Week of March 2, 2009

Yahoo Search Ads With Video & Images

Friday, March 6, 2009

Yahoo's latest move in its ongoing battle for the paid search leadership with Google is a new form of search that integrates images and video. Instead of the traditional paid search results returning simple text and links, the Yahoo results will include video and images. The move comes as Yahoo's traditional strength in display advertising has diminished as many advertisers switch from display to search advertising.

Google has opened a wide lead over Yahoo in paid search over the past few years. In the last 5 years, Yahoo's share has dropped from 13.8% to 10.5%, according to market research firm eMarketer. Meanwhile, Google has more than doubled its share, growing from 32.8% to 67.7% now.

iTunes Passes Another Test

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Apple just announced the new iTunes Pass in conjunction with the release of the new Depeche Mode album on April 21st. The iTunes Pass is a hybrid business model that combines elements of a subscription model with the traditional download-and-own-it model. The Depeche Mode version of the pass will cost $18.99, giving users immediate and automatic delivery of various content over a limited amount of time.

Users will get downloads of the album, videos, songs remixes and other selected content. The automatic delivery will be in effect for a specific period of time, after which the user will still own the content, but he/she must pay for any additional future content for that artist. The Depeche Mode model will cover a 15-week period of time surrounding the April 21st street date of their new album

New Online Music-Based Video Game

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Video game maker Acclaim has just announced plans for its new Rockfree, a music-based game to compete with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but with a unique business model. Rockfree is a flash-powered, browser-based game that people can play with friends online. But instead of Acclaim creating a library of licensing tracks for use in the game, they are permitting users to upload any song they want to use.

The game will be free to play and users will be given 3 slots to put songs into. If they want more slots, they'll have to pay 99¢ per month per slot. Instead of paying a licensing fee per track, Acclaim intends to pay 20% of the revenues from these transactions to the publisher. Warner Music is already on board with the concept, but there's no word on where the other major stand.

LinkedIn Growing Fast

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

LinkedIn, the networking social network has seen phenomenal growth over the last few months. In fact, traffic at the site has more than doubled from November 2007 to January '09. In fact, the growth has been accelerating in the last few months. For example, the number of unique US visitors increased by 22% and total time on the site doubled from December 2008 to January 2009.

The reasons for growth include the general state of the economy, which makes networking a vital lifeline for those out of work or who feel they soon may be unemployed. Also technical improvements in the site, especially a new people search function, have led to the increased usage and time spent.

Flash Coming to Mobile...Except For iPhone

Monday, March 2, 2009

According to Techcrunch, Adobe plans to have a fully functional version of its popular Flash player ready for mobile by 2010. The bad news is that the iPhone will not be among them. Apple continues to see problems with Flash, in terms of both its business model and on the technical side. However, the new Flash 10.0 is being readied for use on Android, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile and the latest generation of Nokia smart phones.