Apparently you can now buy parts of the English language on Shopping.com! Today I was doing a search for “buying adjectives” (trying to create a master list of words to use in keyword generation), and here’s the first result I get on Google:
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Guest Post: Terry Whalen of CPC Search Tells Us Why Rumors of Bing’s Ascendance Are Greatly Overrated!
Though I like some of the features in Bing, I don’t have much faith that Bing is going to overtake Google in search market-share, or even put much of a dent in Google’s share over the long run. And I’m not alone in this assessment. My good friend Terry Whalen from CPCSearch has graciously agreed to share his perspective on Bing with Blogation’s readers. Here’s his thoughts:
Microsoft’s $100 million ad spend seems to have done a great job so far in attracting interest and search queries to their new search engine, Bing. In terms of recent market share, many search industry data sources are reporting as much as a 50% gain in market share for Bing, from about 8% of search queries to about 12%. According to figures from Compete.com, that equates to roughly 550 million additional queries. If we use standard web ad metrics, this equates to a cost/click of $.20 ($100,000,000/550,000,000). Good job on the ad buy, Microsoft. You’ve generated buzz and also a very significant amount of searchers to Bing.
Can this trend hold? We think not. Microsoft’s history in online, in our opinion, is one of playing a game of catch-up, and generally playing it poorly. When it comes to the Internet, Microsoft copies others’ efforts, and usually does quite a mediocre job of it. Bing is no different – they have copied Google’s search page almost exactly. Even the color of the premium sponsored ads at the top of the page are shaded orange, just as Google’s are. But one doesn’t need to look for long to see the silliness of Microsoft to shine through. A sponsored ad goes to 3 lines and looks amateurish (screenshot below). The #2 organic result for the query ‘php developers’ is for the Yahoo! Developer Network, which is billed as “your source for information about using PHP with Yahoo! Web Services APIs. It would be a very, very small minority of searchers for this phrase that would care about this specific topic, yet it’s the second result.
We think that the buzz will die down, and Bing’s market share will trend back toward where it has been. If, in the unlikely event Bing.com were to grab and keep a large share of the search market, Advertisers would be much, much worse off. This is because pay-per-click marketing is a self-service activity. The advertiser interface provided by the search platform is key to enabling the advertiser to achieve positive ROI on a worthwhile scale. Google does a brilliant job at this, and yet it strives all the harder to improve its advertiser interface. Microsoft’s AdCenter interface is laughably bad. My colleague and I considered not using “laughably” as an adjective here, but we both decided we had to, for truth in blogging. In addition to an overall horrible interface, AdCenter’s conversion tracking system is unable to report on revenue from ecommerce transactions. A related question: guess who constitutes a major category of keyword advertisers? Drumroll…that’s right – ecommerce companies.
Twitter Sucks, Postscript – I Am Not Alone!
It seems there are a lot of Twitter apologists who refuse to listen to anyone with a negative reaction to Twitter. To wit, most of the comments I got on my last Twitter post were from people either accusing me of link bait (I wish I knew how!) or of misunderstanding Twitter entirely.
Today, however, a post by Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed VP’s blog confirmed at least one thing – I’m not the only one disappointed by Twitter. Jeremy quotes a Harvard Business Review article that shows that most registered users on Twitter basically sign up and proceed to do nothing: “Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.”
The Twitter apologists have already come out with arguments attempting to spin this data, such as: these statistics include abandoned accounts; people may not post Tweets but could still be reading others, etc. Ultimately, however, given the extreme vanity of social media, it seems unlikely to me that a social network can really be successful if the majority of the people using it are, well, not using it in a vanity-induced way. Can you imagine people signing up for Facebook just to read their friends’ updates and view their friends’ pictures? Well, there will be some people who do, but the majority of people on Facebook embrace the notion that it is a two-way street.
Of course, it’s possible that Twitter will evolve – either in the way that people use the tool, or by making UI improvements or functionality changes – but currently I am still convinced that Twitter’s anointment as the next iteration of social media is still an unfulfilled media invention.
