Google Ads and Their Limitations
August 24, 2010
Publishers are not going to be happy with the tidbit tucked into “iFive: Goggles Coming to iPhone, Google Ads Can’t Fund Magazines, Cairn Energy, Smelling Robot, Russian Criminal Life.” Here’s the factoid from Fast Company:
A British business specializing in digital versions of magazines has revealed just how much money Google Ads can make for established magazines. “Nuppence ha’penny.” Hah!
What’s this mean? First, Google Ads require lots of traffic to generate a big payoff. The tinier the topic, the less likely Google Ads will generate huge bucks. Try Tiger Woods and now you are talking.
Second, subscriptions or outright grants, donations, or government support will be needed to make some online content viable. Most vulnerable? The traditional media.
Third, as challenging as Apple’s business methods are, the iPad and its kin may become the life preserver many information companies will try to grab. The problem is that the iPad does not solve fundamental problems of readership, demand, cost of content creation, and marketing.
My take is that publishers will try to jump into rich media, which is not these firms’ core competency. The result? More losses and more opportunities for those with a core competency in new media.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
Freebie
Web Traffic Metrics in a Muddle
August 24, 2010
I wrote about Vivisimo’s Web traffic spike. For that blog post, I relied on free data from Compete.com. If you have not looked at the service, point your browser thingy at www.compete.com. You can sign up for a free but restricted version of the service, or you can become a paying customer. For my blog post, I used the freebie service. Hey, the blog is free. You expect chopped liver?
After I wrote the story, I heard from a high output search vendor. The point of his somewhat urgent email was that the Compete.com data were wrong. This was a surprise? I know of one outfit that has the horsepower to count and analyze log data in a comprehensive manner. The rest of the outfits use different methods to cope with the ever increasing volumes of data that must be crunched for horizontal and small slice analyses. In short, most reports of traffic are subject to error. I have mentioned in my talks about the volume of traffic that flowed to a Danish insurance company from Google. The insurance company itself was unaware of its dependence on Google. Google probably did not care about the Danish insurance company. It was clear that the Web master at the Danish insurance company had not looked at the log data very carefully prior to my getting involved. So between reality and lousy metrics, most people don’t know much about the traffic and clicks on a Web site. Feel free to tell me I am incorrect, please. Just use the comments section of the blog. Don’t write me an email.
What caught my attention this morning (August 21, 2010) was a story from ClickZ called “New Comscore Methodology Reduces Search Market Share for Microsoft and Yahoo.” (How does this outfit spell its name? Comscore, comScore, something else?)There you have the guts of the problem. A change in methodology makes a winner into a loser, a loser into a bigger loser, and a bigger loser into a contributor to the swelling unemployment ranks in the US. Figure out these data.
What about the data themselves? Well, that’s part of the numerical recipe. If you reflect on your exciting moments in Statistics 101, you may recall that sample size has something to do with the confidence one can have in an output. The goose remembers this in a very simplified manner: Small sample, big error. Lousy sample, big error. Shortcuts anywhere, big error. Add up the errors and you get crappy outputs. But figuring this stuff out in real life is beyond the ken of most azurini, poobahs, and Web marketers.
As a result, the data from any Web traffic or click counting service are at best indicative of a trend. Here’s how I check traffic for my own sites and for those I track.
- Take a look at the log analytics. We use AWStats, baked in reports from our hosting company, and the Urchin (Google) analytics outputs. Do these agree? Nope. Not even close, but the trends are easily identified.
- Take a look at what Alexa reports. Hey, I know it skews toward Internet Explorer, but that’s okay. I am looking at what the system says, not calculating the speed of light.
- Take a look at Compete.com. I like the nifty little charts it spits out. The Urchin graphics are bit to HGTV for me and don’t show up well when I do a screen capture.
I then separate the bluebirds from the canaries. I toss out the high and the low and go with the stuff in the middle. Close enough for a free blog post. In fact, I have used this method when paying customers don’t want to pick up the bill for the fancy for fee services.
The bottom-line line is that I can trot out data that supports these assertions:
- Google and Microsoft are so far ahead in traffic that comparisons with other vendors of search and content processing traffic are meaningless. Are the data correct? Well, the revenues of these two outfits suggest that some correlation between traffic and money must exist. Microsoft is nosing toward $100 billion and Google toward $30 billion. Search vendors are not in this ball game with the sole exception of Autonomy which rings in with $1.0 billion in revenue.
- Most search vendors generate traffic in the 3,000 to 15,000 uniques per month. Even the bigger of the search vendors have a tough time breaking through the 15,000 ceiling. The reason? Search is sort of a footnote in the broader world of enterprise and Web functions. Lots of talk does not translate into traffic for search vendors on their Web sites.
- Some search vendors get so few clicks that the services report “insufficient data”. I am sorely tempted to present a list of search vendors whose Web sites get effectively only random clicks and robot traffic. But I don’t need any more defensive snarkiness from search executives. Hey, summer is almost over. Let me enjoy the last few, hazy, lazy days.
To wrap up, are Microsoft and Yahoo losing market share? Probably not. The key factor seems to be Facebook’s emergence as an alternative to Google-style searching. The mobile device “search experience” is a different animal entirely and I don’t think anyone has a firm grip on these data at this time. Google’s obsession with mobile devices is a strong signal that something is indeed happening. The numbers, at this time, are less reliable than the ones for traditional Web site traffic.
Maybe the Web is dead? Maybe search is dead? Maybe an asteroid will hit the earth before it melts? Whatever. Traffic reports are indicative, not definitive. Let’s face it. Search is a small niche and a successful vendor will produce modest uniques when compared to outfits like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
Freebie. 0.999999 confidence in this.
Oracle and Google: More on This Dust Up
August 24, 2010
In “Oracle v Google: Why” the author gives an in depth analysis of the reasons for Oracle’s bold legal move against Google and ultimately what is at stake for both parties, the Java platform and more importantly the technology world. The following quote describes the outcome “As for predictions, I’ll make only one: whoever wins will also lose. Because this suit is going to negatively impact – probably substantially – Java adoption.”
The enterprise technology landscape is more fragmented by the day, as it transitions from Dot NET or Java orthodoxy to multi-language heterogeneity. Oracle’s suit will accelerate this process as it introduces for the first time legal uncertainty around the Java platform. Apple and Microsoft will be thrilled by this development, and scores of competitive languages and platforms are likely to see improved traction as a result of Java defections. Though Google is an easy financial target it seems Oracle’s battle with open source has just begun. The immediate issue may seem to be Google, but the real target may be open source and its threat to Oracle’s traditional business model.
April Holmes, August 24, 2010
Freebie
Fireball Burns Google
August 24, 2010
I enjoyed “Creep Executive Officer.” The Daring Fireball burned Google in this write up. The addled goose read the interview and decided not to put a webbed foot on this hot potato. Fireball identifies some useful quotes, including the passages about predicting what a user really wants and the notion of changing one’s name to avoid an online past under one’s “real” name.
Source: http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/422/godzilla19542fe3.jpg
My thoughts from the goose pond:
- Is it my imagination or does Google seem a bit idiosyncratic or prickly even for Math Club members in the last couple of months?
- Is the DNA of Sun Microsystems undergoing some protein deterioration?
- Will pundit-journalists tire of pointing out Googzilla’s missed tackles as it huffs and puffs on the sidelines of the search revolution?
Certainly not this goose.
He likes math, was a member of the goose Math Club, and remains permanently on the sidelines, nestling against a wooden bench whilst watching the “real” players take the field. He’s not even social, indifferent to Facebook and, like Google, content to let others push the social ball forward.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2010
Freebie
Exclusive Interview: Satish Gannu, Cisco Systems Inc.
August 24, 2010
I made my way to San Jose, California, to find out about Cisco Systems and its rich media initiatives. Once I located Cisco Way, the company’s influence in the heart of Silicon Valley, I knew I would be able to connect with Satish Gannu, a director of engineering in Cisco’s Media Experience and Analytics Business Unit. Mr. Gannu leads the development team responsible for Cisco Pulse, a method for harnessing the collective expertise of an organization’s workforce. The idea is to apply next generation technology to the work place in order to make it quick and easy for employees to find the people and information they need to get their work done “in an instant.”
I had heard that Mr. Gannu is exploring the impact of video proliferation in the enterprise. Rich media require industrial-strength, smart network devices and software, both business sectors in which Cisco is one of the world’s leading vendors. I met with Mr. Gannu is Cisco Building 17 Cafeteria (appropriate because Mr. Gannu has worked at Cisco for 17 years). Before tackling rich media, he served as Director of Engineering in Cisco’s Security Technology Group. I did some poking around with my Overflight intelligence system and picked up signals that he is responsible for media transcoding, a technology that can bring some vendors’ network devices to their knees. Cisco’s high performance systems handle rich media. Mr. Gannu spearheads Cisco’s search and speech-to-text activities. He is giving a spotlight presentation at the October 7-8, 2010, Lucene Revolution Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference is sponsored by Lucid Imagination.
Satish Gannu, Director of Engineering, Cisco Systems Inc.
The full text of my interview with Mr. Gannu appears below:
Thanks for taking the time to talk with me?
No problem.
I think of Cisco as a vendor of sophisticated networking and infrastructure systems and software? Why is Cisco interested in search?
We set off to do the Pulse project in order to turn people’s communications in to a mechanism for finding the right people in your company. For finding people, we asked how do people communicate what they know? People communicate what they know through documents — web page, or an email, or a Word document, or a PDF, and now, Video. Video is big for Cisco
Videos are difficult to consume or even find. The question we wanted to answer was, “Could we build a business-savvy recommendation engine. We wanted to develop a way to learn from user behavior and then recommend videos to people, not just in an organization but in other settings as well. We wanted to make videos more available for people to consume. Video is the next big thing in digital information, from You Tube coming to enterprise world. In many ways, video represents a paradigm shift. Video content takes a a lot of storage space. We think that video is also difficult to consume, difficult to find. In search, we’ve always worked from document-based view. We are now expanding the idea of a document from text to rich media. We want to make video findable, browseable, and searchable. Obviously the network infrastructure must be up to the task. So rich media is a total indexing and search challenge.
Is there a publicly-accessible source of information about Cisco’s Pulse project?
Yes. I will email you the link and you may insert it in this interview. [Click here for the Pulse information.]
No problem. Are you using open source search technology at Cisco.
Yes, we believe a lot in the wisdom of the crowds. The idea that a community and some of the best minds can work together to develop and enhance search technology is appealing to us. We also like the principle that we should not invent something that is already available.
I know you acquired Jabber. Is it open source?
Yes, in late 2008 we purchased Cisco bought the company called Jabber. The engineers had developed a presence and messaging protocol and software. Cisco is also active in the Open Social Platform.
Would you briefly describe Open Social?
Sure. “Open Social” is a platform with a set of APIs developed by a community of social networking developers and vendors to structure and expose social data over the network, at opensocial.org. We’ve adopted Open Social to expose the social data interfaces in our product for use by our customers, leveraging both the standardization and the innovation of this process to make corporate data available within organizations in a predictable, easy-to use platform.
Why are you interested in Lucene/Solr?
We talked to multiple companies, and we decided that Lucene and Solr were the best search options. As I said, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We looked at available Lucene builds. We read the books. Then we started working with Lucid. Our hands on testing actually validated the software. We learned how mature it is. The road map for things which are coming up was important to us.
What do you mean?
Well, we had some specific ideas in mind. For example, we wanted to do certain extensions on top of basic Lucene. With the road map, open source gives us an an opportunity to do our own intellectual property on the top of Lucene/Solr.
Like video?
Yes, but I don’t want to get into too much detail. Lucene for video search is different. With rich media sources we worry about how transcribe it, and then we have to get into how the system can implement relevancy and things like that.
One assumption we made is how people speak at a rate of two to three words per second. So when we were doing tagging, we could calculate the length of the transcript and size of the document.
That’s helpful. What are the primary benefits of using Lucene/Solr?
One of our particular interests is figuring out how we can make it easy for people in an organization to find a person with expertise or information in a particular field. At Cisco, then, how our systems help users find people with specific expertise is core to our product.
So open source gives us the advantage of understanding what the software is doing. Then we can build on top of those capabilities., That’s how we determine what, which one to choose for.
Does the Lucene/Solr community provide useful developments?
Yes, that’s the wisdom of the crowds. In fact, the community is one of the reasons open source is thriving. In my opinion, the community is a big positive for us. In our group, we use open social too. At Cisco, we are part of the enterprise Open Social consortium, and we play an active role in it. We also publish an open source API.
I encourage my team be active participants in that and contribute. Many at Cisco are contributing certain extensions. We have added these on top of open social. We are giving our perspective to the community from our Pulse learnings. We are doing the same type of things for for Lucene/Solr.
My view is that if useful open source code is out there, everyone can make the best utilization of it. And if a developer is using open source, there is the opportunity for making some enhancement on top of the existing code. It is possible to create your own intellectual property around open source too.
How has Lucid Imagination contributed to your success in working with Solr/Lucene?
We are not Lucene experts. We needed to know whether it’s possible, not possible, what are the caveats. The insight, which we got from consulting with Lucid Imagination helped open our eyes to the possibilities. That clinical knowledge is essential.
What have you learned about open source?
That’s a good question. Open source doesn’t always come for free. We need to keep that in mind. One can get open source software. Like other software, one needs to maintain it and keep it up to date.
Where’s Lucid fit in?
Without Lucid We would have to send an email to the community, and wait for somebody to respond. Now I ping Lucid.
Can you give me an example?
Of course. If I have 20,000 users, I can have 100 million terms in one shard. If I need to scale this to 100,000 users and put up five shards, how do I handle these shards so that each is localized? What is the method for determining relevancy of hits in a result set? I get technical input from Lucid on these types of issues.
When someone asks you why you don’t use a commercial search solution, what do you tell them?
I get this question a lot. In my opinion, the commercial search systems are often in a black box. We occasionally want to have use this type of system. In fact, we do have a couple of other related products which use commercial search technologies.
But for us, analysis of context is the core. Context is what the search is about. And when you look at the code, we realized, how we use this functionality is central to our work. How we find people is one example of what we need. We need an open system. For a central function, the code cannot be a black box. Open source meets our need.
Thank you. How can a reader contact you?
My email is sgannu at cisco dot com.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
Sponsored post
Search Marketers Are Ethical Paragons Compared to … Harvard?
August 24, 2010
Short honk: Now I know that the referenced article is not about search, content processing, and the bevy of BAs pitching their services. In fact, the azurini look like paragons of good behavior. In my freshman high school English class, there was a young woman who never did anything wrong. I think she became a nurse, nun, or missionary. Search marketers are closer to her approach to life than the person referenced in “Harvard Confirms Misconduct by Morality Researcher.” I don’t know if the write up is accurate, but it is delicious to contemplate behavior that makes search marketing look really good. Hey, scientific misconduct. Harvard. Snooty-tooty. Rah, rah, rah, quacks the goose.
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2010
Freebie. I wish I had been paid to document this item. Hey, just pay me any time. I’m down with that.
Open Source Grows Wings
August 23, 2010
We’ve been saying that open-source coding is gaining traction. Lately, it has sprouted wings and is headed for the stratosphere. Networkworld.com recently outlined the ascent of open-source coding in an article entitled “Open Source Software a Frequent Flier on Virgin America.” The article details how Virgin America Airlines has jettisoned its proprietary VPN equipment and is now ‘happily running’ OpenVPN. CIO Ravi Simhambhatla says, “Its works like a charm…so, why would I buy a VPN from Cisco?” He says Virgin’s higher-ups are sold on open-source VPN’s 100 percent uptime and single-administrator costs.
He also mentioned that it saved millions of dollars. There’s a silver lining for this ‘cloud.’ Simhambhatla plans to form a core group to focus on giving back to the open-source community. Open source in general, and open source search in particular, appear to be poised to add to the pressure already being exerted on traditional vendors of search and content processing technology. I can hear, “Pass the Advil, please.”
Bret Quinn, August 23, 2010
Freebie
The Future of MBA Textbooks
August 23, 2010
The motion picture for Finance 201 will be hitting the iPad in 2015, maybe sooner. The future is becoming less cloudy for US graduate school education. The traditional book—a clunky, environmentally hostile dog—is a goner. The first step away from textbooks is to convert grad school content into a comic book. Once this is underway, it will be a short step to making a college textbook into an app and then a full-scale, kick back, pass-the-popcorn event.
You can read about the comic book part in “Graphic Novel Replaces Business School Textbook.” The USA Today story reported:
In addition to telling a story with pictures and text bubbles as a traditional comic book would, Short’s book also has paragraphs of text on certain pages, which allows the author to create a richer discussion of content than a normal comic book would, Moliterno said. On the other hand, he noted that it’s difficult to skip around in the textbook because it follows a narrative arc, and confines the professor to framing a course entirely around the book.
Expository content in the style of Maxim magazine will certainly work for MBAs. Look at the wonderful work these folks have done at Enron, Tyco, and other firms. Next up? Brain surgery and nuclear physics. Why should learning be difficult. How will MBA style education deliver an Enron-type of power generation facility? That will be exciting. Let’s keep information simple. One “real” consulting firm specializes in making complexities simple. Works really well I bet. Yep, user experience is taking precedent over content or learning.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2010
Freebie
Search Marketing in Transition
August 23, 2010
Truism: Times have changed. Truism 2: Marketing methods have to change too.
The customers now expect more value for money, high product quality, and have become increasingly price sensitive, expecting higher customer service, and businesses to have greater respect for their time. The organizations that can understand the change in the customers’ expectations can achieve best growth in spite of the challenging scenario, and this applies to all search, software, and information technology vendors.
According to the recent news article “Insufficient Budgets, Shortage of Skills, and Inadequate Tools Hinder Marketing Efforts, New Accenture Study Finds”, a survey among 400 senior marketing executives all over the world concludes that the old marketing methods no longer work. In order to achieve growth objective, marketers must master customer analytics, offer innovation, and improve customer engagement and marketing operations, apart from making effective use of online marketing methods. Marketers have to overcome the barriers as mentioned in the study else they face extinction.
We will be running a group of stories about search and content processing vendors who are successfully changing their sales and marketing strategies. You will be surprised at who is on top and who is not.
Leena Singh, August 23, 2010
Freebie
ChaCha and KGB: Seeing Eye to Eye
August 23, 2010
Who offers the most trusted search system for the Web and mobile. Is Google still the most trusted “go to” Internet search engine and with the advancement of mobile technology many mobile users can now conduct Google search from their mobile device.
“ChaCha, KGB See Text Messages as Alternative to Search Engines on Cell Phones” the companies ChaCha and KGB offer customers a simpler way to get answers. Users can send a question to ChaCha through a text or voice message and simply wait for a prompt reply from an agent. This is a free service but users should be prepared to receive advertisements from various providers. KGB service guides also can be contacted in a similar fashion except users must pay 99 cents and will not receive outside advertisements. Each is responsible for scouting out the latest information and delivering the most accurate up to date information possible. It’s not likely they are going to overtake Google fans but they could be a helpful addition.
Worth watching.
April Holmes, August 24, 2010
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