Website Magazine

Amazon Video Widgets; Great Idea, Poor Execution

PetePrestipino — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:02:00 GMT

Amazon recently launched "Your Video Widget" which enables Web publishers to earn referral fees from products links that are added to videos. Any topic, from product demonstrations to personal videos can be added. Publishers simply select products to display in their video and determine when the product information pops up. Publishers can add as many products to the widgets as they want but are restricted to displaying no more than two products within ten seconds of each other.

One of the most interesting aspects of Your Video Widget is the presence of an embed code. Viewers/visitors have the option of adding your video to their own website. You will still be credited for referral fees generated by your video even if it is added to another website.

Sounds pretty interesting overall and a good direction for Amazon to go in. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be working, even on the official site. Test out the video below to see what I mean - no product links are available! Great idea, poor execution.

7Search PPC Network Gets Upgrades

PetePrestipino — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:11:00 GMT

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising network 7Search.com announced the release of three pretty important enhancements to its platform.

PPC advertisers using the service now have conversion tracking capabilities (helpful to measure the accuracy of third-party analytics systems), geo-targeting (only on the country-level however) and Click-Free™, a direct navigation advertising offering. 7Search is the first major PPC advertising search engine to offer direct navigation traffic.

"Online advertisers require programs and solutions that provide them with alternative sources of traffic, tools to ensure the highest possible return on their advertising spend and the highest level of traffic quality and customer support," says 7Search.com's Director of Internet Operations Gemma Piscotti. "These platform enhancements have been well received by our existing advertisers during their beta testing and will position 7Search to become more competitive in the pay-per-click advertising industry."

It looks like 7Search got a site redesign recently as well.

Browser Usage Market Share - Firefox 3

PetePrestipino — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:40:00 GMT

Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share study (say that ten times fast) tracked the release of the Firefox 3 release by the hour and monitored the well-promoted (yet poorly executed in my opinion due to downtime) Mozilla Download day and the results that followed in relation to usage market share for browsers. Net Applications states that Firefox made some "excellent gains in usage market share the last 2 months, which would imply a spoke in new users of FF3". See the chart below.

Flash Is Now SEO Friendly? Hurray!

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:45:00 GMT

Adobe announced last night that they are providing "optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines." Can you hear every Web designer from Atlanta to Alaska cheering?

The development will offer Yahoo! and Google the ability to provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs (rich internet applications) and other dynamic content (like Flash menu's) that run in Adobe Flash Player. Developers and rich Web content producers need not amend existing and future content with flat (text) files in order to make it searchable - a previously difficult task due to the changing state states, an inherent problem in RIA technologies.

From the official Adobe announcement:

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Google has already begun rolling out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Sometrics Social Analytics For Developers

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:33:00 GMT

Sometrics, an analytics and ad serving solution for social application developers announced that 1,000 developers are now using its analytics tools.

From the announcement: Sometrics delivers social intelligence – a deep understanding of who’s doing what within social networking websites and applications, and a way for developers to use that information to boost traffic and make more money. Some developers participating in Sometrics’ beta test have reported 200 percent growth in traffic. Developers can use the company’s analytics tools across multiple social networks, including Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. Its standard API also works on any community-based website.

“The key to monetizing the social web is to couple the analytics tools, which help us understand the audience, with an ad serving platform that can hyper-target based on the data we’ve aggregated,” said co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson. “We’re the only ones to build those tools expressly for social sites and applications, and that makes a difference. We’re proving that it’s possible to hyper-target and make money in the social web, and we’re thrilled to do that for our developer partners.”

JangoMail Visual Overlay: Email Click Tracking

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:27:00 GMT

Email marketing provider JangoMail announced a new reporting feature that aims to improve email marketing campaigns. The new Visual Overlay for Click Tracking feature allows email marketers to view click tracking statistics graphically superimposed on top of sent email campaigns. At a glance, email marketers can now see exactly how each link in a message is performing.

"With JangoMail's latest enhancement, the Visual Overlay for Click Tracking, we are able to view click tracking results visually superimposed on top of our sent email campaigns," said Charlie Hohorst, president of CajunGrocer.com. "At a glance, we can now see our message and exactly how each link is performing in terms of visits. Plus, we can view additional campaign details such as total clicks versus unique clicks."

Google PPA Now Performics - Official

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Remember not too long ago when all those Internet advertising and affiliate networks were up in arms about Google buying DoubleClick and its Performics affiliate network? I sure do, and it looks like zero day is fast approaching. Google will begin consolidating its offerings, essentially phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008.

But don't worry, Google's got a better alternative (of course they do!). For advertisers, Google is pushing advertisers towards Conversion Optimizer (which lets advertisers manage their advertising on a cost-per-acquisition basis), and the Performics (Google) Affiliate Network - which enables advertisers to advertise to all Performics publishers or select publishers matching specific criteria.

Conversion Optimizer is essentially an AdWords bidding feature that lets advertisers set a maximum CPA goal for ads on the Google search and content networks (using historical information about campaigns to adjust CPC bid for each auction to meet CPA goals automatically). The Conversion Optimizer is now supported in both the AdWords Editor and the AdWords API.

Yahoo Sells Domains for $34.95?

PetePrestipino — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:22:00 GMT

Starting this Wednesday (tomorrow), users who have registered domain names with Yahoo's small business site will see their annual fee for the service jump $9.95 to $34.95. Website Magazine's very own senior editor Mike Phillips has a few domains registered with Yahoo Small Business and will have to pay three and a half times more than other domain owners (a $25 price increase).

If you're looking for a less expensive alternative, be like a Yahoo Executive and jump ship - head on over to any of Website Magazine's Top 50 Domain Registrars for a better deal!

Comparison Shopping Survey: Your Opinion Counts

PetePrestipino — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:33:00 GMT

Comparison shopping online already transformed retailing, but how has it affected you? Whether you’re leading the charge as an active merchant, or you find it’s a big bore, your opinion counts. As a valued subscriber of Website Magazine, you are invited to answer a survey that should take no more than 5 minutes to complete. Your responses will help us gauge the impact of comparison shopping online on web professionals like you. The data collected will be available in the August edition of Website Magazine.

Take the survey on comparison shopping and comparison shopping engines now.

The Domain (and SEO) Industry Are Forever Changed

PetePrestipino — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:31:00 GMT

ICANN has formally accepted a proposal that will allow companies to purchase new top-level domain names (TLD's) ending in virtually any extension they choose. Readers, this is the biggest news in the domain name industry in a long, long time. Read about how the domain and SEO industries are forever changed thanks to this development.

Wix Flash Web Sites - SEO Friendly?

PetePrestipino — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:16:00 GMT

If you're looking to create flash websites or widgets, then recently launched online application Wix may be worth looking into (especially if programming and design are not your strengths).

Wix is essentially an online editing platform that enables users to design web content such as audio, video, images, music and text and publish it anywhere in virtually any format - as standalone websites or social networks and weblogs. Users can do an amazing amount of things with the solution; for example, import files from YouTube and Flickr. What is most intriguing is that content created though Wix is search engine friendly. Unlike many websites rendered in Flash, Wix uses an SEO friendly XML structure to make the content created crawlable.

Domain News; GoDaddy, Dot TK, ICANN

PetePrestipino — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:13:00 GMT

The domain name industry is certainly heating up; here are a few announcements from yesterday and today:

The GoDaddy Group, which operates GoDaddy.com, Wild West Domains, and Blue Razor have crossed a major milestone - 30 million domains registered. According to RegistrarStats.com, GoDaddy.com has around 26 million domains registered and Wild West Domains, its reseller program, counts over 3 million domains.

Dot TK, the registry for .TK domain names, today announced the launch of its free .TK domain name registration system during the 32nd ICANN meeting in Paris (more on that below). Those interested in registering a .tk extension for their own domain receive URL and email forwarding (and a few other perks) but do not actually have legal ownership of the domain or DNS control - that priviledge is reserved for those paying 6.95 per year.

And finally, the ICANN board will vote on two important proposals today. The first would allow domains that do not use Latin characters and the second would allow domains to use other letter or number combinations in their extensions, sans trademarked terms..

Google Webmaster Tools API

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Google is releasing an API for its Webmaster Tools.

The API provides the ability to manage sites (retrieve, add, verify, and remove websites) and work with sitemaps (retrieve, add, remove). This will be immensely useful for those web professionals that need to update multiple sites on a regular basis. Although the current API offers a limited subset of all the functionality (the ability to retrieve queries on the data - links, crawl errors, etc.) that the online Webmaster Tools provides, you can get started with the Developer's Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API immediately.

SQL Injection Detection and Defense

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has released tools to help website developers in their defense against SQL injection on sites that use ASP and ASP.Net technologies. The tools include URLScan 3.0 (which is in beta release) and Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection (MSCASI), available as a Community Technology Preview.

Hewlett Packard has also developed a free scanner which can identify whether sites are susceptible to SQL injection dubbed Scrawlr.

Developed to help battle recent SQL injection attacks as per a Microsoft Security Advisory bulletin, the tools are intended to help developers build more secure code and promote a more trusted ecosystem, Microsoft said.

There has been a recent rise in SQL injection attacks exploiting unverified user data input. When these attacks are successful, a hacker/ attacker can compromise data stored in databases and possibly execute remote code. Clients browsing to a compromised server could be forwarded to malicious sites that may install malware on the client machine.

Vidense: Profiting From Video

PetePrestipino — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:47:00 GMT

Online advertising network Vidsense has surpassed 20,000 websites in its network, lending some credence to the opportunity in profiting from video.

"Not only are we the largest online video network," says Vidsense EVP Scott Messick, "but with clickthrough rates 7-10 times greater than traditional online ad units, we're also far and away the best performing online video network for both our advertisers and our publishers." While that 7-10 times CTR might be a little bullish, Vidsense does offer an opportunity to get in while the getting in is good when it comes to profiting from video.

Vidsense publishers simply embed the Vidsense content unit on their sites and when a visitor clicks on one of the featured thumbnails culled from the videos, a discrete window opens on a sponsor's website, where the video player itself is surrounded by the sponsor s brand environment. Vidsense works on a pure PPC (Pay-Per-Click) basis wherein sponsors pay for each clickthrough generated by participating publisher's sites, and Vidsense pays the participating publishers for each clickthrough as well.

"It costs site publishers absolutely nothing to participate in the Vidsense video advertising network," says Messick. "In return, they receive incremental revenue, high-quality content with proven appeal to attract more site visitors, a real-time reporting mechanism, and on-time publisher payouts." The solutions seems to be working for some. "Vidsense is a wonderful complement to my website," says Erin Chambers of EVTV1 (http://evtv1.com). "The video thumbnails offer real appeal to my visitors, and the additional revenue is a terrific bonus."