Marketing Pilgrim

It seems that more people are watching video online these days. Maybe it’s the rise in unemployment where people are finding more ‘free time’ these days rather than having to be hassled with a job. Maybe it’s the folks at their desks trying to while away the time since there is no business being done? Maybe it’s the high quality of most video on the Internet? Maybe it’s the ‘job outsourcing” craze? Maybe I am being way too cynical?

Whatever it is, ClickZ reports that comScore’s Video Metrix service showed an Internet users watched 16.8 billion online videos in April of this year which is a 16% increase over March. Google itself increased 15% month over month for videos viewed on its properties led by YouTube. What is most striking is what Google is doing regarding market share of online video. It’s a show that is as impressive, if not more so, than their search engine dominance. Here’s the numbers

Local search, much like mobile marketing, always seemed poised to ‘break out’ and experience the growth that so many predict. Whether it’s a real trend or just a result of our un-stimulated economic climate, local businesses that have tried paid search to attract new customers through the search engines like Google and Yahoo are not sticking with it. A report from Borrell Associates as covered in the Wall Street Journal suggests that churn and burn is as much a part of local search as is anything else.

A new study on local search advertising from research firm Borrell Associates finds that roughly 50% of businesses that buy search ads directly from Google and other Internet search companies don’t come back the following year. And the churn rate for businesses like Yodle, ReachLocal and LookSmart that purchase search ads on behalf of local advertisers is around 60%, according to the study, scheduled to be released Monday.

Over sixteen months after Microsoft’s first offer to Yahoo, many people in the tech world are still watching them, waiting with bated breath. Will they or won’t they? Although Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has spent a lot of time lately downplaying the possibility, she stops short of saying there’s no possible deal with Microsoft in an interview with Fox Business (via paidContent) this week:

If you’re reading this via RSS and there’s no video, click through to view the video

Instead, she focuses on Yahoo’s strong properties that dominate their verticals—finance, sports, etc. She says that the social fragmentation of the has confused many users, and Yahoo is still a simple, centralized place for them to go for many different interest areas (not to mention email).

If a tree falls in the woods, but nobody cares about the tree, does it still deserve a blog post?

Well if that tree is WolframAlpha, and the noise heard is the sound of new updates, then the answer is yes. Hey, just because I don’t happen to find value in the (not a) search engine, that doesn’t mean that you’re not fascinated by it. Right?

Today we learn that:

Altogether, there have been 1850 code commits, and 591 code files have been changed. About 1.1 million data values have also been touched in some way in this update.

The full list of updates includes:

• Additional linguistic forms for many types of data and questions
• More comparisons of composite properties (e.g. “US military vs. UK”)

My good friend, and web analytics guru, Avinash Kaushik once wrote:

Cancel the contract with your favorite expensive analytics vendor and take that $50k or $100k or $200k and: 1) Hire a smart analyst for between $50k to whatever maybe your areas great salary 2) Put the rest of the money in your pocket.

That piece of advice has always stuck with with me, and according to new data from Econsultancy and Lynchpin, it appears it’s resonating with many companies. In the Online Measurement and Strategy Report (aff) we learn that:

There has been a marked shift from spending on technology to spending on internal staff, with companies now spending more on human resources than on software and licences. The proportion of spending on internal staff has increased from 36% to 42% of total web analytics spend while spending on technology has decreased from 45% to 38%.

What does this chart tell you?

OK, so it’s open to interpretation, but it tells me that we’re growing tired of our fragmented social media lives and, instead, we’re ever so quietly merging all of our social activities over to Facebook. Facebook has it all–messaging, photo sharing, videos–so it makes sense that the social network is apparently “pwning” those that only offer a piece of the pie.

Is it any surprise then that Facebook managed to achieve a staggering 8.54% growth in the past month alone? Even the astronomic growth of Twitter couldn’t match it–taping off to a sloth-like 1.47% growth.

If you like you social media like you like food–one place for sushi, another for steak–you might be surprised to learn that your peers are all heading to Golden Corral for its all-you-can-eat buffet!