The Pope, Sarah Silverman and another Google Ads Fail October 16, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Advertising, Offbeat, video.Tags: Google, YouTube
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“Sell The Vatican, Feed The World,” comedian Sarah Silverman urges in a three minute Papal pounding routine currently doing good business on YouTube.
It’s not for the easily offended, replete with the f-word and drawings of male-genitalia. And it’s unlikely to go down a storm in the Catholic community.
“Any involvement in the holocaust, bygone,” she assures the current Pope as part of her would-be deal making. For a finishing gambit she tells him: “If you sell the Vatican to feed the world you will get crazy pussy.”
So when the in-vision contextual adverts include ‘Book Vatican tours’ and ‘Papal audience’ you’ve got to put it down as another Google Ads fail.
Related:
- Google Ads. FAIL
Telegraph And Mail Go Troughing With The Micro Pigs October 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers, Search.Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Google
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Further evidence that the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail are print media’s most aggressive online operators. And their latest success is all down to eight inches of bacon-busting micro pig.
Micro pigs are, apparently, the latest celebrity accessory and many of your fellow surfers have been searching for news and information about these must-have pets.
So much so that according to Hitwise, ‘micro pigs’ was the fastest moving search term in the UK last week.
Never ones to miss an opportunity, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph were quick out of the traps (the pen?) with some puff on the pigs.
And it’s worked a treat. As Robin Goad points out today, the Daily Mail has been the grateful recipient of one in four clicks from ‘micro pig’ search results. The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, got a very handy 13 per cent of downstream traffic.
And just like the little pigs, all the search traffic is organic.
Related:
- Is This The Ultimate Daily Mail Headline?
- Telegraph PM, Premature RIP For DIY PDF?
Cervical Cancer Vaccine Scaremongering Pits Google Against The Blogosphere October 2, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Search.Tags: Crowdsourcing, Google, Google News, NHS
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Fellow blogger Malcolm Coles is conducting a medical experiment, but you’re more likely to see the results in New Media Age than The Lancet.
Following death this week of a teenage girl moments after she had been immunized against cervical cancer, Coles noted how many of the papers had failed to offer a balanced account of events, implying that the vaccination and the death were linked when at best there was no proof.
As we now know, the tragic death was later attributed to an unrelated tumour. Too late for the papers – and too late for the aggregator of the newspapers, Google.
Of course Google didn’t author any of these stories but it does disseminate – and Coles wants those stories off the top of search and Google News results pages.
The solution?
He wants as many bloggers as possible to post about the jab, and rather than link to some scurrilous story, they should instead link to this NHS cervical cancer vaccine page.
The more inbound links, the higher the page rank, the more likely that particular NHS page is to appear on page one of Google.
The net result (no pun intended) is that concerned parents scouring the internet for information will more likely see the informed advice.
As I blog, the NHS cervical cancer vaccine page (oops, I’ve linked to it again), has yet to make Google page one but an NHS Q&A has. And someone – the Department of Health presumably - has bought a sponsored ad.
But none of this should stop the experiment. Go link…
Related:
- Google Fast Flip Verdict – Good News For Users, Bad News For Newspapers
- Google Ads. FAIL
- BBC Goes Crowdsourcing To Save The NHS
Google Fast Flip Verdict – Good News For Users, Bad News For Newspapers September 15, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers, Search.Tags: Google, Google News
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So long Google News and thanks for all the traffic.
Google Fast Flip may still be in the labs but the search giant’s latest efforts should give some in the newspaper industry nightmares.
First things first, it is a pretty nice concept (if far from new) and it offers a decent user experience. Search a news event – Kim Clijsters US Open win for example - and Google Fast Flip will return results in all their visual glory by rendering the look and feel of the host website.
You can browse from one page to the next by clicking backwards and forwards on the blue arrows. And if you want to visit the site in question simply click on the image.
Google is in no doubt why you’ll want to use it:
In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.
There’s also a promise of a revenue share for publishers who sign up but here’s where it starts to unravel for a news industry increasingly fretful about generating revenue online.
Paul Bradshaw, writing on the Online Journalism Blog, is in no doubt that this is a bad move for publishers and the only motivation to sign up is “blind panic”. He notes:
Of course, by hosting screenshots Google are eating into one of the key metrics that publishers use to sell advertising: the time a user spends on your site. And given that many readers don’t read beyond the first few pars, there’s a good chance it will eat into the numbers clicking through to the actual page at all.
The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond nicely satirises the move in his Fake Eric Schmidt blog this morning. Adopting the potty-mouth of Google’s (fake) CEO, he writes:
And here’s the part you ——— will love: we’ll share the revenue with you. Of course the ads will be ours, not yours. Oh, and Fast Flip shows enough of the article that readers will decide not to click through and read your pages at all. But you’ll thank us for it because we’ve saved your business model. Happy now bitches?
Related:
- Top 10 News Aggregators In The UK
- What Would Google Do? Fail Quietly.
- ‘I Consider Google News A Gift, Newspapers Consider It Theft.’
Lehman Collapse Showed Power Of Print September 15, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Newspapers.Tags: BBC, Daily Telegraph, Google
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A couple of years ago the BBC revamped its news website so when a major story came along it could push aside all the detritus and devote the top of the page to a single story – larger headline font and bigger image.
It was an admission of sorts that template-driven websites were all very well but come a big event (think 7/7, 9/11, Blair’s resignation etc) there was a need to make a visual impact.
Implicit is the power of print. Despite the onward rush of digital, no where is a splash quite as effective than on the front page of a newspaper.
The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Lehman Brothers’ collapse last September is a vivid reminder of that. Appropriate then that one year on Google has unveiled Fast Flip, digital’s latest attempt to ape that power.
Related:
- News websites 1990s-style
- What’s Wrong With This Telegraph Front Page?
- The Express Fiddles While The Mail Earns
Google Ads. FAIL September 14, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Advertising, Offbeat.Tags: Google
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Great spot by Martin Belam, aka currybetdotnet. If you’re inclined to visit the forum of the English Defence League (‘Peacefully Protesting Against Militant Islam’), you are likely to be greeted by this advert:
The introductory blurb to the forum is duly reassuring:
The EDL will not tolerate any racist or Islamaphobic behaviour on this forum. We are against Islamic Extremists and all that they stand for, but do not want innocent Muslims being victimised or abused.
So that’s okay then, and presumably that passing reference to “innocent Muslims” was enough for Google to serve an ad for Muslima.com, ‘The International Muslim Matimonial Site!’
I wonder whether any EDL members will be tempted to click through.
Related:
- Fox News Anchor To Rupert Murdoch: ‘Mr Chairman Sir, Why Are You So Great?’
- What’s Wrong With This Telegraph Front Page?
- One Of The Best Photo Captions Ever
Which Is The Second Largest Search Site After Google? (Clue: It’s Not Yahoo!) August 13, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Search.Tags: Dailymotion, Google, Vimeo, Yahoo!, YouTube
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And for those who are thinking quizically, “It can’t be Microsoft Bing, can it?” you’re right, it can’t be.
The truth is that the biggest search rival to Google is … Google. In the guise of YouTube, that is.
Of course YouTube isn’t a search engine - it doesn’t bring back results from the web at large. Nevertheless, the video sharing site logs more searches per month than Yahoo!
This may be obvious to some of you but it was only when reading the recently published Sticks & Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time and Lost in a Click by Larry Weber (he of PR behemoth Weber Shandwick) that the point struck home.
In the book, Weber cites ComScore numbers. And this is what he found:
- Google logs 7.6bn searches per month
- YouTube logs 2.6bn
- Yahoo! logs 2.4bn
(Incidentally, MySpace and Facebook log 600m and 200m respectively.)
As Weber notes:
Considering that YouTube went live … in February 2005, it’s achieved an incredible record of growth in a very short time.
But in a couple of respects the numbers are worrying. First, they suggest that nobody does video searching well. Instead people are going to the source.
Second, this volume of search logs is indicative of YouTube’s quasi-monopoly of web video.
Of course it has competitors and some other video sharing sites, notably Dailymotion, have significant market share while others, like Vimeo, are growing fast.
But YouTube remains the go-to site for video – and it has morphed into a video search engine/destination in one.
Putting The Guardian Into The MediaGuardian 100 July 13, 2009
Posted by jonbernstein in Uncategorized.Tags: Apple, Daily Telegraph, Facebook, Google, Guido Fawkes, Huffington Post, Hulu, Microsoft, Moo.com, Spotify, The Guardian, Twitter
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So to the annual MediaGuardian 100. I guess the clue is in the name. The paper likes to slice and dice entrants in its power list – under 40s, top 10 fallers, top 10 women, you know the kind of thing.
How’s this for size?
1. Carolyn McCall, chief executive, Guardian Media Group
2. Alan Rushbridger, editor, the Guardian
3. Stephen Fry, presenter, writer, actor (and former Guardian Weekend magazine columnist)
4. David Mitchell, actor, writer, presenter (and current Observer columnist)
5. Armando Iannucci, writer, director, producer, performer (and former Observer columnist)
6. Emily Bell, director of digital content, Guardian News & Media
At least they had the good grace to put Will Lewis, editor-in-chief of the paper responsible for the biggest newspaper story of the year, at number 10, a full 25 places above Carolyn McCall.
Elsewhere, here’s one for the digerati – the Top 10 Purely Digital:
1. Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google
2. Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple
3. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft
4. Evan Williams, Twitter
5. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
6. Jason Kilar, Hulu
7. Daniel Ek, Spotify
8. Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post
9. Paul Staines, Guido Fawkes blog
10. Richard Moross, moo.com
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