Marketing Pilgrim

Back in May, Rupert Murdoch dispelled rumors that Murdoch-owned sites would devolve into the free ad-supported content model so many newspapers are struggling to make work online. Instead, News Corp’s hundreds of subsidiaries worldwide will all go to a paid subscription model—everything from the Times to the New York Post to the Wall Street Journal.

The announcement comes immediately after News Corp posted a $203M loss for Q2 yesterday, mostly due to a write-down on MySpace. Although you have to have some level of economic savvy to become the 132nd-richest person in the world, it looks like News Corp is trying to defy basic principles of supply and demand. “We’re losing money here, and we’ve got some paying subscribers over there, so let’s just make everyone pay,” seems to be the rationale.

Don’t panic, don’t panic!

Twitter is down and they are working on the issue.

We know you have all kinds of cool things you wanted to tweet today, so feel free to use our comments section instead.

UPDATE: Twitter is back online and apparently suffered at the hands of a denial of service attack:

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

Thank you to Carol Bartz of Yahoo for the new ‘boatloads’ theme. What would we do without it? Back to the news. Of course, we know that lots of people watch online video and SearchEngineWatch tells of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project survey conducted in April of this year and the numbers behind the general statement about online video are pretty interesting. As with any research it’s good to know the source and the group studied so here’s the skinny on the research methodology

The report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research International between March 26 to April 19, 2009, among a sample of 2,253 adults, 18 and older.

Ever have a moment when you see something and you say” Well, of course, that’s obvious. No surprise there.” Then if you actually take the time to look at the ‘obvious’ thing you practically brushed you have another realization of the real impact of the information? I had that kind of moment his morning after seeing a report at SearchEngineLand regarding the most recognized brands in the world.

Millward Brown released their top “BrandZ” report for 2009 and Google has the top spot again. With a list like this you would expect some serious competition and there is.

Remember when we all thought that search engine ads couldn’t get any weirder than those put out by Ask.com.

Ladies and Gentleman, the crown has now passed to Bing.

OK, so they didn’t technically create the latest Bing commercial, but they did select it as the winner of a recently held Bing jingle contest. The winner is “Bing Goes the Internet” by Jonathan Mann:

Whether you pray it never comes to your TV set, or you hope to see it during the next Super Bowl, says a lot about you.

It looks like the Internet marketing industry could be staring at an age of government regulation and oversight that could change online advertising in major ways. While this kind of news should come as no surprise based on the new age of government intervention in business it is still enough to make even the most seasoned online marketer take notice.

The New York Times tells of how things could look very different for the online advertisers in the future

The new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, David C. Vladeck, says it is time for that to change. In an interview, Mr. Vladeck outlined plans that could upset the online advertising ecosystem. Privacy policies have become useless, the commission’s standards for the cases it reviews are too narrow, and some online tracking is “Orwellian,” Mr. Vladeck said.