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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Feb. 9, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of Feb. 5, 2007

1299 - Feb. 7, 2007 - 5.22 PM EST

Gmail now offered to everybody

Earlier today, Google said its free email service is now open to anyone who wants an account. Google's Gmail service was offered previously by invitation only.

So far, Google's service has proved popular. When it was originally launched, Google raised eyebrows with its practice of indexing the content of emails so that the company could place contextual advertisements in them.

However, Google still managed to get hundreds of reader responses from people looking for free email accounts.

Posted on Businessblog™

1298 - Feb. 6, 2007 - 9.09 AM EST

Yahoo rolls out Panama

A group of Yahoo executives will begin testing their new Panama search marketing platform. Overall, Yahoo will be analyzing a whole set of moving charts projected on walls, while comparing them with a team of about thirty-five engineers for any possible signs of trouble.

Yahoo flipped the switch on its new Panama search advertising system yesterday, and is very upbeat about it. Brian Acton, v.p. of engineering at Yahoo Search Marketing said “it’ll be a good event if it is a nonevent.” Yahoo’s investors and advertisers will be looking for something eventful to start happening in the weeks and months after the company has ironed out any potential bugs in the new platform.

Panama is Yahoo’s long-awaited project in closing the wide gap with Google in the race for search advertising supremacy, a rapidly-growing and lucrative business that Google dominates in the industry.

Overall, Panama is the most important new product for Yahoo in many years. “This is something that could potentially affect the largest and most profitable business segment that Yahoo currently has,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup.

Among those who will be watching closely on Panama's overall progress is Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semel. "We will be watching this very closely for many months,” he said. “It has been and continues to be our number one priority.”

This is actually no surprise. Many analysts who follow Yahoo closely say the delay of Panama is the biggest reason Yahoo's stock dropped from a high of more than $35 early in 2006 to just over $22 last October. Yahoo shares have since regained some ground, closing last week at $28.77, but still have a long way to go.

In its simplest form, Panama is Yahoo’s attempt to place ads right in front of users that are more likely to be clicked on. Up until today, Yahoo gave top billing to the advertisers who were willing to bid the most to have their ads listed alongside a particular search result.

It's biggest competitor, Google, has a totally different formula which Yahoo is trying hard to replicate. It ranks ads on a mix of bid prices and relevancy to the user. That leads users to click on ads more frequently, and since advertisers pay only when a user clicks on their ad, Google, on average, makes more money on every search than Yahoo does.

Additionally, since Google is a lot better at matching ads with users, the system is more efficient for advertisers, creating an impetus that rewards Google with a very powerful edge.

“I spend a majority of my dollars on Google,” said Amy Wong, global online marketing manager for the software security firm Trend Micro. “I’m glad to see that Yahoo is trying to get their act together.”

Ms. Wong said she would like to distribute her ad dollars more evenly among Google, Yahoo and MSN, the third major player in search advertising.

Overall, Mr. Mahaney estimated that last year, Google made about 4.5 cents to a nickel on every single search, while Yahoo generated only bout 2.5 cents to 3 cents for each search. The difference adds up to billions of dollars a year! Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

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