool racing" in MSN. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask.com, Hotbot, Excite, Alltheweb, and SplatSearch.com, only SplatSearch failed to list www.barstoolracing.net is the first listing. Even SplatSearch had two listings for the search.
So does Ask really think their results are all that much better? After sucking for so many years and killing off the popular butler (The butler always did it for me...!), they suddenly seem to want our attention, but having a quality search product is not enough. No we have to endure misleading commercials like this one, garish and annoying ones like "Chicks with swords", and I think there was some other that I have successfully blocked from memory.
Ask may be succeeding, I don't know. All I can tell you is that I find their marketing either insulting or repulsive. They don't seem to realize that doing some more realistic and practical marketing would go much farther than what they are doing now. Getting people to try or switch search engines is easy, the hard thing would be getting them to stay. But if they have good results then that would not be that hard.
By the way, when are search engines going to start rotating their results? You and I both know that the same site as the top listing across all search engines is bogus. I'm sure that even for barstool racing there are several very good results that would deserve a turn in the top position, but for some reason, there is only room for one at the top. Until this changes, they will not best serve the needs of searchers or site owners, and will not help reduce the fight by everyone to be at the "top".
(hris
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Public API and Developer Zone From ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo Releases Public API; Launches Developer Zone
Open API Provides Access to Extensive People and Company Information
Waltham, MA (PRWEB) September 6, 2007 -- ZoomInfo has launched a dedicated developer zone to provide several tools for developers to create applications leveraging ZoomInfo's semantic search capabilities and people and company information. The developer zone, http://developer.zoominfo.com, features ZoomInfo's public API, full documentation, a support forum and blog, and is a showcase for newly created ZoomInfo API applications. Companies including Amazon A9, Compete and Xing are already working with the beta version of the API.
ZoomInfo is a business information search engine that indexes the Business Web to quickly find information about companies and people. With the public API, developers can now create applications using many of the search engine's company and people search capabilities, as well as ZoomInfo's people and company profiles and company competitor information.
"Earlier this summer, Compete and ZoomInfo built applications using each other's API to cross-promote data and drive traffic," said Jay Meattle, product manager at Compete. "Integrating ZoomInfo's company information into Compete's website traffic profiles allows us to present even more valuable information to Compete.com users looking for competitive intelligence on individual companies."
"We realized that there are countless uses for the type of business information that ZoomInfo provides on companies, people and industries," said Russell Glass, vice president of products and marketing at ZoomInfo. "By providing a public API, our goal is to encourage new and innovative uses of our data and search capabilities. We look forward to seeing how creative the development community will be."
Full terms and conditions of the API access are available on the site. For more information, please visit: http://developer.zoominfo.com.
About ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a business information search engine used to quickly find information about industries, companies, people, products and services. ZoomInfo is used by sales and marketing professionals to identify business opportunities, by recruiters to locate talent, and by anyone conducting in-depth research about products, services and businesses. ZoomInfo's semantic search engine continually crawls the Business Web the millions of company Websites, news feeds and other online sources to identify company and people information which is then organized into fresh, comprehensive and objective profiles. ZoomInfo currently has profiles on nearly 37 million people and over 3.5 million companies, and its search engine adds more than 20,000 new profiles every day.
According to Nielson/NetRatings, in April 2007 ZoomInfo was the fastest growing network in the country, with 276% annual growth. More than 4.5 million people search www.ZoomInfo.com every month. In addition, over 1,700 customers, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Oracle, PepsiCo and 20% of the Fortune 500, use ZoomInfo's patented search tools. ZoomInfo is privately held and based in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Media Contacts
Kari Hanson, Director of Corporate Communications
ZoomInfo
781-693-7537
Rachel Labas, Senior Account Representative
Lois Paul & Partners
781-782-5000
Press Contact: Kari Hanson
Company Name: ZoomInfo
Phone: 781-693-7537
Website: www.ZoomInfo.com
Web Site Owners and Bloggers Paid To Make More Money
09/05/2007 - (NTSWIRE) Minneapolis - New Publishers and Webmasters that join Auction Ads and start earning money with the Ebay affiliate program will find they are $25 richer just for joining. Auction Ads today announced that all new publishers would be paid a signup bonus of $25. Since the payout threshold is $50, this means a publisher would only have to earn $25 before being able to receive their first check.
The registration process is easy and adding the AuctionAds code to your site is also easy. It's as easy as using Google AdSense and you can have AuctionAds on the same pages as your existing AdSense, there is no conflict.
AuctionAds have been very popular since the ads feature small images and text from current Ebay auctions. Rather than signing up with Ebay, Webmasters and blog owners and easily sign up with Auction Ads and avoid a longer signup process and learning to use the Ebay API. Ads can be targeted with keywords and even maximum and minimum prices so that you get just the kind of ads that YOU KNOW best suit your sites.
The end date for this promotion has not been announced, but it is suggested that you sign up right away even if you are unable to add the code to your site or your blog today. Don't miss out on this great incentive to join a program that really needs no incentive.
Join Auction Ads Here
PR Contact
EbayAuctionAds.com
7141 Oak Pointe Curve
Bloomington, MN 55348
This Conversations Is Brought To You By...
by Steve Smith, Tuesday, September 4, 2007
ACCORDING TO SOME RECENT STATS, there are over 20 billion SMS messages passing across the ether each month in the U.S. market alone. As the father of an adolescent, I am not surprised. I think my daughter's teen suitors alone account for a good chunk of that figure. The signature beeps my daughter assigns these incoming SMS flirts are bad enough even when she doesn't answer them right away. Just walking down the street, she sounds like a truck backing up.
But if you are a resourceful media innovator rather than the father of a teen girl, all of those SMS alerts sound more like ad inventory being wasted. It was only a matter of time before someone came along to knit this flow of messages into networked ad inventory. While I am sure there are others working on a similar idea, MoVoxx is the first company I have seen that is starting to serve ads into a collection of SMS publishers. Using inventory from SMS alerts by NASCAR, newspapers and some major league sports groups, MoVoxx is hoping to transform a 2-cent-a-message expense into a ten-cent-a-message revenue opportunity.
"We are able to charge high CPMs because most publishers have data on their cell phone users," says managing partner Alec Andronikov. In most cases, the publishers are getting just age, gender and zip code, but that is already enough to do more precise targeting than many mobile campaigns. When users opt into the NASCAR mobile alerts, for instance, the publisher gets basic demographics and zip codes. If NASCAR has 200,000 subscribers nationwide, there is enough mass there to net perhaps 80,000 users in a general geographic region for a supermarket chain to target. MoVoxx will split a CPM of up to $100 with the publisher. The company devised an opt-in series of alerts for dining out specials from Mercury News and nightlife offers for San Francisco Guardian.
Ultimately, MoVoxx should be able to fly campaigns across multiple publications as it aggregates audience. Of the many billions of SMS messages that are moving each month, Andronikov guesses that 500 million of them are some kind of publisher-pushed alert that conceivably could be sponsored. Right now, he claims about 3.5 million uniques with sports, travel, dating and newspapers comprising the largest content categories. The creative is a very simple call to action that has to occur in a limited 20 to 80 characters of space. The character limitation of an SMS makes it difficult to include a full URL link to the sponsor within the message, especially if you are trying to meter the response by sending the user to a precise and lengthy URL. Generally a reply to the alert will trigger a return message that then includes a link to a Wap page. Andronikov claims a response rate of 2.5% to 4% on the SMS ads.
This sounds like an ingenious plan to me. It gives publishers a revenue stream that only encourages more content development. For advertisers, it offers mobile targeting on a text platform that people really do focus on. Just given the brief, concentrated nature of an SMS message, those 4% response rates don't surprise me. It is almost impossible not to read the ad in the context of an SMS screen. The only downside to ubiquitous SMS ads is the larger issue of mobile ad clutter. As much as the sponsorship model makes such great sense for expanding a media platform like mobile quickly, it also stuffs even more promotions into a small space. Most of the consumer research we have seen shows little negative impact on carriers and publishers from mobile advertising. Indeed, I suspect that most mobile users don't mind a text link or banner ad in their WAP pages, and if marketers get the formats right, I imagine even some kind of mobile video advertising also will fly without much complaint. And generally, I am a big proponent of ad-supported mobile media. As much as I like having games, news, and some distractions on a phone, I don't believe these are high-value items to most users that a fee-based eco-system can bring to its full potential.
But there is the real risk of choking the platform with ads coming from too many directions at once. As each piece of the mobile media environment -- text, WAP, video, MMS, voice, games, etc. -- looks towards ad models, someone has to start asking how it all adds up in the user experience as she traverses the deck that she still pays $60, $70 or more a month to use. A single banner on a WAP site is no big deal. A three second pre-roll on a video clip (if marketers can be this disciplined) is also reasonable, as is a text ad on a search result or some branded entertainment slipped into a mobile video library. Without a shred of supporting evidence, however, I do have to wonder about the cumulative effect of consumers encountering ads at every turn.
At what point does the phone go beyond delivering welcome messages from NASCAR, and start looking and feeling itself like a NASCAR racer, stuffed to the windshield wipers with branding messages?
Post your response to the public Mobile Insider blog.
See what others are saying on the Mobile Insider blog.
Contributing writer Steve Smith is a longtime new-media consultant and columnist, and current editor of Digital Media Report for MinOnline.com and Mobile Media Report for TelecomWeb.com Contact him at popeyesmith@comcast.net.
Mobile Insider for Tuesday, September 4, 2007:
http://publications.mediapost.com
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