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Marketing News Roundup, January 23

posted on January 23, 2009

It’s time for the week in review: all the marketing news that was fit to print, but we didn’t quite get to you sooner.

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Microsoft Still Wants Yahoo Search

posted on January 23, 2009

Well, Microsoft, you just cut 5000 jobs and missed your Wall Street estimates. What are you going to do now? If you guessed they’re going to Disney World, you’re wrong. No, according to Steve Ballmer, they’re looking to drop some big bucks on Yahoo search.

Naturally, Ballmer isn’t naming his price quite yet. On the earnings call this week, however, Ballmer made no bones about the future for web search from Microsoft, according to the New York Times:

Asked about a deal with Yahoo on search during a conference call with investors early Thursday, Mr. Ballmer said, “We would like to do one.” And Mr. Ballmer sounded more optimistic about the possibility of coming to terms with Yahoo now that Carol Bartz, the former chief executive of Autodesk, replaced Jerry Yang as chief executiveof Yahoo. “I know Carol Bartz well from the Autodesk days and am glad to see her at the helm of Yahoo,” he said. Mr. Ballmer, who met last week with Roy Bostock, the Yahoo chairman, also said he had spoken with Ms. Bartz recently.

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Facebook Twice as Big as MySpace?

posted on January 23, 2009

At the rate Facebook has been growing these past two months, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook gets more traffic than MySpace. comScore’s latest report, however, claims that not only is Facebook bigger than MySpace, it’s twice as big!

Facebook vs MySpace

This comScore chart shows that in November, Facebook began pulling ahead of MySpace thanks to their 200 million unique visitors that month. Caroline McCarthy from CNET highlights a statement from MySpace regarding comScore’s findings:

We are laser focused on building a sustainable global business which we measure by profits and revenue–not just eyeballs. In a tough economic climate, our international revenue is up 30 percent year over year and we continue to focus on those markets with the strong monetization opportunities.

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Google Announced Q4 Earnings; Getting Back to its Fighting Weight

posted on January 23, 2009

Google has released its Q4 numbers–beating Wall Street expectations–and in the process has admitted that it can no longer continue to milk its fat search engine cow.

First, the boring stuff numbers:

  • Google reported revenues of $5.70 billion in Q4, representing an 18% increase over Q4 2007 revenues of $4.83 billion and a 3% increase over Q3 2008 revenues of $5.54 billion.
  • Google’s net income fell sharply to $382 million, or $1.21 a share, from $1.2 billion, or $3.79 a share, in the same period a year earlier.
  • It it weren’t for writing down the value of its AOL and Clearwire investments by $726M and $355M respectively, Google would have seen net income of $1.62 billion–or 15 cents higher than the $4.95 per share expected by analysts.

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Is Search Weathering the Recession Storm?

posted on January 22, 2009

By Peter Young

Depending on who you decide to subscribe to it appears to have been a bit of a mixed bag for search spend during the final quarter of 2008. Recent reports by both Covario and Efficient Frontier have both released slightly differing reports on how search has fared, however there is one consistency that seems to be common to be both—search in comparison to nearly every other channel appears to be holding its own, in what can only be described as extremely trying times.

According to a report by online analytics firm Covario, search spend actually ‘surged’ during the final quarter of 2008, 43% YOY increase over the same period in 2007—a 7.2% gain over 3rd quarter 2008 spending. Such figures are all the more impressive given the circumstances experienced during the latter part of last year. It however should be noted this report was based on 12 of Covario’s U.S.-based high tech and consumer electronics customers—and thus is fairly limited in terms of scope.

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Win Copies of Sandy Carter’s Book “The New Language of Marketing 2.0″

posted on January 22, 2009

Winners: Congrats to:

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It’s been at least 24-hours since we did a reader giveaway, so how about another one?

We have 3 copies of Sandy Carter’s The New Language of Marketing 2.0 to give away and all you need to do is leave a comment to enter!

Sandy Carter is the VP, Service-Oriented Architecture & WebSphere Marketing at IBM and her new book is packed full of great advice. Carter demonstrates winning Web 2.0 marketing at work through 54 brand-new case studies: organizations ranging from Staples to Harley Davidson, Coca-Cola to Mentos, Nortel to IBM itself. You’ll discover powerful new ways to market brands and products in both B2B and B2C markets…integrate Web 2.0, experiential, and conventional marketing…maximize synergies between global and local marketing…gain more value from influencers, and more.

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Apple Profits, SEC Probes

posted on January 22, 2009

apple-logoWith all the bad economic news flying around including massive Microsoft layoffs, Intel’s first performance concerns in a long time and IBM job cuts, Apple had its best quarter ever as reported in the WSJ.

Steve Jobs let the world know and issued a prepared statement on Apple’s earnings.

Even in these economically challenging times, we are incredibly pleased to report our best quarterly revenue and earnings in Apple history,” the CEO said.

That’s to the tune of over $10 billion dollars. A big number for sure. Increased sales of Macs and iPhones led the charge in the fourth quarter but Apple is already advising that Q1 of this year may not be so great. Interestingly enough it’s not the business of Apple that is getting the most attention these days. In fact, it seems as if the great performance in otherwise dark days is an afterthought when compared to the news swirling around the health of Steve Jobs and the SEC’s interest in the whole situation.