Healthy Blog Reviews

Skype has partnered with Marchex to offer a new pay-per-call advertising service in the US, Canada and Western Europe. The Click & Call program works with a “Free Call” button that can be placed anywhere on the web. When a customer clicks the button, the Skype software launches and the call is connected at no cost to them. The advertiser pays a fee only for the calls they’ve received and they can set a budget so they won’t be surprised by a large bill at the end of the month. Skype’s Click & Call system might seem like a good alternative to acquiring an expensive toll free number, but there is a downside to the system and it’s a pretty big one. In order for the call to connect, the callee must have Skype software on their computer and Skype’s browser plug-in. The system is also not available for Macs and it won’t work on Skype mobile. On the other hand, since you only pay for the calls that come in, there’s really nothing to lose by setting up an account with Skype. If you’re running a service business that gets a large number of referrals on line, an instant, free phone call could be the deciding factor between you and your competition. Marchex will be handling the day-to-day operations of the program which include detailed call analytics. Skype emphasizes that only standard metrics will be included in the reports and that the personal information of the individual Skype customers will be kept private and protected but I can see that becoming a concern if the program takes off. You can click here to watch a short video that shows how the system works. Advertisers wishing to participate in Click & Call Advertising with Skype supported by Marchex, should visit www.skype.com/go/clickandcall . Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Tags: advertising, calls, competition, Display, flickr, individual, personal, program, Skype
Posted July 21, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Google is a real all or nothing proposition most of the time. They either completely dominate something (search) or they barely make a dent (Google Buzz and social media). One area that they continue to dominate in and there is no real relief in site for competitors is the delivery of video content. I’ll let the picture from comScore tell the story from April of this year. This kind of dominance is just as impressive as the search share lead that Google continues to hold over its competition. With video becoming more and more important in the business world this dominance stands to increase as well which can be disheartening to the competition. One bright note is that even delivering a small percentage of all the video that is consumed by the US online audience can represent large opportunity. There were 30.3 billion videos viewed by US Internet users. That’s an average of 171 videos a month per Internet user. That’s just under 6 videos per day per Internet user. Of course, as with any average there are extreme users driving that number up but it’s still interesting. Here are some other tidbits to consider from the report: The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group) with 36.6 percent penetration of online video viewers, BrightRoll Video Network with 19.5 percent, and BBE with 18.5 percent. 83.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video. 135.7 million viewers watched 13.0 billion videos on YouTube.com (96.0 videos per viewer). The average Hulu viewer watched 24.7 videos, totaling 2.5 hours of video per viewer. The duration of the average online video was 4.4 minutes. So how do you contribute to these numbers? Do you lean toward the low end or the high end of the scale?

Tags: adconion-media, Business, cloud-hosting, competition, from-the-report, internet, network, numbers, picture, time, video, video-network, video-numbers
Posted June 2, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Google continues to change the face of the SERP’s (search engine results page) by taking more real estate on the first page with information that expands on the traditional “blue text link” results. Yesterday, they took a feature that has been around for a while but, as they put it in the Official Google Blog, “hasn’t been too visible” until now. Simply put, Google is telling its users what pages are similar in specific direct searches and taking out the need for another click to find them. From the Google blog : We’ve offered a “Similar” feature on results for a while now as a way to discover new, useful sites, but it hasn’t been too visible. Since we’ve been continuously improving this feature and we think it’s really useful, we’re now going to start showing these alternative sites more prominently. Starting this week, for queries where similar sites are likely to be helpful, we’ll display a list of “Pages similar” at the bottom of the results page. For example, this is the list of sites similar to Direct Relief International: I first became aware of this from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land who posted before the official Google announcement and shared a result he produced below This kind of a result is much more interesting in many respects because looking for the right charity doesn’t feel like you are doing something competitive. Looking for information on search engine and Internet marketing, however, is truly competitive and most folks won’t be too thrilled about Google “advertising” for the competition when someone is searching for your site directly. So how this new feature is rolled out by Google should be interesting to follow. Imagine one day if Google would ask each business “Who are you similar to?” and starts to find another way to generate revenue. I would hope this would never happen because then that means that the SERP’s were truly “for sale” rather than on merit. Some would say that’s the case today already but I’ll let you fight that out amongst yourselves. Your thoughts?

Tags: cloud-computing, competition, direct-relief, official, real-estate, Search, search-engine, serp, similar-search
Posted April 28, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

A new argument to prevent your competition from buying sponsored search listings, containing your brand, is playing out right now in a Wisconsin court room. And it sounds like the kind of court case you’d actually enjoy watching unfold ! Habush, Habush & Rottier claims that competing law firm Cannon & Dunphy violated state privacy laws by buying search ads using the keywords “Habush” and “Rottier.” As attorneys they likely knew that they wouldn’t win a trademark infringement claim, so they’re taking this novel approach. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the defendants pulled a Perry Mason… J. Ric Gass, attorney for Cannon & Dunphy, accused the plaintiff firm of doing what Habush had said he’d never do – pay to get a Habush, Habush & Rottier ad to appear in Internet search results for other lawyers’ names. Gass demonstrated his point on Yellowpages.com. Searching for Cannon, Dunphy or Gass, the firms’ information appeared, but beside each set of results was a larger ad for Habush. I can almost hear the attorney turning to the jury and saying smugly, “then how do you explains THIS!” Gass then argued that the plaintiff’s had “unclean hands”–legal jargon for “you can’t sue someone for something that you are already doing to yourself.” Despite my legal background–and penchant for John Grisham novels–I’m not normally found enjoying my morning coffee while reading about a court case. However, when you have two attorneys battling to find new ground to protect their internet advertising “rights” it all makes for an enjoyable read. Especially when you are treated to legal rhetoric like this: “The Complaint demonstrates that the plaintiffs believe that cutting-edge advertising is a sword that only they can wield against their competitors whom they are unable to threaten into stopping such marketing. A simple reading of the statute and the law does not just blunt the plaintiffs’ sword, it breaks it across the knee of the Internet.” You can’t handle the truth! ( via )

Tags: attorney, cloud-computing, competition, competitors, defendants, dunphy, dunphy-or-gass, Habush, internet, legal, Perry Mason, plaintiff, plaintiffs, Search
Posted March 31, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

I will file this under “I didn’t know that although I am not even close to surprised” for obvious reasons. Google gets to make a claim about its Chrome browser that others like Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 and Apple’s Safari can’t. That claim is that it survived the Pwn2Own 2010. Forbes tells us a little more The Pwn2Own competition in Vancouver is a yearly demonstration of the software industry’s utter inability to keep its products safe from determined hackers. This year, researchers cracked Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari in minutes, winning $10,000 each, bragging rights and the hardware those applications were running on. But more notable is the one survivor of the competition’s browser category: Google’s Chrome. For the second year in a row, Chrome has left the Pwn2Own competition unscathed even as all of its competitors have been compromised. In a world where security and privacy are more desired but maybe less available than ever this kind of competition is interesting. We all know there are folks out there who are interested in compromising Internet systems for monetary gain and many other times just for sport. We as end users know it exists and cross our fingers hoping it doesn’t happen to us. While Google can talk about its victory here there is some skepticism among the researchers who participate in this competition as to just how secure Chrome really is. Apple hacker Charlie Miller was able to win for the third year in a row with his efforts to compromise the Safari browser. He also wonders about Google supposed invulnerability. Miller argues in an email to us that Google isn’t necessarily more secure than its competitors–just that hackers hack the applications they use themselves. “Researchers tend to just pick on their favorite browser,” he writes. This is the second year in a row that the Chrome browser was unscathed but there is plenty of speculation that this will not last. Why? As something gets a reputation of being impenetrable it gets the blood of any good researcher / hacker or whatever boiling. Also, there is $10,000 on the line each year at this competition. Which pays better than Google apparently because they have $1,337 limit on payment for security bugs. So what is Google take on this? Of course, they have a better mousetrap Google, for its part, would argue that Chrome simply has better security features, namely “sandboxing,” which drastically limits the privileges of a Web site to access your computer’s hardware. Google bought at least part of that sandboxing ability with its acquisition of software firm GreenBorders in May of 2007. Check out its comic book illustration of how sandboxing works. Now that Google has put a bullseye on Chrome we’ll see just how long this streak will last.

Tags: Charlie Miller, chrome, competition, firefox, green, internet, Microsoft, pwn2own, safari, Vancouver
Posted March 29, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media