Online Research Drives Offline Sales

Online product research is driving more in-store sales than online sales, says eMarketer's Jennifer Grau.

Last year, eMarketer estimated that store sales influenced by online research totaled $471 billion. Comparatively, retail e-commerce sales were only $136 billion.

Looked at another way, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales.

Read the eMarketer article here.

Google Health Records Set Off Privacy Alarms

Google today unveiled a pilot program that enables people to store and share information about their medical conditions online. Google today unveiled a pilot program that enables people to store and share information about their medical conditions online. Read this story here.

Integrating images in search algorithms

This blog presents a test of image inclusion in searches from the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Micosoft and AskJeeves). 10 different search terms were tried out. One of the search terms ended with the word “pics”, four ended with “pictures” and five ended with the word “images”. Conclusions favor Microsoft and put Google at disadvantage. Draw your own conclusions from the results...

A YouTube for How To

A New York City startup called Howcast is launching today that wants to be the YouTube of instructional videos. In fact, the three founders—Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman—are ex-Google employees who worked on Google Video and YouTube before they left eight months ago. They actually are going for a little more polish than YouTube, trying to bring some production values to the world of Web video.

Howcast is also announcing an $8 million series A financing, led by Tudor Investment Corp. In addition to their own site, they already have a Youtube channel (where they split advertising revenues with their former employer). The Howcast team also has signed distribution deals with Myspace, Verizon for its Vcast phones and FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO. JetBlue is the launch advertiser. Read the entire story here.

Super Bowl Ads Online - 1984 till today

If you wanted to watch again your favorite Super Bowl commercials - now you have the chance! Check out this statistic from The New York Times of all Super Bowl commercials from 1984 to 2008. Click on the stat icons to watch the commercials. Enjoy!

Microsoft's Bid for Yahoo! is about the Advertising

From the press release: "The online advertising market is growing at a very fast pace, from over $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010. The resulting benefits of scale along with the associated capital costs for advertising platform providers make this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners."

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO said in a statement: "We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market."

Read Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo! board members here.

World's Web Users Are Shopping Online - eMarketer

World's Web Users Are Shopping Online - eMarketer

eMarketer reports on a global study done by The Nielsen Company.
Click on the image to view what are the items purchased online globally.
Books are at the top of the list, followed by clothing. Sports memorabilia rank last on the itemized list.

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo!

If the deal goes through, Microsoft/Yahoo would dominate online display and rival Google in search, writes MediaPost's Joe Mandese. The deal would mark the largest yet in the ongoing consolidation among the Internet's big bodied players, and would once again reset the playing field for online advertising industry. Read Joe's article here.