Marketing Pilgrim

Just four years ago Google made a big splash in the Internet space by buying a 5% stake in AOL for $1 billion. Do the math and that placed the valuation of the company at around $20 billion. The fall of AOL from an Internet powerhouse to a “will they ever be influential again?” story is one that Google now knows all to well. Bloomberg reports today that on July 8th Time Warner bought that 5% share back from Google for $273 million. The valuation of AOL is now placed at $5.66 billion. What a difference a few years makes, huh?

Google wrote off $726 million of that investment last year so the pain of the misstep is mostly in the past. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sting, however.

It’s official. Stop the presses. No longer can there be any banter back and forth about the merits of Facebook and Twitter. Your opinions are no longer valid regardless of who you are because Martha Stewart has made up your mind for you. Twitter is the way to go because Facebook is “dippy”. That’s right, dippy. Looks like the folks at Facebook should just fold up their tents and leave the social media camping area because they are not favored by the Queen of All Things Comfortable.

Ok, that was really sarcastic but there may be a little bit of a sting in this proclamation as reported at Mashable. It actually comes on the heels of Bill Gates, the King of All Things in General, stating that he couldn’t tell his real friends from his other ‘friends’ on Facebook. That’s two monsters of the media giving Facebook the thumbs down.

Our 4th Annual SEM Scholarship Contest has now finished and we’re compiling a list of our five finalists. This will be done today and we’ll then forward that list to our panel of expert judges.

I know that our contest entrants are dying to know if they made the list of top five most popular articles. So as to avoid any tampering with our judges, we will not be making the list of finalists known until August 5th.

We’ll then announce our grand prize winner on August 7th as planned.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!

PS. In case you missed the awesome contest entries, here they are again (in no particular order):

• The Small Business PPC Art of War

It’s kind of hard for me to report on Click Forensics without being biased–I’ve long maintained that click fraud will simply be one of many "costs" associated with paid search and is therefore a non-issue. So, you should keep that bias in mind, when reading the following:

Click Forensics’ reports may put them out of business.

Maybe I’m being extreme, but when Click Forensics first launched its Click Fraud Index, it was able to report on massive amounts of click fraud and likely attract many new clients as a result. Four years on, I hardly ever hear anyone–outside of Click Forensics–claim click fraud to be a major issue–and the latest index suggests the same.

For the second straight quarter–and year over year–the click fraud rate declined:

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you just might find
You get what you need…

And, if we believe the latest report from AdAge, neither Microsoft or Yahoo will get exactly what they want from a potential partnership. Instead, both will make significant compromises in order to put a deal together that might just help them compete with Google.

The deal will likely be based purely on a revenue share–a far cry from what Yahoo had hoped for:

Yahoo’s request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last week in the on-again-off-again talks. But they were revived late on Thursday, according to executives with knowledge of the situation.

If you were hoping Microsoft would rebound from its poor 3rd quarter earnings, you may wish to sit down.

Yesterday, the software company reported its first year-over-year revenue and sales drop ever–which will compliment nicely the quarterly drop from Q3.

According to the WSJ:

…Microsoft said net income for the period ended in June fell to $3.05 billion, or 34 cents a share, from $4.3 billion, or 46 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue fell 17% to $13.1 billion.

Breaking it down, Microsoft’s online services unit continues to struggle–posting a $732 million loss. Its online advertising revenue faired slightly better than last quarter’s 16% drop, seeing a mildly improved 14% decline–the equivalent of telling a teenager on prom night that the humongous zit on their chin looks "less pussy today."