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A Global Greeting
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AdSense email preferences: Get the most from your account and from Google
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.
Searches come in many flavors, but it’s our job to determine what type of search you’re doing once you’ve clicked your way out of the search box. Whether you’re looking for a blog or a business, our goal is to get you the most relevant type of result back to you—fast. Ultimately, it’s that combination of relevance and speed that we think will give you the best experience. Here are some of our newest search enhancements:
Improved Blog Search
With the proliferation of specialized blogs all across the web, you’ll often find great content on blogs—whether you’re planning a trip to Florida, looking to bring home a new golden retriever or learning how to make a delicious Italian dinner. Recently, our blog search team made it much easier to find full blogs about your query, rather than single posts on the topic. This is especially useful if you’re looking for bloggers that post on an ongoing basis about the subject of your query. Try it with one of your search queries by clicking “Blogs,” then “Homepages,” in the left-hand panel of your search results.
Example searches: [tesla car], [google], [android]
A new home for Realtime Search
When we think about relevancy, often what you’re looking for may have just happened. It’s been more than nine months since we first announced our real-time search features, and this week we gave it a new home at www.google.com/realtime as well as some great new tools to you refine and understand your results. You can use geographic refinements to find updates and news that’s happening right near you or in the area of your choice. We also added conversations view, so you can follow a discussion more easily by browsing a full timeline of tweets and seeing how the conversation evolved. And in Google Alerts, you can now create an alert specifically for “updates” to get an email the moment a topic of interest shows up on Twitter or other short-form services.
Realtime Search and updates in Google Alerts are available globally in 40 languages, and the geographic refinements and conversations views are available in English, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.
Example search: [egg recall]
More local results in maps and clickable markers
We made some changes to local results in web search that will help you learn more about the results and save you time by saving you clicks. Starting this week, when you search for places we’ll show you all of the results that match your query on the map. Results after the first seven will be shown with small circle markers. This can be very useful in identifying the density of stores and helping you find the right neighborhood to visit. For example, when you search for [fabric stores nyc], you can now easily identify the Garment District:
When you see a result on the map that you like, you can now click directly on the marker (the pin or the circle) and go to Google Maps with that place selected and the “Info” window open. The other results will still be there if you want to explore more places.
Example searches: [fabric stores nyc], [coffee in seattle], [resort near ko samui, thailand]
We hope you find these updates useful. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
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This week in search 8/27/10
Our sixth annual Google Summer of Code program has wrapped up and we want to highlight some of this year’s amazing participants and projects. Summer of Code offers students developers all over the world the chance to get paid to write code for open source projects as an alternative to a summer job.
Kicked off in 2005, the Summer of Code has brought together more than 3,400 students with more than 200 open source projects from all over the world to create millions of lines of code. We work with several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects through three months of coding.
There was some really awesome work done by more than 1,000 students from 69 countries in this year’s Summer of Code. Of those students, 6.5 percent were women representing 23 countries—six times higher than the estimated proportion of women in the open source community. Here are just a few of the women:
25 reference manuals in her purse
Ann Marie Horcher, an information systems security Ph.D. candidate at Nova Southeastern University was mentored by Docbook.org. Ann Marie worked over the summer to create an application that transformed a docbook file to epub format used in ebook readers such as the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook and the iPad. As a result of Ann Marie’s project, it’s now easier to move technical documentation to a portable format so she “can carry my 25 reference manuals for my project with me in my purse.” And now, so can everyone else.
Check out Ann Marie’s YouTube video illustrating her work and its results here.
Geophylogenies now displayed on Google Earth
Kathryn Iverson, a University of Michigan bioinformatics graduate student was mentored by National Evolutionary Biology Synthesis Center and wrote a library implemented in Java with KML to build geophylogenies—geographical evolutionary histories of organisms. She told us: “Since I was starting from scratch it was up to me to decide in what direction I should move the project and make decisions about everything from what input filetypes to support to the color and size of the geophylogenies when they are displayed in Google Earth.”
When asked about her key takeaways, she said, “Working remotely required me to be clear and verbose about what I needed because with the time difference (my mentor was on the other side of the globe), I may not get a response until the next day, which can slow down work tremendously if you’re not clear in asking your questions.”
Bridesmaid brings word tag clouds to biological networks
Layla Oesper, a Brown University computer science Ph.D. candidate mentored by Cytoscape, was attracted to Summer of Code because she was looking for a summer job that would give her the flexibility to work and still participate in two weddings. Layla built a plugin for Cytoscape that would allow people to create word tag clouds from biological networks they’d already created in Cytoscape, giving users a visual semantic summary of a biological network. The final product has all sorts of configurable features, including the ability to cluster together words that appear near each other in the original network in the order in which the words appear.
Check out what Layla learned during her Summer of Code experience on YouTube.
Drupal gets more content management friendly
Emily Brand, a computer science graduate student from Loyola University Chicago, was mentored by Drupal.org, an open source content management platform. During her summer, she worked on QueryPath—an essential part of the Drupal and PHP communities. Her goal was to keep and increase Drupal’s popularity by making it a go-to content management system for websites focused on web services using PHP.
Emily says she learned “how to effectively work on an open source project while keeping and improving the users and developers requirements as well as how to effectively integrate web services in Drupal.”
You can find out more about this year’s program and projects on the Open Source Blog, and if you’re in college looking to write some open source code, we hope we’ll see you next summer.
Credit:
Sixth annual Summer of Code flexes some serious geek girl muscle
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Google Calendar Sync Now Supports Outlook 2010
This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You’ll be unable to log in to your AdSense account during this time, but we’ll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won’t be affected.
We’ve converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:
London – 6pm Saturday
Alexandria – 7pm Saturday
Hyderabad – 10:30pm Saturday
Jakarta – 12am Sunday
Perth – 1am Sunday
To learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.
Read the original here:
Site maintenance on Saturday, August 21
Jambool, creator of Social Gold and former provider of virtual currency for Facebook games and web apps, was sold to Google for a reported $70 million. This follows the trend of game and social app providers LabPixies and Slide we covered here.
In a post about the Slide acquisition, I discussed how Facebook, which originally welcomed developers in 2007 with open arms by dangling the possibility of riches, changed the game and pulled the power back in, away from developers. But why did developers originally flock there? In a blog post, Paul Allen called it the “true spirit of Wikinomics”, explaining:
“Mark Zuckerberg made three big announcements. 1) Applications can be deeply integrated with Facebook 2) Distribution of the applications will occur through the network, and 3) The business opportunity Facebook is providing will give 100% of advertising revenue (for third party applications) and 100% of transaction revenue to the application developers.”
That move had a huge impact. First Round Capital, a venture capital firm, describes this step: “By providing a clear roadmap – and business opportunity – for the widget makers, Facebook has just increased its virtual R&D budget by over $250 million dollars.” First Round correctly predicted that companies like Slide, RockYou, and other developers would enrich the user experience and likely enrich Facebook.
One such company, Jambool, took on the task of building a virtual currency business on Facebook, facilitating the buying and selling of virtual goods and services for application developers. This gained them some traction with other app developers and helped to build a growing business.
But that was the past, and now, as Facebook has grown in size and influence, it has changed the rules. Just as Slide, RockYou, and others have seen their fortunes wane as Facebook grew more powerful Jambool literally had the rug pulled out from under them once Facebook introduced credits and negotiated deals where these credits would be the exclusive virtual currency on the site. It’s no mystery then that Jambool was snapped up by Google. Like Slide before them, Jambool’s market valuation and market viability took a hit when Facebook changed the game, making them more likely to embrace an acquisition by Google.
This expands the Google fold to include game makers, experts in viral widgets, social advertising, expression tools, and now virtual currency. What’s next? Who else has been hurt by Facebook changing the game? What gaps need to be filled in Google’s social strategy?
While there are many utility apps and games that fit the bill, the one missing piece are offers – the trend where users don’t pay directly for points, credits, or virtual goods directly, but instead they do tasks, trial products, or spend money on other things that get them what they want.
The two most obvious candidates in this space are OfferPal, which was flying high until the scamville problem we covered here and the choice by Facebook to use TrialPay and PeanutLabs for their offers. This dramatically cut OfferPal’s profile and instantly cast doubt on how big they could become, and now, with a reduced valuation but solid technology implementation, Google could pick them up and round out their portfolio. However, while OfferPal is one obvious choice, Google could also choose TrialPay – a successful, and less controversial, but smaller provider in the offer space. If Google was willing to be aggressive, they could buy TrialPay, which is the favored integration partner for Facebook and currently the main provider of offers that yield Facebook credits. Such a move, at the right time, could not only give Google a solid technology and team, but also temporarily disrupt Facebook’s ability to leverage offers for credits.
Google is building an army of technology, social tools, and people to challenge Facebook’s dominance in social media. While it has successfully executed on many technologies, it’s only now buying the companies with the traction, experience, and the mindset to put the social back in Google. The only remaining questions are around their ability to they integrate the recently acquired companies and if/how they will move into the offers market.
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This is part of a series of stories from people who have shared how Google has helped them in their lives. If you missed the rest of the stories this week, check them out—and if you have a Google story, tell us about it. -Ed.
Of all the great stories people send us, some simply make us laugh and appreciate even more why we’re in the search business. For our final post in our series of your Google stories, we’re sharing three tales that we found particularly funny and unique. We hope they make for good Friday summer reading. Enjoy!
Just last month, Trichelle wrote about how Google helped with the rediscovery of a lost wallet:
Received: 7/18/2010
From: Trichelle
This isn’t really a question but a great story I thought Google would be interested in hearing. Today I called my daughter in St. Louis and found out her friends that were suppose to be coming to see her in St. Louis were stuck in Chicago because the driver’s keys and wallet were lost. They searched everywhere cancelled credit cards and tried to have a new car key made….but without ID could not. The group was getting angry at Brandon the one who lost the keys and wallet, and my daughter in St. Louis was highly disappointed because her friends she hadn’t seen in a long time were not going to be able to come see her. Well I’m in Perry Georgia and decided to google “Brandon [Brandon’s last name] wallet”. And low and behold the first thing that comes up is a Chicago Craigslist entry telling Brandon his wallet had been found and where he could pick it up. I then called Brandon and he and his wallet were reunited and now the group is on the way to my daughter in St. Louis For the record, after the fact I tried Yahoo and Bing and no wallet. Google rocks!
On to the next:
From: Usman
You ever hear a song that you wish you knew the name of? Usually you can just Google a few key lyrics to find the answer, but when the song has no lyrics, one has to get creative. This was the case a few years ago when I was tasked with finding out the name of that famous circus/carnival music, you know, with the calliope, like, the clown music people usually hum in situations when someone’s just done something silly.. you know, it kind of goes like “doot doot doodle-oodle oot doot do do?” Sorta? Of course it’s more likely that you’d recognize the tune if I could whistle it to you. Except everyone I’d whistled to, despite recognizing the tune, had no clue what the name of the song was. So, on a whim, I googled it. That is, I went to Google Search, typed in “doot doot doodle-oodle oot doot do do” (without quotes, even!), clicked “I’m Feeling Lucky”—and guess what? It’s called “Entrance of the Gladiators”—also known as “Thunder and Blazes” — by Czech composer Julius Fučík. Good ear, Google, good ear.
And finally …
From: Michelle
I’m a librarian and I use Google all day every day. Today I helped a senior citizen find the telephone number of the company that made her frying pan. Her frying pan handle had broke and she wanted it replaced. She had actually brought the frying pan into the library where I work, because it had been many years since she had purchased it and didn’t know who the manufacturer was. I searched the words on the underside of the pan and not only found the manufacturer, but found that the pan had a 50 year guarantee! One satisfied Library patron, thanks to Google.
We hope you enjoyed these stories as much as we did. We’ll work hard on making Google even more helpful, so that you’ll keep ‘em coming!
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Your Google stories: and some other ways we help people find things
We wanted to give you all a heads up about a new Google blog that is focused on helping small businesses grow. Check out their first post below and visit googlesmb.blogspot.com to follow their future posts and updates. -ed.
Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger… faster.
In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level. We’ve received fantastic feedback about these posts, and realized that there’s a healthy appetite among small- and medium-sized business owners who want to know all about the latest web tools and tricks. Fortunately, we have lots more to share with you, too!
That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community. Rather than having to sleuth around in many different locations for details about templates for creating video ads on YouTube, tips for your employees using Gmail or how to respond to the business reviews on your Place Page, you can find all of this helpful information right here in one place.
Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to the Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs. We’re starting small today, but who knows what tomorrow will have in store!
Continued here:
Introducing the Google Small Business Blog
Three things are always on my agenda when I visit New York: the arts, the museums, and the food. This year there is a surprising addition: funny puppets. Whom do I have to thank for such an odd itinerary item? That razor tongued curmudgeon of the webs Loren Feldman, who flicks his Flip camera on anytime he wants to watch Michael Arrington duck. Affiliate Summit Co-Founders Shawn Collins and Missy Ward have teamed up with Loren for a night of humor and yes, puppets that is the Audience Conference. That precursor to Affiliate Summit will take place at Caroline’s on Broadway (it is technically a separate event and tickets are still available).
Usually I tend to be attracted to panel sessions because I find the dynamics and the possibility for intelligent discourse and debate compelling. This year Affiliate Summit East features a lot of very strong individual presenters around a range of innovative topics. There is simply not enough focus within the affiliate industry on innovation. I don’t feel the networks do enough to cultivate innovative publishers. That is unfortunate because the flexibility of the affiliate marketing can be applied to many emerging models and sometimes I feel we are missing the boat on social media, mobile commerce, and local marketing. This is why I am glad Shawn and Missy have compiled the line-up they have.
So before you get lost hunting for some restaurant you saw Bobby Flay throw down at, here is my pick for the top ten sessions you can’t afford to miss:
1) Innovate! New Exciting Applications of Affiliate Marketing
Session 1c
Location: Sutton Complex (Beekman & North)
Session: 12:00pm-1:00pm, Sunday, August 15th
A lot of innovation has becoming out of the UK. I’m glad to see Joe Stepniewski who has been doing some amazing things over at Skimlinks, fresh off the 2010 Technology Genius Award at LinkShare’s Golden Links, present this session focusing on new ways affiliate marketing is being used in web startups, services and applications. Here’s hoping he mentions PopShops (I’m proud to be part of their original team).
Panelists for the Innovate! New Exciting Applications of Affiliate Marketing session include:
- Joe Stepniewski, Co-Founder, Skimlinks (Twitter @digijoe)
2) New Lead Generation Models: Social-Mobile-Viral
Session 2b
Location: Murray Hill Suite
Time: 1:30pm-2:30pm, Sunday, August 15th
Continuing the innovation theme off-beat veteran Declan Dunn will be taking folks interested in the lead-gen space into the new media game. Focusing on how to turn fans into leads via various social and mobile tools without becoming the equivalent of that insurance sales guy no one wants to invite to parties anymore. A valuable balance to strike in lead-gen.
Panelists for the New Lead Generation Models: Social-Mobile-Viral session include:
- Declan Dunn, CEO, Dunn Direct Media (Twitter @declandunn)
3) Affiliate Freakonomics: Market Quirks at Work
Session 8a
Location: Gramercy Suite
Time: 12:10pm-12:30pm, Tuesday, August 17th
This has potential of being a session with some fireworks. Like Skimlinks, VigLink is also an extremely innovative company. Oliver Roup, CEO, of VigLink devised an intriguing title to this session and it will indeed be interesting to take a look at how wildcards in click data can help give affiliates an edge. So what about the fireworks, you ask? I’m curious to see whether Oliver addresses the blogger fallout over supplanting tracking code inside Lijit. That indeed was an unexpected variance for bloggers using Lijit. If he doesn’t, someone should ask him.
Panelists for the Affiliate Freakonomics: Market Quirks at Work session include:
- Oliver Roup, CEO, VigLink (Twitter @oroup)
4) Android Affiliate Mobile Marketing
Session 5d
Location: Sutton Complex (South & Regent)
Time: 2:00pm-3:00pm, Monday, August 16th
For a long time we’ve been hearing how mobile is the next big thing, that it would soon arrive. Well, if you’ve been watching the market, thanks to the rise of smartphones mobile commerce has arrived. Like the web, the platforms you can choose from in mobile are fractured with very specific nuances. This session by Michael Martin will focus on Android, arguably one of the most exciting of the current mobile platforms.
Panelists for the Android Affiliate Mobile Marketing session include:
- Michael Martin, Owner, Mobile Martin (Twitter @googleandblog)
5) Curation. Can You Filter Free Content?
Session 7c
Location: Sutton Complex (Beekman & North)
Time: 11:30am-11:50am, Tuesday, August 17th
In the debate over the value of content, I’ve always been squarely on the side that holds that “content is king”. But with so many information streams the value of the content produced is often diminished because it is impossible to filter through all the distracting noise. The concept of curation isn’t new, but with the rise of social media it is getting far more attention these days as the need to filter quality content from the chaff increases. With over 42,000 sites featuring a wide variety of topics all with a video distribution backbone, Magnify.net knows a thing or two about effective curation.
Panelists for the Curation. Can You Filter Free Content? session include:
- Steve Rosenbaum, CEO, Magnify.net (Twitter @magnify)
6) How to Eliminate Affiliate Fraud 100%
Session 7d
Location: Sutton Complex (South & Regent)
Time: 11:30am-11:50am, Tuesday, August 17th
If VigLink session doesn’t provide fireworks this one should. I am always wary when someone promises to eliminate 100 percent of anything. It’s too bad eBay didn’t know of Rey Pasinli’s secrets. That being said I am pro any tool or sharing of techniques that can help reduce the high rates of fraud inherent to the industry even if that reduction rate doesn’t quite reach zero. Maybe Rey will make a believer out of me.
Panelists for the How to Eliminate Affiliate Fraud 100% session include:
- Rey Pasinli, Executive Director, Total Apps, Inc.
7) Affiliate Platforming: How to Attract & Retain Audiences
Session 9a
Location: Gramercy Suite
Time: 2:00pm-3:00pm, Tuesday, August 17th
It took only a few minutes at SOBCon to realize that Scott Stratten is one of the smartest people in the marketing industry. He is an idea factory of sorts but one whose laser focus actually churns out ideas that are practical to implement. Add to that rare talent the fact he is a karaoke rockstar and you have a can’t miss session. Thus I encourage you to forgive the fact he has the most boring title of any session this year and tune in to the UnPresident. It will be worth it.
Panelists for the Affiliate Platforming: How to Attract & Retain Audiences session include:
- Scott Stratten, UnPresident, UnMarketing (Twitter @UnMarketing)
Master of Your Domain?
Session 4c
Location: Sutton Complex (Beekman & North)
Time: 11:30am-12:30pm, Monday, August 16th
The legal labyrinth of the Internet has grown in complexity over the years. Snagging a URL doesn’t always mean you have the rights to use it free and clear. Trademark law often impacts domain owners, especially if another business claims you are infringing on their rights. The constant twisting evolution of the legal space, makes such sessions a must. Plus I have a weakness for panels where one of the members is from a committee that advocates the mirage of self-regulation.
Panelists for the Master of Your Domain? session include:
- Gary A. Kibel, Partner, Davis & Gilbert LLP (Twitter @GaryKibel_law) (Moderator)
- Sara Freixa, Brand Protection Manager, Americas, Melbourne IT DBS Inc
- Peter C. Marinello, Director, Electronic Retailing Self-Regulation Program
9) Avoiding the Google Slap
Session 5b
Location: Murray Hill Suite
Time: 2:00pm-3:00pm, Monday August 16th
Google has been traditionally unfriendly towards affiliates. That has changed slightly since Google bought Performics and has stepped into the space. While I would have rather had a representative from GAN than an AdWords evangelist; having representatives from ClickBank and Google should shed a lot of insight on the impact of quality scores in-channel.
Panelists for the Avoiding the Google Slap session include:
- Dush Ramachandran, Vice President – Sales & Business Development, ClickBank (Twitter @DushR)
- Frederick Vallaeys, AdWords Evangelist, Google (Twitter @siliconvallaeys)
10) Why Q4 is the Year Long Season
Session 6c
Location: Sutton Complex (Beekman & North)
Time: 3:30pm-4:30pm, Monday August 16th
Everyone plans to think ahead but merchants inevitably find themselves scrambling for placements in Q4. This last minute mentality often fails to capitalize on potential placements with publishers. Publishers, as well, can be equally blamed for not pressing merchants often and early enough. The end result is wasted potential and money left on the table. Planning beyond the current season is always smart, and CJ should have some interesting insights on how to leverage such plans.
Panelists for the Why Q4 is the Year Long Season session include:
- Kim Riedell, Vice President, Client Development, Commission Junction, a ValueClick Company (Twitter @CJnetwork)
Special Note: Watch for a rare Jim Kukral post on ReveNews following his keynote at Affiliate Summit East.
That’s the rundown of my picks for Affiliate Summit East 2010 in New York. What sessions are you looking forward to?
See the rest here:
Top 10 Must See Sessions at Affiliate Summit East 2010
We’re excited to announce a revamped design of three of our AdSense for content ad units! After analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests around the world, we decided to make our formats more space-efficient and visually pleasing by changing the layout of the text. We spent a lot of time experimenting with different possibilities, and we’re starting with changes to the following ad units:
- Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
- Medium and large rectangles (300×250, 336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title
In certain cases, you’ll also see a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable. Please note that these changes will roll out over the next few weeks.
During testing, the redesigned ads performed extremely well. We’ll continue to experiment and innovate on our formats to help you monetize your content, and we encourage you to submit ideas in the comments below.
More here:
A new look for AdSense for content ad units
The other day, we covered how Google is testing a new paywall system for newspaper called Newspass. But given where the newspaper industry is headed, there’s a very a plausible chance that Google is coming too late to the party.
Essentially, newspapers have struggled with their online revenues because they’ve been unable to successfully implement either a paid subscription or micropayment model on a widespread level. Google is hoping to change that with Newspass, a new a paywall system that offers users one-click access to multiple sites/networks through a single Google Account (like Google Check Out). Essentially, Google seems to be testing whether paid subscriptions and micropayments become more viable revenue models if users can manage their purchases through a single, third-party account.
As good as an idea that Newspass looks like on paper, however, the product faces quote a few challenges.
1. Google’s Non-Search Track Record
Google’s track record beyond search-related products is less than stellar. Essentially, the list of Google’s failures is long and growing, with Google Wave added to it less than a week ago. So if Google hopes to keep Newspass off of this list, it will need to ensure that a strong marketing strategy is in place.
2. Marketing Challenges
Now, Google has had some success beyond search, and Google Checkout is one example that’s particularly relevant to Newspass. But just like Google Checkout has to target both merchants and consumers, Newspass must also engage the market on two fronts simultaneously: publishers and readers.
As it stands, Newspass intends to solve a problem for publishers by catering to readers. That means that the Newspass team must successfully deploy two separate marketing strategies simultaneously. Granted, this isn’t impossible, but it does double the workload for Google.
3. Growing Digital Revenues
Newspass is set to bolster digital revenues, but many newspapers are already experiencing digital revenues growth on their own. As The Wall Street Journal reports:
Several newspaper publishers have reported solid growth in digital advertising revenue for the second quarter in recent days, helping offset continuing declines in print advertising. The New York Times, for instance, reported 21% growth in digital-ad revenue against a 6% drop in print advertising, keeping total advertising “roughly flat” with the year-earlier quarter. Digital now accounts for 26% of its total ad revenue, up from 22%.
4. Newspapers are Losing Less and Less
Even though print ad revenue has continued to fall, print might be pulling out of the nosedive. As we reported last month:
Editor & Publisher reported that even though newspaper print and online revenue dropped 9.7 percent year-over-year in Q1 2010, it was the mildest drop in three years. “The 9.7% drop compares with a 28.3% year-over-year decline in the last quarter of 2009, and a 29% drop in Q3 2009.”
Part of the cause behind these changes in newspaper ad revenues, no doubt, is that there’s just less competition. Essentially, enough of the smaller guys have gone out of business, that the largest ones (such as the NYT) have been able to capture more of the market more easily than before. But this also means that newspapers are under considerably less pressure to adopt entirely new processes — such as integrating an entirely new paid content system such as Newspass.
5. Increasing Production, Lowering Costs
Newspapers are also finding cheaper, more efficient ways of sourcing their content. For instance, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, and USA Today have started using a content farms to source content for some of their sections. This is allowing them to broaden their coverage of topics without having to invest in additional editorial infrastructure.
6. News Sources of Revenue
Many major newspapers companies are developing completely new sources of revenue by either partnering with or outright acquiring online marketing agencies. Specifically, Hearst, Gannett Newspapers, and the McClatchy company have all started offering online marketing services to advertisers in the various local markets they serve.
7. New Distribution Channels
Mobile apps are offering newspapers an entirely new distribution channel for their content, and the opportunity to bolster ad sales through mobile content is clear and present. The Globe and Mail, for instance, is already serving gets 7.5 million page views / month through its iPhone app alone, and advertising is embedded throughout each of these pages.
8. Subscription Revenue is Obsolete
Subscription fees are a revenue model designed to cover the costs of distributing content on a physical piece of paper that had to be delivered to readers’ doorstep. Online content isn’t plagued by such overhead, which is probably why online readers have been reluctant to pay for content.
With newspapers adapting to the new content marketing by adopting new advertising, production, and distribution models, they might be reluctant to try and impose such outdated costs on their readers. After all, the first newspapers to do so can risk losing their readers to any competition that holds out. After all, you can’t teach a new user and old (obsolete) trick.
9. Users Habits
There’s also considerable reason to doubt that, at this point, users will be willing to start paying for content. Essentially, users have been consuming free content for quite some time. They’ve also seen paid content models fail time and time again. So it might be impossible for newspapers and/or Google to convince users to start paying for content now.
10. Bad Blood
The relationship between newspapers and Google is a strained one at best. Essentially, many newspapers feel defrauded because they’ve received no compensation for their content appearing in Google News, but Google has made revenue off of the Adwords ads that appears alongside that Google News content. So it might be unrealistic for Google to now expect newspapers to trust them with revenue and sales data.
Early in the Game
For all the challenge’s facing Newspass, it’s still very early in the game. After all, the service is still only being tested, and only in Italy. It could very well turn out that Google doesn’t take Newspass beyond Italian borders.
Similarly, it’s just as likely that Newspass will pique the interest of many newspapers. While some newspapers cut Google out altogether, others have invested considerably in SEO.
The world of news publishing is going through so many changes, that it’s hard to tell where things will end up exactly. So like all things related to newspaper publishing, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens with Newspass.
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In my article about RockYou, a comment from a ReveNews author led to a discussion of Slide likely facing similar market pressures as RockYou. Both RockYou and Slide were darlings of MySpace and expanded to Facebook as it became a more dominant platform. Early on, both RockYou and Slide did well, using all the smarts and experience they developed on MySpace to tweak the viral loop driving their user numbers upward. No one thought they could be stopped. Well, no one that is, except Facebook, who controlled the platform and wanted to participate in the riches and valuations that RockYou and Slide were taking in.
Back in 2008, while Facebook allowed it, Slide and RockYou worked the viral knobs like artists, so much so that Slide commanded a hefty $500M valuation as it took more institutional money. Max Levchin, founding of Slide even stated “I’m convinced it will be bigger than PayPal”
The belief was that unlike PayPal, which was mostly dependent on eBay, Slide could ride on top of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks. By using their knowledge of social networks and viral loops, they believed that they could grow anywhere online using their viral techniques.
Of course we now know differently. Facebook took several steps to show app vendors who was in control. One step was to ‘clean up’ the User Interface (UI), hiding and/or removing applications from the default view of users, forcing users to take one or two clicks to access an application, and putting those applications out of mind. Users had to be passionate take the extra steps to even see these apps, driving app vendors to pay for advertising to gain more visibility. Another move by Facebook was to ratchet down the viral loop, limiting the methods and frequencies by which users could tell other users about new applications. Again, app vendors turned to Facebook advertising to regain the visibility lost.
As Facebook cleaned up their UI and turned things to their favor, other social networks followed suit changing to look more like Facebook, further pushing Slide and other personalization/expression apps to the fringes where only the dedicated would engage. A side effect of visually blanching Facebook and other social networks was that the ‘personalization and expression’ habit and viral loop was also killed. Less people saw cool slideshows and interactive apps, so fewer people commented on them or tried them out themselves. A vicious downward spiral that bled users away from apps.
So today, Facebook holds the cards, having crushed most app providers and especially personalization and expression apps without the sizable budgets needed to stand out in a crowd of more than 200,000 apps. Facebook dictates terms to most app makers, forcing them to accept 70 cents on the dollar for Facebook credits and locking them into 5 year deals. Five years ago, MySpace was multiple times the size of Facebook, and who knows if the tide will rapidly shift again to another network in that same time.
Realizing that popular shifts happen Google decided to capitalize on the number of skilled social network and viral experts who had found themselves on the losing end of Facebook’s changes to control its app market and UI.
It was only a matter of time before Google acquired a company with the background of Slide, and I expect that they will acquire a number of other companies with social network DNA to bulk up on their capabilities in engagement widgets, engagement ads, games, and viral growth. Slide fits the bill well, as does LabPixies, which was acquired in April. Those two are not enough, as Google seems to have finally recognized that not only has it lagged in its attempts to do social, but that Facebook is a serious threat to its own dominance in advertising.
Google can start by setting the Slide team loose on the Google Buzz data for a Gmail situated social network launch. Let the Slide team apply their viral loop mastery on allowing Gmail users to quickly and seamlessly participate in the new Google social media offering by leveraging an existing email social graph. This time focusing on opt-in and relationship strength, as available from aggregate email data. This sounds like a bastardized, with a more functional feed and an email portal similar to, but more interactive and functional than, Google Buzz. There would be games from Zynga and LabPixies, both Google investments, with more gaming companies to follow, with added personalization apps plus widgets from Slide, and a network-wide integrated game mechanics system to engage and acquire users.
Google investment Zynga started rolling out a non-Facebook identity system earlier this summer for Facebook users, and last week Zynga modified their authentication system in a way that should allow them offer the same game to users on multiple social networks. This step, would allow players on Google’s new network, Tagged, Yahoo, MySpace or elsewhere to join the same game and not be locked in to staying on Facebook to keep their characters.
Imagine that – being able take your Facebook Farmville or Mafia Wars character and play them on Google with no need to restart a new game.
Facebook has done well with the steps it has taken to make more money and control its platform. In the process, it has negatively impacted the businesses of game, widget, and app providers that are now more than willing to join Google, the largest Internet company with the most to lose from Facebook’s rise. With Google’s help, game developers are realizing that Facebook may not have all the cards.
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Google Buys Slide, Puts On Social Warpaint
Wave, which was once touted as the email and social media killer by Google, has been phased out by the search giant. It will still be around, hovering on the web with its diehard users, but Google plans to let it die on the vine.
Somehow the billion-dollar bully of the Internet wasn’t able to put together a social networking success. Despite its commitment to the promotion and development of Wave, the product was always met by a collective shrug by the public. Google should be worried because its Buzz product is getting a somewhat similar reaction right now; when it’s not clogging up the GMail inboxes of curious onlookers that is.
So why was Wave, which allowed real-time email threads, playbacks and drag-and-drop sharing, such a big failure? It had the features that users were interested in, but despite coming out as social networking fervor was picking up steam, it never got any traction.
One of the biggest reasons was the exclusivity that Google used to first roll it out. Since Wave was first opened by invitation only, the initial excitement involved with getting an account was soon eclipsed by the simple fact that none of your friends were there to talk to.
And that type of exclusivity is a sign that Google still really doesn’t understand what drives social media.
For many, Google Wave was an empty room that no one had the patience to fill up. Why mess with waiting around and yelling your name into the darkness on Wave, despite its cool features, when you go log on to Facebook and talk with everyone you knew, share pictures, videos, links and — probably an overlooked key — ease of use.
Sure, when you signed up for Wave, you were given invitations to email to your friends. But if you were tepid and awkward about using the site, they would be too. Telling someone “Hey, let’s try Wave and see if we can figure it out” is a lot different than saying, “Dude, you need to get on Facebook so we can chat.” While such an invitation rollout strategy worked for Gmail it crashed for Wave.
Wave was innovative and slick, but in the end it was clunky and not-intuitive, which put it at a disadvantage when compared to Twitter, Facebook and other sites.
For its part, Google is doing what innovative companies should do: kill bad products and move on. According to TechCrunch, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said the company has a try, fail and keep creating mentality.
Wave may have been too ahead of its time, but most of all it was just too much of a closed system to matter to the public at large. The products Google has rolled out that have worked have been exceptional – Docs, GMail, Google Talk not to mention search. So for that, we should give Google some credit, they are smart enough to move on.
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Google Wave, We Hardly Knew You
Google has received a lot of blame for the decline of newspapers. It looks like Google might now be poised to bail newspapers out and make them reliant on the search giant.
Google is testing a new paywall system. Called Newspass, this new system seems like it can make micropayments a viable revenue model and make Google an ecommerce behemoth.
Bad Blood
Some newspaper owners have accused Google of making a profit from scraping their content. Essentially, many newspapers feel defrauded because while they’ve received no compensation for their content appearing in Google News, Google has made revenue off of the Adwords ads that appears alongside that Google News content.
Blood is so bad between Google and some newspapers that many newspapers have ignored Google’s efforts to help them drive traffic to their restricted content. For instance, rather than using Google’s First-Click-Free service to let Google index content behind a registration wall, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation blocked Google from indexing its newspaper content altogether.
Google’s Paywall Solution
One model tabled to help newspapers generate online subscription income was micropayments. The model was never widely implemented, however, because of widespread doubt that a user would be willing to repeatedly charge minuscule transactions from multiple sites to their credit cards.
But Google is now working on Newspass, a paywall system that would allow users to manage subscriptions and micropayments across multiple sites/networks through one centralized account. And as Matthew Buckland wrote for Silicon Valley Watcher, Google is already piloting Newspass with Italian publishers, and it’s designed to support multiple platforms:
The search giant will apparently launch “an integrated payment system” allowing users to buy news content with just “one click”. Newspass would allow publishers to use a single infrastructure for Web, mobile and tablet computers to monetize their content.
Importantly, [...] consumers will have a single log-in across a multitude of news sites that would be flexible enough to accommodate various kinds of payments, including long-term subscriptions and one-time micropayments. It would be a one-click payment for access, not too dissimilar from Google Checkout.
The one-click access to multiple sites could potentially be a deal closer for micropayments and other paid subscriptions because it would reduce friction. Essentially, users might be more likely to pay for content if all recurring and micropayments are managed under one account that they already have through a brand that they already trust.
Just Another Brick in the Wall?
Of course, this all begs the question: is Google too late? In addition to Google having failed at many things, it might be too late to expect users to start paying for what they’ve been getting for free for so long.
For instance, there’s no guarantee that mainstream publishers will go for Newspass. They might be too uncomfortable with Google having that much access to data about both their traffic and revenue.
That being said, it’s equally likely that this kind of product and level of support could be the tipping point for news publishers to fully embrace Google’s suite of tools (such as First-Click-Free). In the meantime, we’ll just have to sit back and watch how things play out in Italy.
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Google Moves to Corral Newspapers into Newspass
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