Marketing Pilgrim

As we have talked about in the not so distant past, Yahoo is in the midst of a brand overhaul. Today we will be given the first public look at the new home page as it is rolled out to most of the US (I don’t see it as of 7:40 am EST but maybe I don’t rate). TechCrunch has previews of the new look and reports on some of the changes that are taking place.

The main difference from the current Yahoo home page is that users can now customize the page with widgets/apps from third parties. Some apps have been pre-created by Yahoo and others. And others can be added as well, Yahoo will make the app based on the URL you supply (they don’t say it needs RSS, although I’m not sure how they create it on the fly without it).

Last week, we highlighted the good news from Google’s Q2 earnings report—they beat expectations and they expect YouTube to be profitable soon. But there was more to the full report, as Econsultancy points out today.

In the paid search arena, Google’s bread and butter, the results weren’t as bright as the hope that YouTube will be in the black soon. Overall paid clicks were down 2% from Q109, and down 13% YOY.

Efficient Frontier agreed, according to Econsultancy.

According to Efficient Frontier, Q2 saw a 20-31% decline in CPCs amongst the advertisers in its Customer Index. Google CPCs dropped 31% while CPCs on Bing and Yahoo dropped 30% and 20%, respectively.

As a culture, we love to try to determine how successful someone will be in a huge job based on the first 100 days. We do it regularly with the President of the US and now there is the same examination occurring with Tim Armstrong, the recently minted CEO of AOL. Much like our struggling economy AOL needs some real help and Armstrong was brought in to get the once high-flying Internet giant back among the ranks of the heavyweights. So how’s it going thus far?

Posts for pay, reviews for cash or whatever you want to call them are a part of the blogosphere and have been for quite some time. The amount of attention that it gets is often directly related to the amount of other news that is happening in the space at the time. Well, we are in the middle of the summer and other than Twitter running around with its security briefs around its ankles there has little news to truly examine.

Enter Ad Age and its video feature “Three Minute Ad Age” which interviews BlogHer co-founder and COO Elisa Camahort Page on the eve of their 5th annual conference in Chicago. While many turn up their noses at the idea of ‘mommy-bloggers’ there is power in numbers whether it is real or perceived. Ask Motrin. BlogHer.com is a online community that gets 15 million unique visitors per month so there is nothing to sneeze at there from a pure quantity measure.

Google is still letting its employees play with their 20% time, as evidenced by the newest YouTube project spotted: three dimensional video. Pete, the Googler behind this, confirmed this in a YouTube Help thread, saying that the project is “currently very early.”

Pete says the current tags in the project are:

• yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode.
• yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
• yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince.[sic]
• yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.

When it comes to Internet marketing and social media marketing one of the most important metrics of success is the return on investment (ROI). Everyone demands to see something that measures this although most can’t agree on just how to accomplish that. Twitter is one outlet that people are trying to measure as to just how much value do their efforts get on the micro-blogging service. Well, while the rest of the world scratches its head on putting a number to the value of its efforts, Twitter is practically falling over itself with free publicity that has street value that would make any PR person’s head swim.