The more you give away
Just discovered a new search engine just for us: Internet Marketing Resources: Featuring reviews and links to the Top Sites 40 Marketing Categories. Nice work, Larry.
No purchase required
I did some of the very first online sweepstakes (starting in 1990) so I’ve seen a bunch, but this is a pretty good story. Pepsi finds a loophole in the rules: Apple – Pepsi – Offical Rules
It turns out that you must offer a “no purchase necessary” option if you want to avoid running a lottery. The Pepsi iTunes promotion offers you a 1 in 3 chance of winning a 99 cent song for free. To get your entry without paying, you must send them a SASE envelope (that means 37 cents plus 37 cents) which means 74 cents for a 33% chance to win a buck.
Wonder how many they get?
The beginning of the end?
Mitch sent me to a movie, which sent me to: What a Crappy Present – CD Gift Advice, Parents and Kids.
What’s so remarkable about the site (nicely done, by the way) is how unremarkable the sentiment has become.
The thing about the Yellow Pages
Tim Manners talks about local search in today’s Reveries. On a lark, I went to Google Search: magic near 10706
and to Yahoo! Yellow Pages
to look up magic stores near my house. Why? Well, there’s a magic store in my little tiny town, which is weird.
Neither site found it.
Yahoo did, on the other hand, find an escort service and put it right up top. Sigh. Google wasn’t any better.
The Yellow Pages works for a few important reasons:
1. it’s usually a monopoly. Concentration of attention makes it worth advertising in.
2. The advertisers make the book. It’s so expensive, it’s not worth running a dumb ad. Besides, they have thousands of editors, working hard to make sure no one is cheating.
I have no doubt that one day the Yellow Pages will be digital. I just don’t think it’s going to be that easy to replace all those salespeople and all those dead treest.
Rank your teachers?
Imagine. Turning teacher ratings into a public discussion.
What’s it like to be Mrs. Peyser at the Brooklyn Tech High School? The lowest ranked teacher out of thousands of posted rankings at that school…
This isn’t the end, of course, just the beginning. Soon, there’s going to be a “Zagats” of just about everything. RateMyTeachers.com – BROOKLYN TECH HIGH SCHOOLTeacher Ratings
Do I care what my friends search for?
Pete Caputa sent me to eurekster search. I’m not sure this is the next google, but what’s fascinating is how obvious it makes it that there IS a next google. Somewhere.
26,000 Alcoholics a day
I guess this might be the future of the banner ad. MarketBanker – The Internet’s Ad Marketplace
Once you boil it down to a commodity (with a nearly infinite supply and a close to zero clickthrough rate) it becomes clear that making money on the web by selling banners is awfully difficult. (I wrote about this in 1998–when I claimed in Fast Company that banners were doomed by the year 2000. I was early, but not wrong).
The insight of Adwords and other keyword buys is this: These are relevant ads that Google (and others) have TRAINED the user that it’s useful to click on.
Google will fire you as a client if your ad doesn’t get good clicks. The reason is obvious: they only win when you leave the site, and ads where people don’t click don’t work.
I hope and wish that one day we’ll have a viable model for supporting content-based web sites with advertising. But it’s pretty obvious that today we don’t. (pintshop.com is the site the headline refers to).
You will like this site
a lot.
If I was willing to work a LOT harder, I’d do something like this.
If I wanted to work a little harder, I’d just rip it off.
Instead, I’ll just point to it. Have fun. Viral Marketing Blog
I love this statistic
For a whole host of reasons. For what it says about our culture, our technology and most of all, about how hard it is to get anyone to PAY ATTENTION!