Marketing Pilgrim

So it appears that local marketing is the new black of sorts when it comes to the Internet. Location based services, concentration on the SMB and now attention being given to large national advertisers whose lifeblood is local markets all over the map is bringing local marketing to the forefront of the Internet marketing mix.

The folks over at Mobile Marketing Watch now tell us just how much Google knows about local search and it’s easy to see why this is such a hot topic.

Speaking at a Mobile Marketing & Advertising event in Las Vegas to coincide with CTIA Wireless 2010, Diana Pouliot – director of mobile advertising at Google – revealed that one-third of all Google searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment.

Yahoo is the top display ad seller at this point in time. That may come as a surprise to many because Yahoo has had a rough go of staying on top of anything lately. Now they are coming off a rough transition year and the tumult of the Microhoo deal is behind them (from a public perspective at least) so Yahoo needs to get in gear.

One of the methods it will be using to keep its top spot in the display ad sales category is to do what everyone seems to figuring out as of late: go local. Forbes.com tells some more

National advertisers spend more than $120 billion on advertising in local markets and Yahoo wants it.

YouTube experimented with renting videos on its site during the Sundance Film Festival in January. In the ten-day test, reports said they netted about $10,000 from the four films.

Apparently that was enough to impress YouTube. Recently they opened the rental program to many publishers. Barry Schwartz blogs at Search Engine Roundtable that he found an “Enable Rental” option in his account the other day. Clicking the button let him edit the revenue sharing options to his video to include rentals.

YouTube is letting its publishers set their own rental length (ie the amount of time users will have to view the video, 24 hours to unlimited), as well as rental price ($0.99US to $19.99US). YouTube has to approve the video for rental. Until it’s approved, the video is labeled “Video submitted for rental consideration” in the publisher’s account and available for free on YouTube.

Hitwise has been blogging its stats for over a month showing Facebook beating Google in all kinds of ways. At the beginning of February, they said that Facebook sent more downstream traffic to news sites than Google News. Last week, they had two such stories: Facebook eclipsed Google in terms of traffic and loyalty to those downstream news sites.

But a closer look showed that the traffic numbers looked a bit . . . massaged. Facebook’s numbers include all their traffic and capabilities—search, video, interaction, etc.—while Google’s numbers only represented Google.com pages, not YouTube or Gmail or Google News or any of their other properties (which compete directly with Facebook in many respects). And the returning visitor rate, shown below, may also be suspect, as Danny Sullivan observed in his stat rant on the subject.

Google just shut down Google.cn.

There are three things you should know. First, the decision:

…earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

Second, the Chinese government could block access to Google.com.hk at any time.

Third, Google appears to be concerned that the Chinese government could take retaliatory action against its employees in China:

Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.

While it is getting smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror, 2009 was just a terrible year for advertising whether it was online or offline. It will be one of the “Remember when?” years that will have people who ‘survived’ saying “hmmmm, yea that was rough, man” over their frappamochacappasigmafi-chinos in the future.

Fortunately, there was a little bit of good news according to a report from IDC and article on MarketWatch. Despite the crap year it was, online advertising spending actually showed its first quarterly growth in a year in Q4 with a 4.5% rise. Hallelujah!

Spending on online advertising in the U.S. increased 4.5% to $7.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, marking its first quarterly growth in a year, according to a report published Friday by IDC.