Marketing Pilgrim

AdAge reports that ABC.com has started research to prove that online viewers will tolerate seeing multiple advertisements when watching popular shows like Grey’s Anatomy (funny, I can’t even tolerate that show.) So in other words, they can serve up ads similar to the way you would watch it on TV, and viewers will be fine with it as long as they get to watch their favorite shows.

I really don’t see how this could be true. Wouldn’t it just further encourage fans to use their DVR or to download the shows elsewhere (illegally or legally—i.e., iTunes). When you watch the shows on ABC’s website, you’re unable to fast forward through the ads. There is so much technology at our fingertips, that it gives viewers so many alternatives then sitting through a forced-commercial version of the show.

Amazon had a great fourth quarter as reported today in the WSJ. Sales were up 18% and profits rose 9%. Those numbers are pretty strong when things are going well but in today’s economy these are outrageous results.

Here’s a few more numbers to drool over. Earnings of $225 million for the quarter ended Dec 31st. This is compared to earnings of $207 million for the same period a year earlier. What’s that you ask a company that’s experiencing growth year over year in this environment? Yup, that’s right. Oh and the $6.7 billion (with a “b”) revenue number for the quarter is very impressive indeed.

Can you really ever fully automate your SEO and PPC campaign? Well, the folks over at WordStream are launching a new hosted software solution that claims to do just that. I’ve not checked it out–and with a starting price of $300, I’m not sure if I will–but I’m sure some folks will find it useful.

I’ll stop there and let you watch the video demo below:

WordStream offers a free trial. If you’ve tried the service, let us know what you think.

By Danny Brown

Perhaps it’s a sign that the site is reaching more mainstream popularity levels, but Twitter is fast becoming a haven for spammers. Accounts include semi-naked girls with just one link to an affiliate site to brands that use the service for nothing more sending direct messages to other users with a sales link.

Now it seems that the “power players” of Twitter are being targeted—yet it’s not directly at them. Rather, it’s using them instead.

This latest trick sees users that have a certain authority on Twitter—i.e., thousands of followers—be the lucky target of a fake account with their details. Their image and name is used to trick unsuspecting users into thinking it’s the real person. Normally it’s a play on the person’s name—underscores, dashes, numbers, etc.

We have been talking a great deal lately about how Twitter should be monetizing their service. Most of this talk comes after news that Twitter secured $20 million in venture capital, to push its total valuation to $250 million. It wasn’t long ago that Twitter started looking for a product manager to define a revenue stream. This is a smart move for a company that has relied solely on venture capital from day one.

Andy recently wrote a post detailing his thoughts for a Twitter subscription program. This is an idea that even Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams has spoken about in the past.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Then I present to you the growth charts for US search trends for 2008:

If that doesn’t send chills down the spines of Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL, then this observation from TechCrunch will:

What’s even more impressive is that nearly 90 percent of all the growth in search volume was also captured by Google.

It’s been like this for years now. Should the other search engines even bother to compete?