Free Lunch
Well almost. The next iteration of Jupiter’s semi-annual survey of search marketers is live. If you spend money on search or help clients do so, be sure to fill it out. In return, you will get the topline data from the survey. It will be the largest quality data set you’ll receive for free. Or however much 10 mins of your time costs.
The First of Many
Mediapost reports on Marchex’s $30m acquisition of IndustryBrains, one of the gazillion providers of contextual ad networks. IndustryBrains was doing about $6m in revenue and generating $1m in profit, so the acquisition price was a good one. The firm grew sensibly through specific verticals like technology and finance, growing a reputation for premium distribution instead of the much worn catchcry of "I have a better mouse trap! Look at me!".
Perhaps more interestingly is the link into direct navigation. OK it’s not that interesting. But a little while back I caught up with Mark Peterson and Kirby Winfield of Marchex and chatted about their entrance into the space and plans for the future. They are making some interesting moves here and the integration of IndustryBrains with their portfolio of 200,000 domain names is one.
In other exciting direct navigation news, Matt Flanagan, who represents Sedo.com (who have 500,000 names) and reads this blog, kindly setup a meeting with their CEO Matt Bentley. I’ll try to dig down deeper into the economics of slapping search ads and feeds onto domain names next week. Don’t change that channel!
Commerce and Advertising
Online advertising and commerce have an almost teenage sibling relationship. They are both growing very fast and people pepetually wonder which is better. From a profit standpoint, advertising is always going to be the golden child but topline growth is a different story.
Revenue growth, over the long term, will be one to one. When I say long term, I mean more than 10 years but less than, say 25 - when marketers might start valuing offline impact of online advertising (I am not trying to be cynical).
Commerce continued its stellar rise, even when the technology investing bubble burst in 2000. Advertising stagnated around for a few years.
Commerce companies like eBay, Amazon and IACI grew quickly. Yahoo didn’t and every other online publisher experienced similar stagnation. But in recent times, online publishers have grown like weeds. Much of this is catchup. At some point commerce and advertising becomes correlated and they grow in unison.
One data point is the great quarters eBay and Amazon just put in. Most investors had assumed wrongly their stage of maturity.
Online advertising may have another year or two of faster growth in it (simply because of the international aftershock - i.e. markets outside the US are 12-18 months behind it) but after that I would expect the two will grow largely in line.
The only difference is one has to pay a worker to pop a book in a box and into a postal van.
I Don’t Know Why This Fascinates Me
Verisign, in its most recent earnings call, has some great commentary on the fascinating area of domain name/online advertising speculation (well I think so anyway).
250,000 names a week!
Who Says that Social Networks don’t have a Business Model?
[Via Searchenginelowdown] Brazilian police arrested 10 people on drug charges, after monitoring activity on Google’s Orkut.
Old Names Die Hard
Matt Marshall over at Siliconbeat has an excellent profile of a new intermediated online dating site (just what the world needs! another dating site!), Engage.
It is interesting to see the old stalwart names reappear under different guises. Engage used to be yet-another-ad-network in the late nineties so it is somewhat ironic to see it reappear as yet-another-dating-site. Another example is Snap.com, formerly yet-another-portal, which has reappeared as yet-another-general-search-engine in recent times.
Maybe it’s time to put in a call to see if Altavista.com is nearing renewal?
