Advertising and marketing

For the last quarter of 2008, Google followed the example of Apple and IBM, not Microsoft and Intel, reporting financial results above financial estimates amid a grim economic environment.

Google also announced a stock option exchange program intended to keep its employees happier.

For the quarter ended December 31, the company reported net income of $382 million, or $1.21 per share, a big decline from the $1.21 billion from the year earlier. Factoring out various costs, including stock-option expenses, though, the result was $5.10 per share, 15 cents above the $4.95 expected by analysts surveyed by … Read more

One administration after George Bush became the top result for a Google search for "miserable failure," new President Barack Obama has his own such artificially engineered result for the query "cheerful achievement."

Earlier Thursday morning, a search for the relatively unusual term returned Obama's whitehouse.gov site as the top link, the result of a bit of work called a Googlebomb . However, perhaps illustrating the frailty of this particular effort, the result had been bumped to second place behind news of the Obama Googlebomb published by the Google Blogoscoped blog. See the more recent view … Read more

Digg CEO Jay Adelson on Thursday morning is announcing that the social media site is laying off a "very small" portion of its workforce, but will also be hiring a new direct sales force and head of sales to drive the company to profitability this year.

The overall job cuts at the 75-person company will be "microscopic in size," Adelson said to me, later confirming a figure of "about 10 percent." He reiterated that Digg this year is focusing on profitability and growth, and for the first time is building out its own advertising support structure, "which we've never really focused on before." Adelson posted a brief item about the news on the Digg blog.

The partnership Digg has with Microsoft to sell standard advertising units will continue. But Digg will be rolling out higher-profile advertising programs, and features on the site to support them, that his internal sales force will be pitching. He pointed to Digg Dialogg as an example of a vehicle that could be sponsored by a higher-profile advertising program.

It's a difficult time for all media companies, of course, but Adelson says that Digg has not seen any CPM erosion--the price they get for the ads on the site--and that the Microsoft is doing well for the company.

Even though Digg has "multiple years" of cash on hand for operating expenses at the current burn rate, Adelson said, it's a brutal economy today. "It's true we have cash in the bank, but getting to profitability makes more sense to us." Sounding like almost every other Web start-up CEO on the state of his business today, he continued, "If things don't get worse this year, if we get to the second or third quarter and things look good, I can bring some of that talent back in. But if we go in the other direction, that's not a burn rate we can maintain. I'd rather be in front."

The company raised new capital and doubled in size in 2008.

Adelson says Digg's engineering and core development group won't be hit by the layoffs. The cuts will come in areas "not core to our function. We'll be shifting some of that cost to a sales force." … Read more

Google plans to give big media companies a cut of advertising revenues when their videos appear on YouTube, regardless of who posts them to the site.

The technology blog TechCrunch reported Wednesday that unnamed sources at YouTube expect Google to expand a program that allows media companies to sell advertising for their video content that appears on YouTube. The program is expected to be expanded by the end of the first quarter.

The blog reports that today only a few media partners sell their own ads on YouTube. But YouTube confirmed that a few big partners, such as CBS, already … Read more

Google will report financial results Thursday for the last quarter of 2008, but the crystal-ball set likely will be watching for indications of how much Google's belt-tightening efforts will help the search and advertising giant's future profits.

It's not clear exactly how deeply Google is affected by the recession. The company has been bullish about how its search-ad business is better able to withstand a down economy because advertisers can find out just how well a campaign is faring financially and because cost-conscious buyers might use Google's services more. But the economic malaise has proven a … Read more

Personalized Web radio service Pandora has added 15-second audio advertisements that will occasionally play between songs.

The company's official Twitter feed first announced the inclusion of ads, saying Pandora will be "extremely respectful of your listening experience" while promising "to be prudent."

So far, the ads have been used sparingly. Pandora's founder and chief strategy officer, Tim Westergren, told PressDemocrat.com in an interview that the average user will hear an ad only once every two hours, but the company is experimenting to see what works.

Pandora has experimented with audio advertising in the … Read more

As the publishing industry gradually moves online, Google has discovered that it's hard to shift some of its initiatives in the other direction--specifically, advertisements.

"While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we--or our partners--wanted," Spencer Spinnell, director of Google print ads, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "As a result, we will stop offering print ads on February 28."

Google launched the print ad program in November 2006, then expanded it in 2007, … Read more

Steve Horowitz, engineering director of Google's Android project to build a Linux-based open-source phone operating system, has left the company to become chief technology officer of Coupons.com.

"The company is at a pivotal point in its business, and I am eager to help further advance its development and deployment of new platforms and services for digital promotions," Horowitz said in a statement Tuesday.

Coupons.com offers coupons online. Using its technology, people printed coupons worth more than $300 million in 2008, up 140 percent from 2007, the company said, but it's not clear how many … Read more

Wondering who that mysterious new Flickr contact is with all the slick product photos? Maybe it's a viral marketer.

That's what happened to Illuminata analyst and CNET blogger Gordon Haff earlier this week when Scion xB RS 6.0 added him as a Flickr contact. I thought it might be a marketing move, given that the Detroit auto show was under way, and indeed a little digging showed that to be the case.

"We are promoting the new Scion xB Release Series 6.0 vehicle online through a variety of social media avenues," said Kat Kirsch … Read more