Read/writeweb has an interesting observation. Apparently Amazon has started to place ads on their site that lead to products in shops on completely different sites. Some ads are contextual, others are not. And Alex asks, why on earth Amazon would do something like that, i.e. sending people out of their shop to go somewhere else?
Here are a few thoughts why it might make sense:
People might remember that they found what they were looking for when visiting the amazon site. Sort of like Google whose tools are all more or less designed to send people away. AFTER they found what they were looking for.
Amazon should know the parts of the site where they are loosing the most users anyway, simply because of natural drop out rates that always occur on sites. This way, they can at least earn some money with people who would never have purchased anything in the first place, too. Question is: would they also integrate the banners on pages with well-selling products?
Learning about the click behaviour for products that amazon doesn’t list, is really clever (and paid for) market research into the gaps of their product offering.
Who says, that margins of products sold are always better than advertising revenue. Most of the web 2.0 sites base their business model on advertising revenue rather than actual products. Amazon can probably offer a good, if not the best, targeting based on their recommendation engine. Does anyone know what they charge per click or per CPM? I bet it’s dearer than most sites you can put your ads on. (And it should well be worth the money!)
These are just four thoughts that immediately came into my mind, why it could possibly make sense for amazon to start placing ads on their site. Any other ideas, anyone?
Now people can ad their own sequence. Obviously, within your video, the M needs to appear from the left and dissapear to the right, to make it work. Sort of like that Nike Video from last year. (I just hope that’s the right URL. With those Flash Movies you never really know. Power to the permalink!)
Most people still underestimate the dangers of net transparency. As one can read in this article of the Guardian, some students of the University of Oxford were caught by proctors who found the relevant evidence on facebook.
Students now face fines of up to £100 after proctors collected evidence of students celebrating the end of exams by „trashing“ their friends, covering them with champagne, confetti, flour, and even foodstuffs including raw meat and octopus. […] „Somehow the proctors have accessed my photos on Facebook and cited them as evidence of my misconduct, and I am being summoned to a disciplinary hearing.“ „I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos“.
I keep telling everyone to be really careful with what they put on the web. Don’t put up pictures or videos of friends who didn’t agree – and also don’t put up pictures of your kids – they might not like that in 20 years time.
You never know, whether things like the abovementioned might be possible. Or for how long your content will stay in the Google archive. Or whether or not a site will end up in the archives of archive.org and possibly stay there forever. Web content is more permanent than most people realize.
In this article on Read/Write Web (while I am still at it), there are three points, where Google says, that advertising needs to go:
Advertisers need to get better at creating a 1:1 experience for their users. As an example, she cited the work that Cadillac did with their MyCadillac campaign.
Advertisements need to continue increasing personalization. This was surprising to me, given that I don’t believe Google has publicly announced any plans to incorporate behavioral targeting into their ad delivery system.
Users are demanding the delivery of information to be an experience and advertising must respond to it, just like content needs to.
Not really new points, but it doesn’t hurt to reemphasize them. I also find it interesting that the one thing that made creative ad agencies puzzle (text based search advertising) – because it reduced the need for (admittingly more expensive) creatives – is something Google says, we must move away from. Instead, we should increasingly make it an experience. I have been saying this all along, but now even Google recommends experience-richer content.
One other thing I found in that article: I didn’t even know that Yahoo! actually owns the patent for search advertising! This is interesting.
When Google started doing this type of advertising, Overture (acquired by Yahoo) had been delivering similar ads for years. This is why Yahoo owns patent #6,269,361 – which Google licensed from Yahoo right before the Google IPO.
Another field which Google took from Yahoo! (or Overture, in this case) and made it successful.
Automated translation: According to Mayer, someday in the future Google could automatically search content in all languages and present all the translated results to the user on the same page, regardless of language!
Book search: they are adding metadata about books, so that Google’s algorithms can understand what the book is about, relevant references, and availability of the content.
Images and video: one of their recent changes is to include all web videos into Google search; it is no longer limited to content within Google Video
Voice search: a free phone service that you can call to perform a voice search. As the usage of this system rises, the increasing number of samples of user input will be used to improve voice-to-text technology; users are, in effect, training the system to recognize voice commands
Universal search: the blending of different types of content, such as images and news, into the main search engine
Maps and local search: There are some interesting new advances in this area – for example, Google Maps now supports traffic display, based on data licensed from third parties…
Client software: Google Gears and Gadgets: Google Gadgets enables third-party developers to create tiny applications that live on the desktop and connect to the web in the background to pull in information from the web. Google Gears provides a browser plug-in that, in Mayer’s words, takes Ajax applications and makes them better.
iGoogle: As an example, Mayer said that although she’s a big fan of Netflix, she probably would not make it her home page; with a gadget, however, Netflix could still establish a presence within her home page
One of the most interesting things for me is, however, how people get so excited about Marissa Mayer:
At the end of the session, I had the opportunity to meet her briefly [certainly one of the high points of the conference for me!]
Admittingly, she is pretty. And supposedly, she is also very smart. But the main things is positioning. She is a pretty and clever girl in a world of geeks.
Wo ich sonst so bin...