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Rave. For a certain segment of the in-home entertainment market, myself included, Netflix is reaching cable killer status. I’ve had a growing dissatisfaction with cable and other such services for some time simply because their offerings do not fit my viewing needs. In short, I find that cable is plagued by high monthly rates, monopolistic-like market dominance in the form of Comcast (which brings with it a whole other set of gripes), and on-demand programming choices of little interest to me. Plus, cable is the avenue of the networks, and unless you have an insatiable desire for reality shows, music videos, and Law and Order reruns, then you’re left asking yourself "What about the stuff I want to see?"
My home viewing needs are simple: 1. I don’t want to pay through the nose to see network programs that don’t appeal to me or the same syndicated TV shows on every channel. 2. When I’m in the mood for something, I would like to see it. There really isn’t much more than that to it.
Unlike Comcast, Netflix has caught on to the fact that it really is that simple. And because Netflix has realized that this basic consumer desire is largely unfulfilled by the giants of the cable industry, they are slowly transitioning from a secondary source of in-home entertainment via their hallmark DVD-by-mail service, to a primary provider of broadband-based on-demand entertainment.
Last year when I subscribed to Netflix, I thought their 2 DVDs at a time for $13.99 plan was a steal, especially since you can keep the DVDs as long as you want without having to be troubled with late fees and because there were no restrictions on the number of rentals you can have per month. Some time ago, Netflix launched it’s Watch Instantly service which streams movies direct to a user’s browser WITHOUT INCREASING THE MONTHLY PLAN PRICE. Now, I’m fairly certain this was done in an attempt to gain market share from other companies in the DVD by mail market, namely Blockbuster Online, and it may not last forever, but the added value of this new service to customers is astronomical. Watch Instantly is an extremely user-friendly system, with a basic point and click interface that gives folks instant viewing gratification. With 10,000 Watch Instantly titles to choose from, the customer plays the role of a network programmer with the single goal of pleasing oneself. Unlike, Comcast On-Demand, Netflix actually has stuff in its inventory that I want to see, including a bunch of hit movies and TV shows from a year ago. If I wanted to watch Heroes: Season 1 right now all I would have to do is click the "Play" button. Go ahead, dare me to do it.
At this point you may ask yourself "Suppose I give Comcast the ax what am I giving up by going exclusively with Netflix? Other than the high monthly rates, not much else. You’d be able to get network shows (including the local news) from NBC and ABC over-the-air in most markets (dig the rabbit ears out of the closet). But, you’d miss out on seeing first airings of Flavor of Love 3 episodes. You’d be able to rent many of the same movies shown on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime for a fraction of the cost, however the ability to view original shows like Weeds would be delayed at least a year. But if you’re a sports nut, you may not want to cancel your cable just yet. What about the viewing experience? Netflix also has a slick piece of hardware (available for $100) that allows customers to stream Watch Instantly movies direct to a TV set without first passing through a computer. Lastly, from what I’ve seen the steaming quality of Watch Instantly is pretty damn good.
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Any website optimizer who has been in the game for a while knows that in order to keep up with changes in search marketing you’ve got to examine Google under a microscope, memorize the gospel according to Matt Cutts, and stay up to date with all the cool new Google tools. That’s just what a good search engine optimizer has to do. Although Google is the most prolific search engine on the web, responsible for 55% of all searches, there’s another player in the game that I feel doesn’t get it’s fair share of love from the SEO community.
Enter Yahoo - The Scottie Pippen of search engines. Yahoo is responsible from somewhere between 20% - 25% of web searches depending on who is holding the stat book, and despite the fact that it doesn’t have as dominant of a market share as Google, owning 1 out of every 5 online searches is a helluva lotta searches.
That being said, today I will give Yahoo its long overdue respect by sharing some tips and idiosyncrasies for working with Yahoo:
1. Yahoo still uses Meta keyword tags.
There was a time (circa 1999) when all a webmaster had to do was throw a bunch of keywords with high search volumes in to the Meta keyword tag and the search engines would eat it up. No more. Top tier search engines hate the tag, including Google, but not Yahoo. According to this article by Danny Sullivan, Yahoo still eats up terms in the Meta keyword tag and uses it in a search query service process called "recall" to some extent.
2. Yahoo does not display the cache date for pages in its index.
You’ll never know by looking at Yahoo’s cache when Slurp!, Yahoo’s search engine bot, last visited your site. Why Yahoo doesn’t display a cache date for the sites it crawls baffles me. Perhaps, Slurp! is a bit more lethargic than Googlebot, and Yahoo wants to keep a tight lid on the limitations of it’s web crawler technology. And this is a great reason, in my opinion, not to display cache dates. It reminds me of something MSN should have done when it announced last year that it can now execute keyword stemming functions in order to determine search results. My reaction to this MSN news: Are you kidding, me? MSN, you mean you weren’t doing this before?
Eventually Yahoo’s cache get’s dumped into the WayBack Machine where it get’s stored for posterity. Here, 
in the WayBack Machine, suddenly the original Yahoo cache date is rediscovered.
A tip to webmasters: if you want to see when Yahoo last cached your site, put a widget that displays the current date and make it either visible only in the HTML code or in the footer of your website (where it isn’t noticeable to your visitors). This way the "image date" can quickly be determined when you retrieve the copy of your site from Yahoo’s cache. The date widget should not be dependent on JavaScript, as search engines are not affable toward the scripting language
3. The "noydir" Meta tag tells Yahoo not to form your search listing using the Yahoo directory.
Yahoo may assemble the search engine listing description for pages on your website using a couple of different sources, including the Yahoo Directory. And who wants their search result descriptions coming from an offsite location? The solution: use the "noydir" Meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />
This tag instructs the search engine not to look at the Yahoo Directory when forming search engine listing descriptions. The only catch is that this Meta tag must be applied to each page on your website.
4. Yahoo gives webmasters a better idea of the number of inbound links to a website.
a link:www.websitename.com query conducted on both Yahoo and Google will return dramatically different results. Each of the two search engines has different criteria for evaluating the righteousness of an inbound link to a website. In short, Google will count only what it has determine to be "highly qualified" backlinks to a domain. On the other hand, Yahoo appears to return all inbound links to a website, regardless of apparent legitimacy. Use this disparity of reported links to your advantage. Treat the number of Yahoo links as a best guesstimate for the actual number of inbound links to your site and the Google number to determine the links in your arsenal with the most SEO power.
5. Yahoo doesn’t care about PageRank. It has its own way of measuring page popularity called WebRank.
According to Wikipedia, PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents. PageRank or PR is a Google proprietary algorithm. But many folks mistakenly believe, that PageRank is some sort of official web standard that measures the link popularity of a page. It may indeed be considered an informal, de facto web standard because of it’s widespread usage (and ironically it’s misusage), but PageRank doesn’t mean anything to Yahoo.
Yahoo has knocked off Google’s innovations yet again to create WebRank. WebRank is so overlooked that its Wikipedia article looks like this. In fact, I seriously doubt that Yahoo WebRank is still included in the latest releases of Yahoo Toolbar, although I could be wrong. At any rate, the lesson is that Yahoo’s ranking of page popularity isn’t related to PageRank at all- Yahoo has it’s own methods of weighing the importance of a webpage to the Internet.
6. Like Google, Yahoo maintains a blog aimed at webmasters.
Yahoo shoots some search engine optimization advice to webmasters too on the Yahoo Search Blog. It isn’t as well known (or as well loved) as the Google Webmaster Central Blog, but I would strongly recommend sucking down the RSS feed for the site "to keep abreast with the second best in the search engine contest".
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Given the current growth of rich media advertisements and wireless enable handheld computing platforms, it is inevitable that rich media will crossover onto the mobile web within the next few years on a continuing widening scale. Mobile computing is just beginning to come of age, and as Internet enabled handheld devices are gaining widespread adoption, there are several questions the online marketing community must answer concerning integrating interactive advertisement models into the mobile world. To that extent, this analysis will examine the challenges presented to online advertisers for deploying Flash-based rich media advertisements in a mobile environment, including:
- Given the existing state of mobile technology, is deploying rich media in a mobile environment possible? If not possible, what will it take to integrate rich media into mobile environments?
- What are the benefits to advertisers and users for introducing rich media advertisements onto the mobile web?
- What impact will rich media have on the overall user experience for mobile users?
- What guidelines should e-commerce managers use to decide if rich media campaigns in mobile platforms are the right strategy for their website?
As recently as a decade ago, the Internet was viewed largely as a proving ground for new technologies and experimental business models. Most websites were created using simple HTML and contained simple image ads (if at all), Internet Explorer was gaining market share from Netscape in what is referred to as the Browser Wars, and the term mobile computing described the ability for a laptop to connect to the web via an AOL dial-up connection.
Ten years later, the promises of the Internet’s vast fertility to enable business transactions, facilitate interactions, entertain, and distribute information has only been partially understood, yet for the moment seems to be boundless. With the viability of conducting business on the web insured, the websites of companies are now recognized as commercial properties, and the Internet as a whole has become a medium for marketing and advertising functions. According to this article, total online ad spending has grown from $8.1 billion in 2000 to $18.5 billion per year in 2008, with projections expected to increase $44.5 billion over the next 5 years. The regular use of the Internet by Americans has also increased over the years and for many people is an integral part of work and personal life.
Websites and online advertisements are no longer characterized by technological homogeneity either. Websites are frequently built using a combination of high-level programming languages that enable a site to interact with the user. Likewise, online advertising platforms have leveraged new web technologies, such as Flash, to create highly engaging advertising pieces. The phrase “rich media advertising” broadly describes digital advertising media that is characterized by motion and interactivity.
As the Internet distinguished itself as both a destination for users and as a commercially viable medium, along came the development of powerful Web-enabled handheld devices, networking protocols, and wireless technologies that connect users to the web when away from the personal computer. The definition of mobile computing has evolved accordingly to encompass the features of the present handheld computing environment (Turban, Efraim, et al. Electronic Commerce 2006: A Managerial Perspective). The revised definition of mobile computing is nearly exclusive of laptop computers and refers to the use of handheld devices, such as smart phones and PDA’s that permit access to information, application and tools. Internet connectivity has become a critical feature of mobile devices and microbrowsers, or mobile browsers, scale websites down to size for viewing on a smaller screen so that the user can do a range of activities from finding the closest restaurant to conducting m-commerce transactions. Presently, 20% or 34.6 million Americans regularly access the mobile web according to an Informationweek report. However, the US is not the worldwide leader of mobile Internet users; this distinction belongs to Italy.
One of the best descriptions of rich media comes from ClickZ columnist and CEO of WebAdvantage Holland Thomases who describes it’s usefulness as:
“Rich media is the use of interactivity or multimedia to give an enhanced experience to a web user. When it’s used in advertising, it’s done so to attract attention, stand out among the clutter of ads and copy, or shake someone out of their "banner blindness," a term that’s been used to describe the general ignoring of all banner ads. Although we’re in a time when a lot of online marketing buzz focuses on simple text ads or search engine listings, rich media is still a sound piece of the Internet advertising puzzle. (http://www.webadvantage.net/tip_archive.cfm?tip_id=427&a=1)”
To complement Thomases thoughts, it should be noted that interactive media has strong brand enhancing and traffic-driving abilities for online properties. Another factor encouraging the spread of interactive media onto mobile platforms is that streaming videos are quickly becoming part of the handheld interactive experience.
Naturally, some rich media advertising units are more readily integrated into a mobile website than others. For example, Flash-based banner style graphics, interstitial ads (the display of a page of ads before the requested content), video ads and map-based ads will probably be the first generation to transition to the small screen. Ads that request high amounts of interactivity from the user, such as Flash games or gadget ads, may see their mobile debut postponed until hardware, software and compression technology catches up.
Advertisements in Mobile Environments Today
One of the most popular components of non-Flash rich media in mobile has proven to be Google’s Mobile Maps application. Users with capable smartphones and Internet access through either wireless or 3G can access Google Local (also known as Google Maps) on the go. Incorporated into Google Local is a local search application, allowing users to perform searches for businesses and services within specific areas. As a result, Google Local is rapidly becoming a powerful rich media advertisement channel on mobile devices. With both paid and free listings incorporated into the map application, businesses with physical locations – e.g. restaurants, service locations, shops, etc. – can directly target users in close physical proximity to their stores. Not only can business advertise their locations and services, they customers are provided with maps and directions to their locations.
The dominant ad format on the mobile web today are text messaging advertising, and paid text links and image ads placed on websites intentionally designed to be viewed by smart phones. This observation parallels the adoption of the types of media used in the early days of Internet advertising.
Requirements for Deployment
I am of the opinion that there are three conditions that must exist before for rich media advertisements can be deployed on a large scale into the mobile web community. These conditions address hardware requirements, software requirements, and bandwidth requirements.
Hardware requirements
The first requirement is that it must be technological feasible from a hardware perspective. Rich media is intrinsically interactive, and interactivity can decrease device performance because of the need for greater processing time. Today, Flash powers much of the rich media on the Internet, including interactive games and streaming videos. Many contemporary desktop systems in use can execute Flash without sacrificing performance. However, there was a time when many hardware systems could not execute Flash in combination with other processes without slowing the entire machine down. An extreme example of deployment of Flash technology that preceded the widespread adoption of the hardware required to support it is the case of Boo.com in 1999. Boo.com was a virtual clothing store that featured a 3-dimensional shopping assistant avatar. The site relied heavily on the use of Flash and JavaScript to produce the interactive components of the shopping assistant. In 1999, many computers simply lacked the processing power to execute these client-side languages, and in a pre-broadband, 56k dial-up modem era the size of the site required the shopper to wait several minutes for a page to download. In mid-2000, Boo.com closed down and is remember as a casualty of the dot-com bust.
Mobile computing devices are designed to model the capabilities of personal computers to allow the user to perform some tasks while away from the home or office, but not all duties. Consumer-orientated mobile device design is a compromise between portability and functionality. Mobile computing hardware usually has only a fraction of the processing power of comparable parts for a personal computer. For example, the Apple iPhone, is performance-wise one of the higher-end web-enabled devices available on the US market. The iPhone has a clocked processor speed of 620 mhz and between 4 – 8 gigabytes of memory depending on the model. These specifications are equivalent to the processing power of an average desktop PC on the market between the years 1999 - 2002. Indeed, a personal computer from 1999 may have some difficulty keeping pace with many of the software applications of today. The point is that frequently special web technologies or modified versions of existing web technologies must be developed to accommodate current handheld computing capabilities; seldom can core features of the desktop Internet experience be seamlessly transitioned on to mobile platforms.
Software Requirements
On the software front, developers are trying to refit the existing applications and programming languages of rich media advertisement on the Internet to create a mobile web experience. Adobe, the maker of the Flash browser plug-in and several Flash development applications, has created a scaled down version designed specifically for mobile environments called Flash Lite. Although it has been modified for use by handhelds and microbrowsers, Flash Lite supports user interactivity, streaming video, and can play much of the Flash media found online. Although, Flash Lite has not been adopted by the majority of mobile users, several handheld manufacturers such as Nokia have began releasing units pre-installed with Flash Lite.
In February 2007, another barrier was removed bringing the deployment of Flash media advertising one step closer to fruition. On2 Technologies, a video compression technology partner with Adobe, announced that the new Flash development kit will be able to transcode streaming videos to mobile phones using an engine called Felix Engine 3GPP. On2 Technologies compression algorithms essentially opens the door for marketers to create a Flash-based online video advertising experience for consumers. The impact of this new development was described in On2 Technologies’s press release:
"For the first time, web content can easily be made available for mobile services," said Bill Joll, president and CEO of On2 Technologies. "On2 VP6 based Flash video has taken the Internet world by storm with the creation of tremendous amounts of new content, but that content was not available on mobile devices until now. The new Flix Engine 3GPP changes that."
As a side note, JavaScript is another programming language that is being integrated into the newest generation of mobile browsers. While JavaScript can animate objects in a browser and supports user interactivity, rich media ads developed by combining HTML/DHTML elements, graphics and JavaScript are approaching extinction and there is no reason to expect rich media of these types to cross over into the mobile community.
Bandwidth Requirements
The third consideration is bandwidth capabilities. To properly conduct "m-marketing", it is necessary to have sufficient bandwidth to transmit the ingredients of interactive marketing - text, picture, voice video, or multimedia - to the user’s device. The 3G communication technology, the abundance of wifi access points, and other wireless data connection networks support the ability to send data back and forth from client to server (Turban, Efraim, et al. Electronic Commerce 2006: A Managerial Perspective).
Conclusion
But the real question is - how will customers react to interactive ads? Action Engine CEO, Scott Silk believes the mobile market must overcome several hurdles before accepting rich media ad formats:
“1. Perceived cost - What is this advertisement costing me?
First, subscribers do not want to feel like they are paying for mobile advertising.
2. Personal relevance - What does this advertisement mean to me?
Second, subscribers do not want non-relevant advertisement — and in most cases, neither do the advertisers.
3. Ease of use - Is this mobile advertisement degrading my user experience?
Third, more subscribers avoid data services because they are too difficult to access and operate than because of cost. (http://www.actionengine.com/images/events/mobileadvertising/advertising.html)"
There are indeed other issues that will arise from the foreseeable deployment of rich media advertisements aimed at handheld users that e-marketers must address. One example is how to fully capitalize on a mobile user that has clicked a multimedia advertisement and has general interest in the product or service offered. In this example, depending on the purpose of the website, an “interest form completion” or website registration may be the optimal conversion mode of the marketers, but not for the user who is restricted to an abbreviated keyboard and smaller screen.
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When I first launched this blog way back in October of 2007, I used to check my Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Feedburner statistics excessively (even though the three services only update every 24 hours). A little time has passed and I’ve settle into some sort of groove, so I don’t pull the metrics for my site that crazily anymore.
This week, however, as I was scanning my Google Analytics, I noticed a high volume of search traffic coming in through an article I wrote called How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in September 2006. It was the first meaningful article I really published on this blog, and one reader was so impressed by it that they kindly submitted it to Digg.com on my behalf (BIG THANKS!). Like any good blog-keeper, I proceeded to investigate why I was getting so much search engine referred traffic to this page. Well… it turns out that Google ranks this particular article #1 for the phrase "Organic CTR". All things considered, that’s quite an endorsement from the world’s busiest search engine. Although there are a few updates I will make to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the future, the basic methodology still holds up despite the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool being put out to pasture.
Because this post is the second most popular entry point on my site next to the homepage, I wanted get a better idea of just how well this article was ranking on Google. To determine this, I pulled the top referring search terms for this posting from my Google Analytics and did a quick search engine ranking report to determine the article’s depth among Google’s results. The table below summarizes my findings:
Top Referring Keyword for
How to Estimate the Organic CTR for Your Website |
Google Ranking (as of 3/2/08) |
| organic ctr |
1 |
| calculating organic ctr |
1 |
| estimate organic impressions |
1 |
| organic ctr google |
2 |
| allintext:estimated impression estimated clicks |
3 |
| estimate organic keyword stats |
3
|
|
estimating ctr
|
5 |
| ctr estimating |
6 |
| estimate ctr |
13 |
| estimate number of searches google |
27 |
As you can see, this article ranks highly for a variety of variations and concatenations relating to the valuable terms "organic ctr". I believe the fact that folks are using these keywords to find my blog reflect that my site is doing decent job in attracting the search marketing crowd. In the end, I just think it’s all just pretty cool. I plan to write an update to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned!
SEO Store Grand Opening. Check it out!
Rave. For a certain segment of the in-home entertainment market, myself included, Netflix is reaching cable killer status. I’ve had a growing dissatisfaction with cable and other such services for some time simply because their offerings do not fit my viewing needs. In short, I find that cable is plagued by high monthly rates, monopolistic-like market dominance in the form of Comcast (which brings with it a whole other set of gripes), and on-demand programming choices of little interest to me. Plus, cable is the avenue of the networks, and unless you have an insatiable desire for reality shows, music videos, and Law and Order reruns, then you’re left asking yourself "What about the stuff I want to see?"
