The Twitter story just keeps going from strength to strength, its popularity and industry influence gaining all the time. Until recently the big question was how the company would monetise. How would it turn profile, popularity and adoption into cash?
The numbers, both terms of users (Twitter just hit 58 million users worldwide) and in venture capital pumped into the company have been growing rapidly. After Twitter’s recent $1 billion valuation and having raised a total of $55 million so far in private venture capital, with a further $50 lined up, the company has gone a long way to justifying the optimism – it has got into bed with Microsoft AND Google. In the process, as well as securing its future – a future now predicted to be long term, highly influential and highly profitable – Twitter has shaken up the search industry by introducing the concept of real time search to the masses. Read the rest of this entry »

Content is king without doubt. Well-written, interesting and topical copy will act as a powerful search engine signpost, winning both high search engine placements and traffic. SEO (
Whilst email usage continues to grow,
In a recent report from Econsultancy and Lynchpin Analytics, 88% of companies are using Google Analytics to track the performance of their websites, compared to 66% last year. The survey of 800 predominantly UK-based companies found 23% were using Google’s free tool exclusively, compared to 14% a year ago, while 57% were using it in conjunction with another analytics platform. Excluding Google Analytics, Omniture was the most commonly used web analytics package with a 42% market share, followed by WebTrends.
Here’s an interesting fact straight off the interesting fact press. New statistics from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers claim that US Internet advertising revenues are down 5.3% from the same period last year. Not insubstantial at $10.9 billion for the first half of this year, the fact that the numbers are down at all in light of the dramatic drop in ad spending offline is somewhat of a surprise. A break down of the figures reveals that search makes up 47% of these revenues, followed by display/banner ads (22%), and classifieds (10%). Rich media and lead generation both contribute 7%.
It’s official – figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau recently reveal that spending on online advertising is now larger than spending on TV advertising. Few in SEO (search engine optimisation), web marketing and digital marketing agencies would express even the slightest surprise – all will tell you it was just a case of when not if.
Everyone loves the idea of being number one, to be ‘top of the charts’, to be looked up to. In today’s ultra competitive market place, where you’re now having to battle on a global basis, organisations will invest huge amounts of time and energy on SEO – on competing their way to the top of the search engines.
Do you use Google Chrome? Most people don’t (we’re talking less than 10%). Why should they? Yet. Few web users even look further than their pre-installed browser as their Internet interface. It’s historically been the Technorati, the aficionados, the web-heads who’ve felt the need to get promiscuous with their browsers, to seek the thrill of Firefox, the opulence of Opera or the cutting edge offer by Google Chrome.
Do you follow the SEO and Internet marketing news? If you keep an ear to the SEO ground then likely you will be aware of the fact that Bill Gates feels Microsoft missed a trick when it came to search. Gates has publicly admitted that the failure of Microsoft to acknowledge the potential of the Internet search market was one of the company’s biggest strategic errors.