According to Searchignite, the demand for paid searches went up in 2010. While only 17.4% of search ad spending was done through Bing and Yahoo, Google dominated with 82.6% of search ads. The market is up 18.5% from 2009 when search ad spending was beginning to decrease. Retailers had very impressive spending because of the busy holiday season. December by itself had a 44.8% increase. While some speculated that there would be a continued decrease, these numbers prove something different. Leadpile uses ad spending as an option just as many others are continuing to do.

Exciting news for online advertisers! Online advertising spend comes in at #1 in 2010, totaling $25.8 billion, closely followed by print publications at $25.7 billion. Many advertisers have shifted offline spend to new online campaigns, some even dabbling in social networking media buys. Advertisers are shifting offline dollars to campaigns that have more measureable results such as banner ads or email campaigns. Even more stunning forecasts are that online display spend will overtake search ads by 2014.

If there weren’t enough search engines to try and keep up with, there is now one more to try out- BLEKKO. Digitaltrends.com is reporting that this new search engine is certainly unique compared to the others out there. Do you ever search for something on Google and a bunch of unrelated/unimportant websites appear in your search results? I know I have and now this new search engine is promising that this sort of thing is not going to happen when you perform your searches. Using “slashtags” is what is being said will differentiate Blekko from the other search engine’s search results. These slashtags will help to improve results in the initial search categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. For example, you should be able to search amongst the millions of websites and be able to pull up sites that are not spam or unrelated websites. Blekko is currently in beta mode, but try it out. Looks like something totally different than Google!

It seems like everyone including Moms and Grandmas are on Facebook sharing pictures, status updates and commenting on pages. With all of the updates and changes Facebook is constantly requiring users to update privacy settings….However, if you are not watching this with an Eagle eye, you may be one of the 100 million “FB” users that personal details have been collected and published online, making it hard to impossible to remove this information from the public view.

This data was collected and posted by the Internet site Pirate Bay. Using a code to scan the 500+ million Facebook profiles for any information not hidden by privacy settings. Stated by Ron Bowes of Pirate Bay on his website www.skullsecurity.org the results of this code/search were “spectacular” allowing him to capture 171 million names, 100 million of these being unique.

Facebook is currently downplaying the absorption of this information saying no private data had been compromised. In a statement emailed to msnbc.com, Facebook stated the information on the list was already available online.

According to recent articles, the amount of money being spent on paid internet searches (such asPPC) has notably risen. Between 2008-2009 there was a 14% rise. Many believe the increase in paid searches can be due to the retail industry being down, leaving more opportunity for non-retail related businesses and consumers to make purchases on the  internet. Search engine sites, such as Bing, are up an impressive 26%, with Google up 15.9% for paid searches.

Paid searches on the internet continue to grow strong and prove to be beneficial to websites on the internet. Leadpile works with PPC publishers to help maximize a site’s potential and bring in consumers who are looking for a service.

Google announced today that it will shift its search engine off the mainland but will not close doors completely. Google and China have had an on-going dispute over recent months regarding restricting search results. There had been talks that Google would pull out completely from the Chinese market, however has decided to remain most likely due to its desire to profit from an explosively growing market.

According to the Associated Press, effective this afternoon, visitors to Google.cn are being redirected to Google’s Chinese language service based in Hong Kong. Results on these pages are not censored by Google, but the Chinese government filters can still restrict results that are viewed by mainland audiences.

Google originally set up a search engine in China in 2006. Currently about 700 or Google’s 20,000 employees are in China.

Microsoft is gearing up to test a new format for ads appearing in the search ad format. Traditionally, this ad type appears as plain text with links either imbedded into the text or in adjacent to. According to MediaPostNEWS, the new ad type that will be live next month will introduce logos and favicons hoping to attract consumers attention as well as generate more search campaign dollars to Bing.
Bing which has continued to increase its market share of the search engine world, and currently sits at 10.7%, still has a long way to go to catch Google who is number 1 with 64.6% of the market share.
When searching, does the ad type on the page attract you to return to a specific search engine? Does ad type affect your choice, more than habit? I know that I have been making an attempt to utilize Bing, but 9 times out of 10 I am at the search results produced by Google before I even realize I made the decision. Flashier ads may attract additional buyers to the ad, but the consumers will have to be attracted to the search engine first!

It now seems that Google will have a bigger beast to battle, because Yahoo and Microsoft have officially signed a partnership deal. This is something that has been going on for a while now, but now has become official. This new deal will also create some more potential for Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing, amongst other benefits. The AP is reporting that, “Under the agreement, Yahoo will have limited access to the data on users’ searches — which yield insights that can be used to pick out ads more likely to pique a person’s interest. The value of that information is why Microsoft wants to process more search requests.”
It does not seem that this signed deal will produce any immediate changes that we will all see, however Leadpile and all other lead generation companies that deal with search engines, will see some sort of changes in the near future. There is going to be lots to come with the battle over the market share for Google and Microsoft/Yahoo, and who can come up with what next? Hopefully, we are all going to be the ones that benefit from this battle to be on top! Let’s sit back and watch it ALL unfold.

The days of newspaper and magazine advertising seems to be becoming more and more extinct as businesses turn to online direct response advertising. Online direct advertising incorporates lead generation, search and online directories into one category and then there is national and local digital media. Businesses seem to be turning more and more to generating clients through search and other more “targeted” media because of the better end result = more business. The costs to print newspapers and magazines has not become as profitable as in previous years because many are not turning to print to get their news, they are turning to a more instant “fix” like the internet. Knowing this, publishers and advertisers are also turning to the internet for customer’s attention. Lead generation companies, like Leadpile, have become more and more in demand as the cost to convert even things such as a television ad to a interested customer rise.
Biz report points out that, “Besides online search, the forecast predicts that online direct response marketing, a new category in 2009, will increase by 2.9%.” Other reports show that by 2014 this sort of advertising is set to increase by 10%. This is great news for lead generation companies and our search engines. However, the picture does not seem as good for national digital media (rich media, online video, email, display and mobile) which is set to decrease by 11%, and local digital media (ie: television, radio and newspapers) to decrease by 5%. The good news is the report also points out that both are set to rebound in future years.
My question is how are other advertising sources, besides online media, going to adapt to increase their revenue? This has to be something that is very challenging for many companies who have built empires by using these non-online media companies (ie- newspapers and magazines). I can’t imagine how people survived in earlier years without the internet, and the capabilities it has to reach so many people in such a little place (computer). This reminds me of growing up and parents stating they did not have televisions or things like calculators in their daily life. I could never understand how they survived, which I know now sounds silly. What will be the next innovative creation that will change our world???????? Who will discover it?

Lately it seems to be a dog-eat-dog world with all our search engines trying to get the biggest piece of the search engine “puzzle”. Yesterday I spoke about search engines and the need to bring new things to the table in order to stay competitive with other search engines. Ask.com is one of those search engines that is offering a unique service that other search engines are not offering. For instance, Ask.com is great for longer questions you want answered versus entering them in a standard Google search, and having to filter through all the results. Comscore reports that Ask.com’s ranking rose from 10th place to now 6th place, compared to other properties such as eBay and Facebook (in May based on unique users). This explains why a lot of Leadpile publishers are using this search engine to generate traffic to their payday loan, debt, auto finance, online education and other websites. Just like search engines trying to do something different to attract users, affiliate marketing and lead generators have to think of unique ways to generate traffic to their properties. Ask.com seems to be a good option to consider. It appears that others think so too, and that’s why their rankings seem to be headed in the right direction. Another GREAT alternative to the Google BEAST!

In the days of companies trying to be the best of the best, companies are trying to always come up with fresh new ideas. Yahoo has rolled out it’s new search tool called “search pad”. This new Yahoo tool will allow those that are trying to do a lot of research on a prticular subject matter, to keep all their results in one common place to reference (a notepad per say). This new tool will allow you to really sort through all the various search results you obtained from a particular subject matter. This is not something that can be organized with search engines such as Google and Bing, so there could be some interest in this new notepad. The unfortunate thing about this new tool is it really is not beneficial for those that are just doing a quick search for simple subjects such as stores in the area.
The idea of this could be really good for students or workers that are doing an indepth report, and need to have a lot of material to complete the report. Unfortunately, the use of libraries has pretty much dwindled, where people now use the internet to research reports for school and work.
Leadpile and other internet companies have to have this same sort of initiative to stay around. The future of your company relies on knowing your competition will always be trying to come up with new/fresh ideas. If you want to stay around and remain competitive you have to come up with ideas to capture a new audience that some other company is not doing. This appears to be that attempt by Yahoo, and it certainly has a uniqueness that other search engines are not yet offering. So maybe it will be received with open arms like Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The key is to not capture of the attention of users, but to keep their attention.

Google was not happy with dominating the internet search world, so now they are looking at getting a piece of the pie with computer operating systems. NPR is reporting, “The research and development for the browser will feed directly into Chrome OS, which will be a free, open-source project designed to get people onto the Web quickly. Open source means any programmer can make changes to it.” Initially this is going to be more of a focus on netbooks, but I am sure if there is any success with this new operating system they will be rolling it out on an even larger scale. The new operating system will be called Google Chrome OS. So, it looks like Windows and Mac OS are going to potentially see some competition, however Leadpile is still devoted to Apple!