Here is a bit of twitter fun I recently found. You load your username in and it does a parade of your contacts. It made me laugh out loud. Try it yourself, keep a check on what animations they apply to your contacts…
As I sat in my garden this evening, I looked up and noticed the redundant old fashioned arial on the roof. I looked at my neighbours houses and could see that we all have pretty much the same ugly rake-style ariels that festoon the land on virtually every house.
We have become so blind to them that, like chimney pots we only miss them when they are gone, most new houses these days do not have a chimney so therefore chimney pots are something of a rarity in certain areas.
Personally I think houses without chimney pots lack some character but ariels, now these are ugly things that are a blight on the skyline. The great news is that we no longer need them.
They are mostly made of recyclable metal and strapped on with scaffolding pole, surely some enterprising person can come up with a business that takes them away free for you and they make money on the recycling aspect, I hate them and for one would be glad to see them all going. I will be removing mine anyway.
I vote we have a “national arial recycling scheme?” don’t you?
The old saying ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’ is an old but valid mantra. The last 12 months has seen Google snapping away like a rabid dog and many small businesses and affiliates are either out of business or fighting hard to survive.
The growth of Google’s sponsored search business (in the early days) was largely driven by big brands and affiliates – small and large. Now let’s just quantify what I term as an affiliate, in my view; any website that generates it income from being an intermediary to the real destination (eg: where the consumer makes its purchase) is an affiliate. So that encompasses the thousands of sites from comparison shopping like CompareStorePrices, content sites like Wildmushroomsonline and vertical search sites like Goissimo.com.
so from the cry small to the major players like Moneysupermarket, Gocompare, Comaprethemarket and Travelocity, these are all in effect affiliate sites, even Google itself is one massive affiliate site as it sells nowt but advertising space…
So what is Google doing? Well logically you would say that it would be in Googles’ interest to workout what the maximum CPC the ‘destination’ sites can afford and based their so called ‘ quality score’ to effect all advertisers for a specific keyword to enable only those best performing detonation to be advertisers. Sounds fair? Well of course, yes it is. It gives the user a better experience and Google more buck for their click. However, this could fundamentally change the Internet. When you look at the amount of websites that exist, and the amount of money on the merry-go-round, you soon realise that only a small percentage of sites are actually real destinations and that much of the entire business model of online is built through the dispertion and spread of marketing money to get users to do the final purchase.
With Google being the all powerful beast that it is today, the fact they have made it so expensive to buy clicks these days and so hard for intermediaries to get volume of traffic at the right prices, I personally have seen lots of ‘affiliates’ hit the wall. These affiliate companies have no choice but to find traffic from elsewhere, and as most of us know, good converting traffic is hard to finding volume.
Google can certainly get more money from the system, but to what effect long term? Is the process of squeezing the middle man out of business actually going to reduce the size of the Internet? And at some stage potentially hurt Google? It may be possible to see a situation where the concept of being an affiliate advertiser on Google is a complete non starter and nearly all advertisers are destination site…. But this could and likely would lead to a reduction in bidding war which, unless Google went down the route of minimum category bids may lead to a global reduction of bid prices if the affiliates are not there to splash big marketing bucks growing their traffic.
When all the latest and greatest social sites started to take shape and grow, it was all about how many contacts you had, none more so than with Linked (showing off your business connectedness), facebook, Twitter et al. All of whom based their growth model largely on the ‘look at me’ factor in terms of popularity.
Does anyone really give a damn? How many of your contacts do you either connect with more than once per year in a meaningful way or actually know who they are? I have friends, followers and contacts who I can’t even remember meeting or ever talking to. in reality, what we have here with these connected lists is just a great big address book. Period.
What would be useful would be a global facility which interacts across all mediums and site where you can flag your true contacts, (privately) to help keep track instead of being swamped with utter insanity of mass meaningless contacts.
There was a time when you would quite happily build a fully fledged site that had lots of clever modules, features and content which were only accessible if you were a registered user… Those were in the days that enabled a business middle to be built on a data acquisition strategy where, once you had the users details, you could monetize it both through your site and with third parties.
Facebook has largely impacted this area, not a lot of people talk about it but it is just another one of the ways in which web2.0 (a term I hate) or the social nature of the web has changed how we all do business online and also make money online.
In the modern era, you simply must build your site so that users can log into it using their existing Facebook account details. There are other global login facilities such as OpenID etc but to be frank Facebook will probably see off most of these as IT becomes the defacto login medium for so many sites.
What does this mean for the business of data? Well I think it is fair to say that within a couple of years, sites that insist on their own solus walled-garden method of signup will lose opportunity and ultimately not be major players. I also think it depends how Facebook start to interact with users they have barely scratched the surface yet… If Apple were to buy Facebook then it would be game -set-match as far as global leadership is concerned for many years to come.
Facebook is the biggest growth opportunity online, they have such far reaching opportunities way outstripping anything Google have. No, I have not been at the Gin, just look at the gaming situation, when Facebook launch their own currency it will be huge… This is just one example of a massive growth area no one else of the main players has managed to capitalise on. Then there is search..I personally believe Google should be very worried about the tie up Facebook has with Bing.
