Marketing Pilgrim

Other than looking like an Old Navy commercial, I really don’t know what to make of this new Ask.com TV ad.

Still, when did Ask.com ads ever make sense?

As usual, you can find statistics to support almost any argument. For example, if you want to use online ad spending as a measure of the economy, things are either looking up or looking down—take your pick. With search ad spend, the trend is up, but on social networks, the trend is down.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, social network ads are doing well—just last month, we were hearing that over 20% of online ads are shown on social networks, with MySpace having a slight edge over Facebook. Just a few weeks ago, Neilsen reported YOY ad spend growth on social networks—but the real figures may be more grim, says eMarketer. While the spend may be increasing, it’s still way too small for how many impressions they give. Social networks account for 3.5% of total Internet ad spending—a little disproportionate for a sector that’s displaying 22% of total Internet ads, don’t you think?

What do you get when you analyze nearly 300 quadrillion megabytes of Internet traffic? Aside from really tired, I mean. Well, if you’re Arbor Networks, you get the largest study of global Internet traffic since the beginning of the commercial Internet in the ’90s. And ten guesses who came out on top. (No fair cheating, reading the headline!)

Yep, Google received 6% of all traffic worldwide. Meanwhile, 29 other giants, including Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, rounded out the top 30% of traffic—meaning that these days, a few big sites are getting a lot of the Internet’s traffic.

Considering that only 52% of Internet traffic is web-based, this is even more significant. (The other 48% is made up of email and private networks. And did you know that P2P constitutes 18% of Internet traffic? That’s down from 40% two years ago.)

Nothing will scare a web site marketer more than either of these two situations:

1. Google flagging your site: "This site may harm your computer"

2. Seeing exactly how your site looks to Google’s spider

Well, Google has announced two new Webmaster Tools Labs features that help with either of these scenarios. First, Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of your pages that it considers to be malicious. You no longer have to scour your entire site, looking for the malicious code.

It looks like this:

The second feature allows you to "see" your site as Googlebot sees it. To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed with this new tool. OK, so it does show you the HTML code that was fetched by Googlebot, but unless you’re looking for session IDs or cache info, it returns no more than you’d see if you simply "viewed source" in your browser.

If there’s one solid truth about class action lawsuits, it’s this: only the attorneys win.

That truth has held out over and over again, especially when it comes to any kind of class action against a search engine. Adding to the list, Yahoo has settled a 2006 lawsuit that claimed it allowed advertisers’ ads to be displayed on a whole host of undesirable web sites:

…Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

A free pass on what you ask? Well, a free pass on the partnership of Microbing and Yahoo as it morphs into Microbingahoo to provide search from bing that will be sold by Yahoo that will make the online world a better place because of competition. You remember that one, right?

Funny how we forget about the big news of the summer when there is no speculation or guessing whether it would or wouldn’t happen and if it did what it would look like. Well, we wouldn’t want this to go 18-24 months without a little Google induced drama now, would we?