Leadpile’s Blog

We’ve discussed the topic of Google’s presence in China a couple times, and it looks like it’s time to revisit the topic again.  It appears China has decided to renew its license with Google to continue using its search address Google.cn. In March, Google had begun redirecting search queries from China’s mainland to a version of its search engine that is not censored in Hong Kong.  Google stopped redirecting two weeks after the government indicated it would not renew its license if the company continued this practice.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt commented at a news conference, “Our operations in China are completely at the discretion of the Chinese government.  I don’t want anyone to be confused about that.”

During the standoff with Beijing, Google did lose some of its search share to other rivals such as Baidu.com. Other Google services continue to be popular such as its email service, Gmail.  Other services provided by Google such as YouTube continue to be blocked by China.

Under the renewed license, Google.cn requires visitors to click on an image in order to be redirected to the Hong Kong site for web searches.  Music search features, product searches and translation services have also recently been made accessible from Google.cn itself recently.

It will be interesting to see if the new 2-click requirement for Google will restrict its commercial ability to make the ad revenue it has long profited from.

Twitter has exploded over the past few years, empowering news to travel at nearly lightening speed.  Over 50 million people post on Twitter per day right now!  But this big question has always been, what are their plans for a business model?  Well, the latest news is that companies will now be able to advertise on Twitter.  This plan for advertising will start with 10 companies including Starbucks, Virgin America and Best Buy.

The advertising program will be called Promoted Tweets.  The ad-matching and pricing formula for this advertising has not been announced yet, but preliminary discussions indicate a CPM pricing model.  As they continue, Twitter will likely seek other alternative ways to charge advertisers.

In the new Promoted Tweets program, when a company pays for a tweet, the promoted message will appear at the top of the results, regardless of the time it was written.  Promoted Tweets will also appear in the organic Twitter stream rather than on the side like other social networks promote.  Additionally, they will also be highlighted so that companies have the capability to respond if conversations turn negative.  It is still unclear how these promoted posts should appear, but it may be based on topics, geographic locations or shared interests.

Much more to come on the Twitter Promoted Tweets program, but affiliate marketers all over are likely “tweeting” about how to capture this audience even more with this new program!

According to Interactive Advertising Bureau, the spending for advertising is up for the first quarter of 2008. This is kind of ironic considering everything that our nation is going through with the economy. It appears that advertisers are backing down on other forms of advertising, but increasing their web advertising. Why is that? Is it because they can get immediate feedback from consumers because of reports that track people clicking on their ads, versus other forms of advertising you do not have that immediate feedback from consumers? In reality, advertising spending were actually down compared to the 4th quarter of 2007, however this is because of the holidays and most retail and online companies increase advertising spending during that period. As we all already know, the internet is the wave of the future where consumers will be spending a lot of time. Corporate America realizes this and they are changing what they are doing to get YOU to buy their product. Let’s see if these spending dollars continue to rise for the 2nd quarter of 2008.

Where is most of the money spent on internet advertising? Search advertising (Google, Yahoo and MSN)is where a large volume of dollars are spent followed by display ads (IE- banners), classified advertising (IE- Craig’s list), lead generation (IE- Leadpile), rich media (IE- youtube), and lastly email marketing.

So, has the slumping economy affected internet advertising also? It appears it did not, but the bottom line is: ……………………………. did the internet advertising result in more sales?