Leadpile's Blog» Yahoo

Who Doesn’t Love A Good Groupon ?

Natasha Aronov — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:20:36 +0000

The anticipation of checking your email and finding out what the Groupon deal of the day will be brings excitement and many desirable discounts! If you have not heard of the website Groupon which offers 1 deal per day according to your zip code, you have probably been living under a rock.

Two years ago, 29 year old Andrew Mason founded Groupon and now employees nearly 1,000 people. The Groupon site emails its members daily with over 200 discounts on multiple retail websites – deals only become “active” or avalible to be purchased when the first person agrees to make the purchase – the deal expires if it does not reach the minimum number or people willing to purchase and becomes unavailable to anyone.

Groupon is currently described by Forbes as “the world’s fastest growing company”, which may give insight to Google placing an offer on the table to purchase the site for $5.3 billion. Yahoo reportedly offered Mason $2 billion in April of 2010, but the deal did not close because the dollar amount was not enough.

Groupon makes its money by taking a cut of each sale and has a projected turnover of $500 million this year. In June Groupon registered 8 million subscribers to its daily email, with nearly 12 million unique visitors monthly to its website.

Facebook Email is coming – [insert_name]@facebook.com

Monica Vo — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:23:06 +0000

Monday will mark another step forward for Facebook. The social network giant is looking to expand its communication hub even further by offering an email platform. Expectations are that this could have a very large impact on Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and other email systems. The impact on email marketers has yet to be addressed, but it will certainly have an impact on the display marketing in current webmail providers as consumers make a switch to the Facebook platform.

With Facebook’s functionality already replacing traditional email services, it is likely the use of Facebook will grow as it offers an email platform. It will likely put its own twist on the typical webmail platform, however details remain to be seen. A large concern over the privacy capabilities and policies of the company may hinder the popularity of such a service.

Stay tuned to see what the big announcement on Monday entails and how usable this email client is.

Social Networking Sites: What’s Too Much Info

Mari Woods Holt — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:18:28 +0000

Social networking sites are a part of most people’s daily lives. Unfortunately, telling too much information seems to be something that people aren’t paying enough attention to. For instance, Facebook users consistently update their status and what they are doing at any given time during the day. However, people are updating their status telling the “world” they are going out of town. How about do you have your full birth date and/or address listed on your profile? None of these items would create any security issues if you have a limited number of Facebook friends that you personally trust, AND you have your privacy settings set that those that are not “friends” with you can not see profile information. If these two items are the case, then this information might not apply to you.
Yahoo Finance pointed out some great things that you should be conscious of with your Facebook accounts.

Things you should never reveal on Facebook:
1. Your birth date and birth place
2. Vacation plans
3. Home address
4. Confessionals
5. Password hints
6. Risky behaviors

Not only are these items above revealing more information then you should be sharing with a total stranger, this information could be potentially viewed by your future employers, insurance company, lenders etc.
Bottom line: limit what you put on your Facebook account because you don’t want just anyone to know everything and anything you are doing in all hours of the day.

Paid Searches Pay Off

Nicky — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:02:42 +0000

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.

Yahoo & Zillow Combining Forces…

Natasha Aronov — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:40:23 +0000

Yahoo and Zillow are combining forces to make Zillow the exclusive sales partner to existing home sales advertisers on Yahoo. This partnership will form the largest real estate ad network for existing home advertisers. According to ClickZ, Zillow which currently offers enhanced listings and profile pages for agents, will also be included on Yahoo Real Estate placements. Zillow’s for-sale listings, showcase ads, and featured listings will also be fed to Yahoo’s site. Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow currently rank second and third among top real estate sites, Realtor.com tops the rankings.

The two companies have worked together since 2006, and partnered separately with a large percentage of the same newspaper site publishers.. Bringing their resources together to become one bigger better force will logically be a positive move.

US Online Advertising To Recover This Year

Christina — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:58:39 +0000

Spending on Internet advertising in the US should “almost completely recover” this year according to the IDC.

With Search and Mobile advertising seeing the largest growth.

Search revenue is expected to increase from 13.8 billion to 27.3 billion between 2009 and 2014. Mobile will see an astonishing growth of 220 million to 1.8 billion.

Currently Google holds a 64% share in the US search market with Yahoo at 18% and Microsoft at 12%. With Yahoo recently agreeing to outsource its search to Microsoft and Google’s proposed $750 million purchase of Admob it will be interesting to see how these big players affect online and offline advertising.

Hotmail Making Improvements…

Natasha Aronov — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:34:05 +0000

In an effort to bring an advantage to Hotmail over Yahoo or Google Microsoft is completing upgrades to the free Web mail service , the changes expected to be available in July or August. According to the Associated Press, the upgrades will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users’ key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also show a thumbnail preview of incoming photos or videos without having to open the attachment. The improvements are also going to make syncing Hotmail on mobile phones easier.

Currently Yahoo’s email service has 95 million U.S. users, Hotmail trails behind with 47 million and Gmail a close 3rd with 43 million.

Twitter & Yahoo! Combining Forces!

Natasha Aronov — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:27:26 +0000

Twitter and Yahoo! have announced a new relationship that will change the “tweeting” world forever! As if there is not already enough instant access to your friends, neighbors, and now even your dogs every tweeted thought, Yahoo! search will now include real-time twitter updates!

According to CNN, real-time tweets will now be available to the 600 million users in Yahoo’s global network. Twitter users will also be able to update their status from Yahoo! sites and share content from Yahoo! in their Twitter stream.

Yahoo Taking on Twitter??

Mari Woods Holt — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:20:27 +0000

With the explosive popularity of Twitter, many companies have attempted or are attempting to become players in this space. You can now add Yahoo to the list of companies that are rolling out a strategy.

Yahoo has already developed a Portuguese and Spanish microblogging platform, and an English version is already accepting invitations to the program. You can go here to see the new site. Reviews of the other versions have been mixed at best, so it will be interesting to see if Yahoo is spending their time and resources wisely in entering this space.

Yahoo Wins Recent Court Case Involving Internet Radio

Mari Woods Holt — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:29:39 +0000

Yahoo has come out ahead in a recent court case involving it’s Launch Media division and major record labels. These record labels wanted to be able to mandate a “status” of the media division (Launchcast Webcasting Service) as an “interactive service”. This title would have then made it a requirement for Launchcast to pay higher fees to broadcast it’s music. Instead the court ruled that the webcasting service would be treated as that, a web service, and only be required to pay some small royalty fees. This is great news for Yahoo who could have had to pay a lot more money to run their internet radio service.
This court case, and others involving major record labels, has really put a damper on the record label’s ability to earn revenue from their music being played. This opens up more conversations in the fact that how can record labels continue to earn revenue? Are we potentially looking at a whole new outlook on record labels and what they do to create music? What about the idea of them being run by internet companies? Distribution of CDs has really dropped off in recent years, and court cases like this one will continue to add fuel to this uphill battle the record labels and their artists are going through.