Archive for the 'Internet Marketing' Category

I enjoy reading Read/WriteWeb, but Alex Iskold recently published a much hyped yet ill-conceived article titled ‘Google – The Ultimate Money Making Machine’. The article had some very interesting points, but the main analysis was simply wrong.

Iskold’s claim that there is an infinite demand for Google’s goods and services is an erroneous claim. Google primarily makes its money by selling advertising, and there is certainly a limit to the size of online and other advertising markets. In 2006, for example, eMarketer estimated that the size of the online advertising market in the US was roughly $15.6 billion, and Google captured about a quarter of that pie. Undoubtedly, the world wide advertising market is bigger. And as companies move toward internet marketing from traditional advertising and as Google moves into traditional advertising, the pie will get bigger. However, this is a far cry from ‘unlimited’. Google’s market is neither unlimited nor is Google the only player. In fact, as stated above, Google only capitalized on a quarter of the online advertising market–its forte.

Google is not the darling, magical money machine that Iskold and others believe it to be. It is a very well situated company in a large market that is becoming increasingly competitive and will continue getting more competitive in the future. We do live in a free market global economy (roughly), and why would anyone pass up on the opportunity to eat from the succulent advertising money pie?

On Tuesday, Techcrunch reported that MySpace has semi-officially overtaken Yahoo as having the most page views of any internet property. This revelation was met with moderate fanfare, and other prominent industry blogs like GigaOm and Searchblog did not even go there. There is good reason to take this news with a grain of salt, as it is misrepresentative and hides some very important facts.

(more…)

On Friday, Techcrunch reported on a rumor that the major television networks were planning a joint effort to create their own video web site that would offer the networks’ own content. This seemed like a logical move to regain revenue lost to websites that profit from illegally disseminated property belonging to the networks. Alas, these plans soon fell apart when individual networks started to take favor with Google-owned YouTube after receiving payoffs. Not only is this a great case-study of game theory, it is also an excellent example of missed opportunities and foregone revenue.

Why don’t the individual networks make content available on their own websites?!

(more…)

Almost all web sites generate value for their owners in some way. The modes by which sites create value can be straightforward like direct online sales or less immediate such as helping to build brand or supporting the sales process. While much has been written about conventional revenue channels, little if anything has been discussed about more indirect sources of value. We strongly feel that the indirect sources amount to a very significant and important component of the overall revenue stream and should, therefore, be understood and carefully considered. To this end, this article presents the entire spectrum of ways that web sites can generate value for their owners.

(more…)

One of the most pervasive design shortcomings of web sites is neglecting entire market segments–a mistake that can have very costly consequences. This article provides the basis for an effective method to correct this and improve overall conversions.

Principal Market Segmentation for Web Sites

There are many different ways to divide a company’s market into segments; the most effective partitioning for web site design hinges on the conversion likelihood of the prospective customers. It is a matrix of a user’s commitment to buy a product or service and that user’s perception of the company selling that product or service. (more…)

When starting a web development project, there are many advantages to hiring a user experience architect first. The most important of these are:

1. to ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company
2. to obtain a definitions guide which can protect against scope creep, synchronize efforts and protect against costly revisions
3. to acquire accurate estimates for project development by providing detailed and unambiguous specifications

Ensure a usable product that matches the goals of your company and reduces support costs

By hiring a web developer first, the process of refining features to address the users’ and company’s goals can be missed entirely, giving less attention for the sake of feature development, and even postponement until integration of usability efforts is much more difficult and less effective. Unlike web developers, user experience architects specialize in evaluating user behavior and task analysis which is invaluable in creating sites with which people can feel accomplished and can enjoy interacting.

Although, a web developer will produce a functional solution, without the expertise of the user experience architect, the result may not be an effective solution; that is to say, it may work technically but your users may not be able to easily accomplish their tasks.

(more…)

Information architectures and accompanying sitemaps often illustrate page relations with single channels linking them. These architectures are sub-optimal because they do not take advantage of the principle of multiple varied access points to key destinations which can increase the traffic flow to said goals.

Providing multiple and varied pathways to key destinations is a fundamental tenant of both urban planning and building architecture, and thinking of its application in those fields can shed light on this principle’s vast potential in website architecture.

(more…)