Marketing Pilgrim

Micropayments have worked for companies like iTunes and even Amazon.com for songs and television episodes. But could they be the solution to the newspaper industry’s pending demise?

The Financial Times is ready to find out. They currently use a hybrid paid-free model, where users can access up to 20 stories a month for free, but they’re looking to a pay-per-story or possibly subject or time period model.

The New York Times has long used a micropayments system—for much of their archive, full stories are available as PDF scans at about $4 for one story, or a package of 10 for $16. However, two years ago the NYT outlined just why micropayments don’t work.

Consumers “expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word,” said [Mercator Advisory Group analyst] George Peabody. . .

Microsoft’s interactive agency Razorfish is the subject of some varying rumors as of late. The one common thread in all of these reports is that Microsoft is shopping the company. That much we know for sure. Where they end up is the subject of much speculation.

In the Internet marketing press it depends on who you listen to and / or trust that will help you make your very own prediction. Publicis ending up with Razorfish has been favored by the folks at paidContent and they were willing to pay handsomely for the company although not quite the $800 million that it was supposed to merit. That may not be the case any longer. WPP is in the game as well but that is another that falls under the category of “to be determined”

Maybe you heard the sound of the world crashing down and people actually being productive at work yesterday while Twitter was unreachable. It wasn’t long before the full explanation came out—the popular microblogging site was the victim of a DoS attack.

But Twitter wasn’t the only site targeted. As CNET reports, Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were all subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack yesterday, apparently to silence “Cyxymu,” one blogger from Georgia (the country not the state). Twitter was the most noticeably affected, though Cyxymu’s LiveJournal page was unaccessible.

The Chief Security Officer at Facebook, Chris Kelly, confirmed the attack to CNET:

We already know how much Arthur Levinson stands to lose, should he give up his seat on the Apple board. But, do you know how much Google’s Eric Schmidt just lost?

Nadda.

Well, that’s not entirely true. You see, Schmidt decided not to take any financial compensation for his time served on Apple’s board of directors, but he did apparently accept all the free Apple gear, the company was willing to throw his way.

As of Apple’s fiscal 2008, directors have been allowed to receive one of each new product the company introduces, free, plus the right to buy more at a discount. In fiscal ’08, Schmidt received $8,712 worth of Apple equipment.

In fact, Schmidt actually spent over $740,000 on Apple stock during his tenure–though don’t feel sorry for him, it’s now worth more than $1.7 million!

9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design

by Justin Briggs

Congratulations to Justin who led our five finalists with six votes from our panel of expert judges. While not the most trafficked entry, Justin took search-friendly web design to a new level and impressed our judges. Some of their comments include:

He has a nice keyword laden title, has links and diagrams, breaks it the content so it breathes and wrote with an air of authority and working knowledge.  He also scored points with me for responding to comments in a respectful manner.

…useful information! I especially like the illustration near the top.

I like the graphics and it’s mostly solid information…

…it’s really good content, well written and actionable advice.

Just in case there was any doubt that online video is more popular than ever, a new study says that one third of all videos are shared online. Yahoo, market research firm Interpret LLC, Warner Bros. Media Research, Havas Digital, and Omnicom’s PHD collaborated for the survey results, to be released today.

We marketers should be especially excited about the results from the survey. Ads on television, it appears, were twice as likely to be ignored as online ads. 28% admitted they were more likely to pay attention to online advertising. Engagement was also high—leading to increased satisfaction for users, brand recall for advertisers and tendency to seek product information for consumers.