Alright, so nobody is actually projecting a gloomy Christmas for babies.  Things are bad, but not that bad.  Can you imagine?  I just wanted an excuse to post this photo of my girl Daisy’s recent “Santa Tantrum”.

Ecommerce, however, is truly suffering as a result of the current economy.  eMarketer released their latest numbers, revising their online sales growth projections for the critical holiday shopping season to cut anticipated growth in half. 

That’s not nearly as gloomy as the data recently released by Comscore which reported a year-over-year decline of 4% for the same period in November.  That represents the very first time that ecommerce sales declined over the same period for a previous year. 

If there’s a brighter side, and there usually is, it is that the slowdown means deeper discounts might be available online.  My inbox has already filled with “pre-Black Friday Sale” emails.  I’ve seen some great prices.  Maybe, if sale prices are good enough, the overall volume of commerce conducted over this critical period can somewhat recover.  But, profits by etailers are bound to be down either way, and this whole thing is sure to have significant impact on the online marketing world. 

I find it pretty incredible that the top 3 businesses in such a competitive marketplace have such a different approach to selling their products.  Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.com peddle more or less the same goods: search ads.  How they get you to that point, however, is very different.

Google decided long ago that the main page of Google.com would feature little more than the search box.  This seems wise, in my opinion.  Google does offer a lot of extranenous features and services, but the bulk of their revenue comes from one thing: search ads.  Why would Google want its users to do anything but to trigger those ads? 

For my screengrab today, Google was featuring Magritte’s birthday.  Classy, and appealing to their user base.

It only took a few years (decades in internet time) for Microsoft to figure out that Google had the right idea, and remove everything else from their site.  This change required (or enabled, depending on your opinion) rebranding MSN to be Live.com (in turn, they improved both their ad matching and ad serving capabilities). 

For my screengrab today, Live.com was featuring London.  I found the page very appealing, and aside from spending extra time on the site not searching, I give Microsoft credit for putting up something with such class:

Then, there is Yahoo.  Now, again and again I remind everyone that I am a diehard Yahoo fan.  I have stuck with them for years and years, and I will stick with them until the bitter end (which, by the looks of things lately might not be that far off).  Yahoo’s site seems to becoming sillier and sillier.

Today’s Yahoo homepage featured a photograph of man stretching to fit his mouth around a hamburger, and his date’s horrified reaction. 

So, here’s what I think.  It isn’t fair to compare these page, and here’s why:

Yahoo isn’t like the other two.  Yahoo is a content site.  I have been saying this for years, and Yahoo’s attempted deal for Google to serve their ads (failed) may be evidence that others are thinking the exact same way.  Yahoo’s value isn’t search.  Their value isn’t serving search ads.  Yahoo’s value is content, page view, readership.  Yahoo needs to refocus on serving effective ads on their content pages.  They should have beat Google to the browser punch, too.  That writing has been on the wall for years and years (think AOL, Prodigy, etc).  Instead of being a good site on the internet, Yahoo had the opportunity to be the “springboard” to the internet for millions of users. 

Now, it may be too late.  I’ll do whatever I can to support you, Yahoo.  But, at some point you are going to have to come to terms with what you are deep inside.  A content site.  With all those geniuses you have on staff, someone’s got to be able to see this and figure out how to monetize it. 

Anyone who has ever seen a movie where aliens come to Earth and begin taking over knows that the only way to stop the invasion is to destroy the brain, the core, the queen, or whatever the individual case may be for that particular species.

This is also the case with Spammers, as it turns out. 

Who would have guessed that such a large percentage of spam email would have originated from a single source?

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4186

Apparently, a little known silicon valley company called McColo “unknowingly” rented their servers to spammers that were used to control vast networks of hijacked (drone) computers.  When the company finally agreed to shut these servers down, an estimated 75% of email spam went down with them.  That’s right, 75%. 

While this is a victory in the battle against spam, it isn’t realistic to think it will take very long before the attackers will regroup.  75% is great, and I for one appreciate any difference in the size of my junk mail folder.  But, until average folks stop believing that a pill will grow their member, their PayPal password needs to be changed (yet again), or an deposed African prince wants to launder $10,000,000,000 through their US bank account, the attack will probably continue.  It won’t take long before spammers find another willing or unknowing server farm from which to base their invasion.  Then, spam will return to 100%.

I’ve had a Twitter account for a long time without ever seeing the real use for it.  But, since it has managed to stick around for so long I figured I owe it to myself to really give it an honest try. 

I have been hesitant to take up other things that just seemed trendy and without substance.  My past hesitation has caused me to unfairly and needlessly avoid:

• LinkedIn (took me at least 6 months to catch on that this was essential for keeping business contacts)
• Facebook (I always assumed it was just like MySpace, simply for the kids)
• Digg (turns out I really enjoy reading the homepage, just like nearly everyone else)

So, I’m going to try Twitter.  Trouble is, I only have like 3 followers.  Any other Twitterheads (Tweets?  What do you call yourselves) want to follow me to make it worth the while?  I added a link to my navigation, just in case.

Two things caught my eye in the news today:

1) Yahoo is reporting that man has eaten a 15 pound hamburger:

A related search turned up some interesting facts.  A regular 100 gram hamburger patty has 259 calories and 16.3 grams of fat.  Now, I’m no math expert, but it seems to me that 15 pounds of the stuff contains roughly 17,612 calories and 1,108 grams of fat.  That’s more than a large movie theater popcorn.

 2) Google has launched a new WYSIWYG Display Ad Builder:

Yes, this is far more on topic for this blog.  But, come on, that hamburger was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? 

The new Display Ad Builder comes at an interesting time when the perceived value of online display inventory is on a huge upswing.  Typically a branding move with expected low rates of directly resulting conversions, banner ads are nevertheless coming back into vogue. 

In my opinion, this is only further evidence of the declining value of vanity websites for commerce.  Let’s face it, most internet users are past falling for a fancy web design, a flashy animation, or a sparkling logo.  They want information.  For small businesses in particular, the more concise that information is displayed the better.  Look at Google/Yahoo to see that this is true.  Up to 50% of a search results page for most every local business search is occupied by local business ads.  That’s because this is primo inventory.  It gets clicked (makes the search engines money) and converts (makes the advertiser money, too).  That’s partially because it is so local in nature, and specific to the search query.  But, it is also because the resulting pages are well formatted for conversion— prominently featuring the phone number, email address, etc.  Vanity websites typically aren’t so well formatted for conversion, that’s for sure.

So, with less emphasis being put on developing fancy websites, more budget is becoming available for other marketing.  There are only so many explicit searches happening for “Seattle Electrician”, but there are literally thousands of contextually relevant sites where a banner ad might display to get some extra eyes on your business.  It may not convert all that well, but it may have long term benefits including driving up your CTR and conversion rates from other media.

And, don’t forget, Google has long been looking for ways to better utilize all of this available inventory.  Content match has had a terrible reputation— mostly because advertisers failed to understand the idea of it being “CPC-priced CPM inventory” rather than more typical click-to-conversion trackable traffic. 

So, what do you think?  Would you use it?  Google’s betting on it and will do everything in their power to help you get around any roadblocks preventing you from trying.  Too cheap to pay a graphic designer?  Try the banner builder.  I did, and it is pretty cool.

Google Display Ad Builder