Marketing Pilgrim

British student Alex Tew sells each of the million pixels for $1 each on his Milliondollarhomepage.com. The result? Almost $1 million in the 21-year-old’s pocket.

Why didn’t I think of that?!?

Via CNet.

SFGate.com has details of Page and Brin funding a low-budget movie…

The Internet moguls are the executive producers of “Broken Arrows,” the story of a man who loses his pregnant wife in a terrorist attack and then takes a job as a hit man…production costs are just under $1 million, Gershbein said. Brin and Page funded about half the film, barely a dent in their personal fortunes, which are estimated at $16 billion each.

Any bet the lead actor uses Google to look-up how to become a hit man?

The January ‘06 edition of Inc. magazine includes a list of challenges CEOs confess they’ll face in 2006.

No online edition yet, but here’s a taster…

“… they’re likely to find that they have two concerns: one, whether they need to launch a corporate blog to get their message out, and, two, what the blogosphere is saying about them.”

They also interview Go Daddy CEO, Bob Parsons about his experience with a company blog.

Good news for all of us in the online marketing/advertising space. According to Bloomberg…

The market for online ads will increase 32 percent to $16.6 billion next year, fueling growth at companies including Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Heath Terry said in a research report. He had previously forecast 21 percent growth.

Looks like rich media ads will see the largest growth next year.

Sales of online ads that have animation, sound or interactive features will jump 66 percent next year to become the fastest growing area of Web ads, Credit Suisse predicts. Yahoo, the most-visited Web site, and No. 1 search-engine Google are winning business at the expense of publishers and broadcasters.

Hat-tip Battelle.

Humorous story from AP looks at how a fake news release announcing the “successful the reintroduction of wolves” made it into Tuesday’s edition of the LA Times.

JenSense reports a new round of trojans are attacking Google AdSense.

A new trojan horse discovered by an Indian publisher replaces Google AdSense ads with their own ads, advertising sites including dating, sex, viagra and weight loss. This trojan is very recent, because it not only converts regular AdSense ad units, but also the Google AdSense and Firefox referrer buttons into text links.

I’ve seen this before, back in the “olden days“.

You may have seen Ben’s post about Amazon’s author blogs. Over at ClickZ, I explain to Kevin Newcomb why Amazon’s effort is commendable, but missing a huge opportunity.

So far, the program doesn’t allow readers to comment on blog posts, or to subscribe to blogs via RSS feed. That’s a missed opportunity, according to Beal. “Popular blogs have two things in common: RSS feeds and readers’ comments. If Amazon’s author blogs are to become popular, they need to embrace RSS feeds for each author and allow customers to add comments to posts.”

Another opportunity that Beal thinks Amazon could take advantage of with RSS feeds would be to use a feed to deliver personalized recommendations to users. “Can you imagine how powerful it would be to include personalized RSS ads that read ‘other fans of this author also bought…’ fill in the blank?” he said.

The title sounds more exciting than the story actually is. Nathan found an Opera press release announcing the company will use Google as the “default search partner for the mobile browsers: Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.”

Niall Kennedy breaks the news that Google is getting ready to offer a feed reader API to allow third-party developers to build new views of feed data on top of Google’s backend.

The new APIs will allow aggregator developers to build new views and interactions on top of Google’s data…Google may offer public access to the feed API as early as next month.

Thanks Cindy!

Over at the Oodle Blog, Craig Donato comments on Google’s decision to insert “jump” pages between search results and classified listings.

It will be interesting to see how this is received by the folks that provide GoogleBase with a feed. Oodle and other vertical search engines (SimplyHired, Indeed) made an explicit decision not to do this. We follow traditional search engine etiquette and send traffic directly to the listing from the results page.

Certainly a worrying decision. Why in the world would Google want to insert a jump page? Perhaps a chance to add ads down the road?

Computerworld speculates that Microsoft and Yahoo! may be teaming up to compete against Google in the search space.

Citing Microsoft employee Ian McAllister’s recent blog post, it certainly appears that Yahoo! could be an unnamed potential partner as MS and Yahoo! look to slow Google’s rapid expansion and rising market share. ComputerWorld also suggests that the partner, instead of Yahoo!, may be a major Internet Service Provider as the post notes.

I’ll copy Ian’s blog post, as it doesn’t appear to be something that would likely stick around for too long.

“Whoa! A Major Player Looks To Take Google Down A Peg

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In a great example of how to leverage blog marketing, the New York Times reports on Amazon Connect which “allows authors to post messages directly to their readers on a wide variety of subjects…”

“…begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans - and to sell more books - with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company’s online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.”