Marketing Pilgrim

The man that gave Google one of its biggest legal headaches, is leaving the company.

According to the WSJ, Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google’s China operations is leaving Google to work on his own start-up. You may remember that Lee, was smack in the middle of a legal battle between Microsoft and Google over allegations that he breached his employment contract, when he took on the job of helping Google with its efforts in China.

The two companies settled in 2005, and since then Lee helped Google build its Chinese search share to 20%–measly compared to Baidu’s 76% dominance–but still a big improvement for the company.

Of course, Google’s moving quickly to ensure Lee’s departure is not too much of a setback. Lee shoes will be filled by two people–those must have been big boots!–and Google will double the size of its sales force in China.

We reported one stat from a new comScore report yesterday—that Facebook served 8.2% of all online ads—but the full report is even more impressive.

More than one in five of all online ads are served on social networks. MySpace still leads the pack with 9.2% of all online ads, and Facebook is a close second with 8.2%. The 3.7% of online ads served on social networks is split among such sites as Tagged.com, MocoSpace.com, Hi5.com, Bebo, Classmates.com and other smaller sites, most with 0.1% or less of the total online ad market:

As impossible as it sounds, Netflix, the popular rental-by-mail-and-instant-download service, may be facing some stiff competition in the future—from YouTube. The Wall Street Journal reports that major studios are discussing YouTube rentals.

Yep, you read that right: YouTube movie rentals. If this comes true, this will be the biggest test to see if users of the most popular video site in the world will pay for premium content—possibly paving the way for more sites to add that income stream.

YouTube has been making deals with professional content providers for a long time—including Disney, MGM, and Lions Gate in the last year.

One of the secrets to Google’s massive success is not the immense size of its search index, but the sparse design of it’s homepage. A design that is now officially patented!

From now on, if you launch a search engine, it had better not use a homepage design that contains the bolded elements below:

It might have taken Google 5 years to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to issue the patent, but issued it is. Of course, even Google doesn’t sit on a winning homepage design. In the five years it’s taken the USPTO to grant the trademark, the search giant has tweaked the design some.

Twitter is really trying to become the company that everyone has it pegged to be, or at least it seems that way by their hiring tactics as of late. While the media daily predicts the emergence / unfettered growth / imminent doom of the micro-blogging service daily (are you sick of it yet?) Twitter goes about its merry way showing signs of brilliance (rapid growth) and signs of “WTF?!” (outages).

The latest attempt to move to the next level, according to TechCrunch, is the hiring of Feedburner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo as the new COO of Twitter. Costolo left Google in July after spending enough time with Feedburner’s new owners to watch them drop the ball. What makes this hire significant (aside from Costolo being an early investor in Twitter) according to TC’s Michael Arrington is

NBC understands that the future of television may have less to do with TV’s. As a result, the company has made a move into the mobile ad space by investing in the mobile ad network Greystripe. The funding is said to have been made to assist the sales team headquartered in New York in selling more ads across the 1,000 mobile apps and games on over 1,400 devices that Greystripe can provide.

Gigaom reports

Greystripe, a mobile advertising network that distributes ad-supported games and applications, said it secured $2 million in funding from the Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture fund co-founded by GE and its NBC Universal unit, ending a Series C funding round. The funding and a new strategic partnership with NBC Universal give Greystripe an edge in the hyper-competitive mobile ad world.