According to the latest Comscore data, Yahoo sites still generate the most unique visitors of any internet property (121,962,000 as compared to Google’s 85,685,000). 

This is no surprise, as Yahoo is a content play before anything else.  With thousands and thousands of pages of proprietary content, discussion groups, forums, email, and everything else under the sun, being a search engine has never seemed to be the biggest priority in Sunnyvale.  With all these page views— one would think that Yahoo would reap enormous revenues. 

According to Yahoo’s own finance page on their business, Yahoo posted gross revenues of $1,817,602,000 for the first quarter of 2008.  By dividing gross revenue by the latest Comscore data on unique visitors (extrapolated to be representative of the same 3 month time period), Yahoo appears to have grossed $4.96 per visitor per month.  And, using a 41.5% cost of revenue (calculated using data from the same balance sheet), that would effectively reduce Yahoo’s net profit to $2.90 per user per month.  Yahoo claims to average 3.4 billion page views per day.  That’s 102 billion page views a month.  So, if my math is correct, Yahoo makes about $0.017 per page view.

When you are talking about how much money you make per page view, less than 2 tenths of a cent per page isn’t too good.

Compare this with Google.  By the same calculation, Google posted gross revenues of $5,186,043,000 for the same period.  Divided by the number of users in the Comscore report, adjusted for time, that equates to $20.17 gross, or $11.90 net per user (profit margin being calculated in the same manner).  Good luck finding accurate page view per user data from Google— so, let’s just say it is 2.7B (thanks to SearchEngineWatch for the guess).  That means, by the same calculation, Google makes $0.52 per page view (that’s 30X more per page).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this math is absolutely and completely flawed beyond being in any way accurate.  It fails to take into account any variables that exist, including revenue from other sources (content network, partnerships to name a few).  But, I would argue that this analysis is “directionally correct” at the very least, if not true to scale.

Although terribly simplified, this analysis does illustrate the problem Yahoo has.  All the users in the world are worthless if they don’t generate revenue.  That’s why Yahoo’s stock is at $21.45 (as of June 22) and Google’s is $545.21. 

But, don’t count Yahoo out— it takes many years, millions of dedicated users, and billions of dollars to generate the depth of content Yahoo has across its properties.  Search is easy, serving ads is easy.  A recent deal with Google might finally give Yahoo the means to better monetize that traffic.  Combine that with true dedicated usership, and Yahoo still might have a chance to win in the end.

It is possible.

Friday, the Personal Democracy Forum announced that it will be hosting a presidential candidate debate to be entirely conducted over Twitter:

“We’re pleased to announce a first for the Internet Election of 2008: Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter.”

While the actual presidential candidates will not be submitting their own “tweets“, some pretty respectable figures from each of their campaigns will.  According to the post:

“The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.”

For a lot of us in the industry, this marks a pivotal moment.  Not because the candidates look to be a tiny bit closer to embracing the internet as an effective (and cheap) means of communicating their messages to potential voters, but because it may be the first truly meaningful use for Twitter. 

For anyone who lives under a rock, Twitter is a website service that provides one single function: users submit >140 character messages (by web interface, text-message from their cell phone, or third-party application), and they are pushed to all of their “followers” (and for most users settings also posted on the public timeline for anyone to see, even if only available for a brief moment in time).  In this time of text-messaging mania, Twitter provides a useful (if not meaningful or profitable) function.  But, short of using it to quickly organize an audience rebellion at a conference (a great story worthy of reading), most tweets consist of one of the following: a) what is for lunch, b) where to get that lunch, c) how the weather is today, or d) where to eat lunch because of the weather today.  Nonetheless, Twitter has racked up impressive usership (an estimated 1.3 million users in March). 

As a free service, with no on-page advertising visible, many people wonder what the real business model is.  Where is the opportunity for revenue?  That hasn’t stopped investors from pumping Twitter full of money to keep going.  Recent estimates have them as having already collected over $20 million.  Many heads are being scratched as to what they are thinking— I for one am wondering, have I missed something here?

So, while the online presidential debate does not represent a way to make Twitter any money— it does give the site a further boost for its popularity and/or notoriety.  And, as long as the 1990’s don’t repeat themselves for this industry, maybe that will prove to be enough.

Here’s something you don’t see every day:

A San Francisco photographer posted pictures on Flickr (yes, Flickr and not Picasa) of the Google Maps “Street View” camera vehicle pulled over by the police in the Presidio.  It seems that a SF motorcycle cop found the enormous apparatus mounted to the roof of this lady’s Prius to be a little suspicious.  Either that, or she was speeding. 

I have always wondered what Google’s camera apparatus for Streetview looked like, and thanks to Damian Spain, now I know.  Some bloggers are speculating what the hardware included– with some convinced Google is working on collecting 3D data for some new functionality to add to Street View.

So, now we know what it looks like.  And, the next time you see a hybrid vehicle with a 5-foot camera array following you down the street, don’t miss your chance.  Do something visible and memorable for the camera, write down where you were when you saw it, and watch for it on Google Maps.  When else will you get a chance for such fame? 

For anyone that doesn’t live under a rock, buildup to November’s presidential election has reached a fever pitch in all media.  Television commercials, whole-page ads in newspapers and magazines, as well as incessant news coverage (yes, I’m lumping that in with other commercial media) are impossible to avoid or ignore.  

This year, the most successful candidates are finally near fully embracing (although, perhaps still not fully understanding) the internet as a truly leveragable media outlet.  Of course, the internet has played a growing role in the past few presidential elections.  Here are some internet memories of elections past:

• 2000 - Ralph Nader gets good viral buzz
• 2000 - Bloggers and the other “free” media make election irregularities more widely known than previously possible
• 2004 - Support rallies for Al Gore organized through meetup.com
• 2004 - Blogs rule
• 2000 & 2004 - Anyone heard of a little political action committee called MoveOn.org?

So, what are the candidates doing online to promote themselves so far this time around?  Here are a few of the biggest candidate internet marketing pushes of 2008 (so far):

• 24% of people report regularly learning something about the election from the internet, up from 13% in 2004 (and compared to 40% for TV news)
• Perhaps this is why the average age of voters continues to decline (arguably creditable to a more informed, more motivated voting-age populace).  In Illinois (where I live), Barack Obama wins the 18-24 age group nearly 2:1 in the democratic primary versus Hillary Clinton
• “Yes We Can” is released as a musical remix of Obama’s motivating speech, tops Youtube ratings and inspires some humorous parodies (including one called “No You Can’t“)
• A ClickZ column points some of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss in the primaries to lower Google Adwords spending (the same article suggests that candidates relied much more heavily on search distribution than content network placement)

So, now the primary season is finally over and we have our major-party candidates.  What will the internet change this time through?  Hopefully, a lot.  I expect to see much more as the national election season gets underway. 

Don’t think that the internet will be a big factor in this year’s contest?  Barack Obama sure does, his campaign is hiring internet marketing professionals.

Merely a few short weeks after Microsoft officially withdrew it’s bid to purchase Yahoo, Google has come into the picture with a corporate mashup that is sure to peak the interest of Capital Hill’s antitrust legions. 

June 12th, Yahoo put out a press release stating its intention to “strengthen [it's] competitive position in online advertising through [a] non-exclusive agreement with Google”.  By the terms of the agreement, Yahoo will now serve Google Adwords advertisements alongside their own, both in search results and on Yahoo’s thousands of highly-trafficked (but poorly monetized) content pages. 

Ads will also be shows on member’s sites within Yahoo’s Publisher Network, which has never seen the adoption of Google’s Adsense program, but still gives Google a boost in content ad placement inventory. 

This agreement is non-exclusive.  Meaning, Yahoo is free to pursue similar deals with other ad providers.  They are even still free to pursue acquisition by Microsoft, although that would carry a $250 million penalty (termination fee).

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo claims that by better monetizing searches and other page views on their properties, they are projecting an extra $800 million in annual revenue.  And, that’s just the beginning— integrating other Google ad serving technologies on to Yahoo’s vast (and widely-used) user pages would certainly mean other opportunities.

It is all good news for Yahoo, whose leadership (Jerry Yang) have come under intense scrutiny from Wall Street, investors and Carl Icahn for missing an opportunity to sell the company for top dollar and subsequently causing a dramatic drop in market cap.  The deal is a positive move to add revenue security in an uncertain time for the internet sector.

Certainly, this deal is going to be reviewed under an electron microscope by fair-trade officials and monopoly watchdogs at the Justice Department.  In fact, Yahoo has claimed that the deal will not go into effect for as long as three and a half months to permit time for thorough regulatory investigation.  Likely threatened by a Google-Yahoo partnership, Microsoft is expected to apply significant political pressure to add further hardship to making the execution of the deal a reality.

So, as a Google/Yahoo mashup appears to be in our near future, I propose the following names:

• Yahoogle
• Goohoo