News Highlights of 2005
News concerning products, services, and events that are changing the face of online marketing were riddled all across news headlines in 2005. To the surprise of no one, Google was part of many of them, but not all.
– Google’s Local Search has long been in a state of subdued potential waiting to burst forth upon Web users. However, with the recent releases of Google Mobile and Google Base, that could all change. Google introduced Google Mobile for Local, which is a free mobile service that offers a barebones version of Google Local Search for cell devices. The primary goal for this service is to generate maps and driving directions, but any sort of local business or entity can now be found through the service. In addition to this, when a user searches for a business, he or she can call the business directly by clicking on a link.
– Yahoo! plans to provide a similar service on the Cingular network. It will offer access to e-mail, photos, music, and other media.
– Though still in its beta version, Google Base has already created a stir in the online community. Users can contribute various types of content including photos, news stories, articles, product listings, and classified ads among other things. There is buzz that Google Base is created primarily to allow users to list classifieds, which Google denies, despite the indicators that could be saying otherwise.
– Google has also joined together elements of its shopping service, Froogle, with Local Search, and added new usability features to Google Base. Users can now search Base and see localized results.
– Yahoo! introduced a mobile shopping service in 2005, which enables users to compare prices of certain products in a local store against those of Web merchants.
– Blog search’s attractive market of approximately 4.3 million users in the U.S. alone lured Google and led to their release of a long-promised blog search service. This signaled the growing importance of blogs and highlighted the untapped source of income for online marketers.
– Microsoft has not remained idle in the field of search, announcing that it would utilize its huge database of user-specific information in the development of a search advertising service. Results from searches will be shown in order of expected revenue return. Microsoft said that it would allow advertisers to target their ads by using criteria such as gender, age, and location, which it hopes will increase its market share, which is currently at 12%. Google’s share is 46%, while Yahoo!’s is 23%.
– The importance and effectiveness of RSS feeds has also grown recently, due to the e-mail marketing’s ever-increasing pool of threats, which include overstuffed inboxes, threats of viruses carried through e-mail, and increasingly complex and effective spam filters. RSS may soon become a necessity for sites that want to keep a consistent and continuous relationship with their viewers. They allow sites to reach interested and knowledgeable audiences with targeted messages, which lead to increased clickthroughs and more loyal user bases.
– In June of 2005, Dutch journalist Henk van Ess confirmed rumors that Google was using human evaluators to manually check and verify sites for search engine spam and “thin affiliates,” which are sites that have inadequate content and are made of nothing more than a bunch of affiliate links. Since the report, Google has expanded its staff in this sector.
– In July, affiliate marketers received good tidings when a report announced that affiliate marketing has the highest ROI channel for polled merchants. According to a newsletter published by PiperJaffray, merchants expect the segment to grow 30% in 2005, as Web publishers are expected to receive 75% of those revenues.
– Dipsie.com has made their footprint on the search arena, and may be the first in a long line of similar services to come. Dipsie made their beta version of dCloak available in late November. Through its dCloak technology, Dipsie will act as a feeder search engine to allow pages with dynamic content, along with other previously inaccessible content, to be seen by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The beta service is free, but Dipsie plans on charging $29.99 per month for 50 pages or less after it is officially launched sometime in the first quarter of 2006.
It remains to be seen how many more of these helper engines will pop up in 2006, and how Google will deal with this new issue.
It’s obvious that Google has a strong hold on online marketing, and its continuous stream of new products and services seems to indicate that it will not change anytime soon. However, it is equally clear that they face growing competition on a variety of fronts, some older and some newer. January 1st will be the metaphorical gunshot that starts another 12 months of competition between the present giants and signals the growing prevalence and emergence of new entrants on the landscape.
Here’s to another good one.
