The Carol Bartz Era is Over at Yahoo

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It wasn't all her fault, but Carol Bartz's resignation as CEO of Yahoo likely will be remembered as the final straw that broke the back of the once-great Internet company. Bartz oversaw the deal that essentially gifted Yahoo's search revenue stream to Microsoft and abandoned future search ambitions by allowing its engine to be powered by Bing. Bartz was dealt a really difficult hand by the former custodians of Yahoo but her direction for the company seemed flawed from the start. From all of her rhetoric, it was clear from the outset that she did not hold search as a particularly important aspect of Yahoo's holdings and she doubled down on display advertising efforts. In my opinion, this was a big mistake.

When Bartz took over, people in my business talked about Google, Yahoo and Microsoft--in that order--when discussing the search landscape. Google was the juggernaut but Yahoo was the company that first began to invest in building out a revenue model to accompany their popular search engine. Yahoo purchased Overture, they rebranded it, they relaunched it, they tailored it, they supported it and, ultimately, under Bartz's stewardship, they discarded it. Now, when people talk about search, they mention Google and Bing; Yahoo very justly doesn't enter the conversation. It's a shame that Yahoo has suffered this fate when they were once so innovative or, at least, so good at recognizing innovative companies to acquire and paths to pursue. 

There is clearly room for two or more players in the field of search; it's sad that Yahoo lost its footing in that field without even putting up a fight. I wish the best of luck to Bart, to the company that she's leaving and to the company that lands with. She's an extremely capable person by all accounts that just didn't have the right tools or ideas to save Yahoo. I hope that this isn't the last we'll hear from Yahoo but it's going to be even tougher for Bartz's successor to turn the company around than it was for her. [Forbes]

Wpromote's SEO Audit Tool

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If anyone out there has an interest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), please go check out Wpromote's new, free SEO audit tool. I'm really proud of all the people who helped create this tool and I hope that people will find it useful when trying to figure out where their websites stand in the eyes of the search engines. The tool has been honed for months but I know that the SEO team at Wpromote would welcome suggestions. If you have any ideas as to what could be added to the tool, feel free to post a comment here or to email Wpromote directly at contact@wpromote.com. Thanks!

Three Things for a Thursday

1) First of all, I recently joined Google+. If you're wondering what Google+ is, I will refer you to the incredibly witty webcomic, xkcd, which sums it up perfectly:

As soon as I'm allowed to invite people, I'll do my best to get my friends on. For now, it's a little lonely on Google+ but I must say, the Circles feature is really cool. Facebook, take a note!

2) Second of all, I saw this ad on Reddit today wherein a girl's boyfriend charms everyone at the table. I have to admit, I found myself charmed as well! See if it has the same effect on you!

Good advertising... it really makes you hate bad advertising, doesn't it? I'm looking at you, Ed-u-ca-tion Con-nec-tion!

3) Third of all, it's been over a month since I posted anything at all! I'm really slipping and Google seems to have noticed. MichaelBlock.org has fallen to a PR1! Oh, the shame! I've got to get back on the posting horse and ride. More posting will be coming more often, whether you like it or not!

PS: I'm totally ripping Petros & Money with the "Three Things Thursday" motif. Hope they don't mind!
PPS: If you didn't see my article on Google Search by Image in the Wpromote blog, please check it out.

Billboard advertising ain't dead

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How do you get people to advertise on a seemingly outdated medium like billboards? That's easy, send an ultimatum! In this case the ultimatum is a naked fat guy. If this ploy isn't effective at getting people to replace such a ghastly image with a nice, clean advertisement it's at least effective at being hilarious and producing some buzz. This is one of the reasons why advertising is so interesting. No medium of advertising should ever truly be considered "dead" as long as there are creative types who "get it" working at traditional marketing firms.

This set of billboards from the Netherlands is a perfect example of a billboard having far more reach than simply the highways and apartments that it overlooks. I would wager that this will have a greater effect in its life as a viral piece than as a physical piece in the real world. We've all seen sites dedicated to creative billboards; this just happens to be the funniest one that I've seen out of the lot that I can remember. Great job to the folks at Interbest for not only showing that billboard ads can be fun but that they can also be just as effective online as offline. [CreativeCriminals via Reddit]

Google Dance Infographic

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Kudos to the folks over at Level343 for putting together such a simple and informative infographic detailing the history of Google and its fickle algorithm. The "Google Dance" used to describe the shake up of the search results caused by tweets and adjustments to Google's search algorithm which is constantly being updated to improve results. This infographic makes the progression nice and easy to understand without being inundated with junky imagery. Great job!

Bing moves ahead of Yahoo for the first time ever

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"We're #2! We're #2!"

That's the chant coming out of Seattle or, at least, it should be. Bing is officially the second most popular search engine in the US, overtaking Yahoo according to a recent report from BusinessWire. This is big news for Microsoft, which has been pushing Bing through multi-multi-multi-million dollar ad campaigns since, well... forever. Of course, Bing overtaking Yahoo is actually something of a mixed blessing because both engines have been serving up Bing results (which also serves up Google results) for some time now. Still, congrats are in order for Bing. Hopefully, this accomplishment will cause Microsoft to take more interest in search and dedicate more resources to to improving adCenter, which still lags way behind AdWords in terms of usability, options and technology. Even if it results in Bing trying to innovate on the search end, that would be good news for consumers and haters of monopolies. 

Remember, even though Bing leaves a lot to be desired when compared to Google in many ways, it's still the only thing standing between Google and a near perfect monopoly of the US search market. And if you think Google is scary now, imagine Google without competition. On second thought, don't. Despite this news, the future is still very bright for Google. Unless Microsoft really pushes ingenuity with Bing on the user and advertiser side, you may only have to wait a few years before Google wins out for real.

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NY Times dedicates very little space to actual news

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Yesterday morning, Aaron Kronis, Wpromote's SEO Evangelist, sent me a fascinating article about JCPenney's rise and fall in the Google organic search results. I really suggest reading it if you have any interest in the dangers of black hat practices in search engine optimization. What struck me as most interesting, though, wasn't the article itself but the very limited amount of space that the NY Times dedicated to actual news. Check out the image above and refer to the key below to classify the delegation of space on the page:

Red = Ads
Orange = Internal linking
Blue = Social network linking
Purple = Absurdly giant image
Green = Actual news article

Using this image as a guide, it would seem that the NY Times dedicated less than 9% of the real estate on the page above the fold to the actual article that I was trying to read. This estimate is fairly generous, as my monitor is pretty darn big. According to Google's handy Browser Size tool, less than 10% of users would even be able to see the first line of text in the article without scrolling down.

I have no way of knowing how many people were as put off as I was by this–maybe that number is very small–but I can't imagine that presenting information in this confusing package is good for the user experience. I've been tired of all the junk on content sites for long enough that I've downloaded Readability, which presents that same article like this, and does so for free. I highly recommend that anyone interested in getting their news in a more legible, less busy package invest the zero dollars it costs to download Readability right away.

I have nothing against ads or optimizing a site as much to impress Google as the actual user. In fact, my livelihood depends on both. I do object, though, when design focuses solely on these two issues and ignores the user experience altogether. The most valuable asset that the NY Times has is the content generated by its reporters. To dedicate so much real estate to ancillary assets seems counterintuitive to me. Without knowing what the analytics account for the NY Times looks like, though, I can only speculate at whether this strategy is hurting or paying off. I just know that for my experience, I'm going to continue to actively remove all excess content through the use of applications like Readability. If more and more users agree with me, it could lower the page views per visit, decrease the interaction with ads and ultimately harm the NY Times in their ability to brand their content.

After all, everything looks the same on Readability. This writeup which I envisioned being a editorial on the JC Penney story ended up being an endorsement for a third party reading application. The more people who are turned off by the way the NY Times presents its content, the more difficult it will be for the NY Times to leverage that content and stay competitive in the increasingly digital world of reporting the news. 

Ben Crane: My new favorite golfer

Golf has a lot of obstacles to becoming a really popular sport. It's expensive (greens fees, lessons, clubs), courses don't often exist outside of exclusive neighborhoods, the scoring is esoteric, the lingo is strange and, for the most part, the golfers themselves seem to all be moulded from the same boring, vanilla-beige plaster. Not only are they all white guys but they're all boring white guys. 

Tiger Woods solved part of that issue for golf because the combination of being multi-racial and wildly talented made up for his boringness and broadened the viewing audience for golf. Then, um, he did some stuff and became somewhat less popular. 

Since then, it's been tough to figure out who to root for in golf. I always rooted for Tiger myself but now I feel slimy for doing so. Nobody else seems anywhere near as talented and if nobody has a particularly great personality, then why root for a boring loser when you can root for a boring winner? 

Enter Ben Crane. 

Ben Crane is, apparently, the coolest, funniest dude in sports that I've never really heard of before. It seems that in the vacuum created by Tiger's fall from grace, Ben and his people have launched an initiative to gain some fans for him through the magic of a series of legitimately hilarious videos. Well, he earned at least one fan; I'll give you a hint, his name is my name. Also, I'm him.

Check out Ben's site or YouTube page and try not to fall in love with this guy. Sure, he only has three PGA wins to date and has never finished better than 9th in a major championship, but he's my new favorite player! Go Ben, if your golf skills don't take the world by storm then your viral marketing acumen surely will!

Ron Jeremy Gets Hard

  

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And by "hard," I mean "hard liquor," of course. What did you think I meant?

I'm not sure exactly why Ron Jeremy thinks that people are interested in drinking a liquid with his face on it, but here it is, Ron de Jeremy Rum! "Ron" does means "rum" in Spanish, so, maybe the wordplay was just too good to pass up. I've seen worse marketing ideas.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I'm not big on rum; I feel like this kind of nonsense wouldn't fly in Scotland. But if the show Entourage can launch an actual tequila, Puff Daddy (excuse me, "Diddy Dirty Money") and Jay-Z can have competing brands of vodka and Ron Jeremy can put his mustachioed mug on a bottle of rum, then I'll just stick to Scotch, a-thank you very much! No offense to "The Hedgehog," of course, I just don't want him anywhere near my mouth. [Uncrate]

Yahoo's Loss is Facebook's Gain

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Every football-loving American knows that that the best platform for fantasy football is Yahoo's. If you disagree and you use NFL.com's or ESPN.com's platform for your fantasy football, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Yahoo's interface is easier, its iPhone app is better and the pages load faster and without noisy, auto-play ads. In order to use Yahoo's fantasy football vehicle, though, you have to have a Yahoo ID. Well, that may not be the case next football season.

AllThingsD reports that Yahoo will soon begin to allow users to log in using their Facebook and (gasp!) Google accounts. Gizmodo's take on the situation is that Yahoo is simply giving up, waving the white flag in a similar manner that MySpace did years ago. Yahoo was long considered one of the biggest, strongest, most important and most relevant Internet companies in the world. It was one of the few companies to survive the Dot-Com Bubble of the late 90s and was still going strong years later. In the past few years, though, Google's dominance of the search space, Facebook's dominance of the social space and Microsoft's annexation of Yahoo's paid search platform left very little for Yahoo to capitalize on aside from their display network (which has also lost ground to Google's). The writing has been on the wall for some time and it seems that Yahoo's best days are officially in the rear-view mirror.

In my opinion, the big news isn't Yahoo's retreat; that was a long time coming. It's not even that Yahoo will allow accounts from its long time nemesis, Google, to log in, even if that does seem extraordinarily strange. The most interesting news is that Facebook logins will be able to be used to access Yahoo properties which will include recreational activities like fantasy football and more compulsory items like Yahoo email. Keep in mind that if you're using Facebook to log in to anything, that means that Facebook knows who you are while you're using what you're logged in to.

Facebook already knows so much about you and, compared to Google, Microsoft and other ad delivery systems, it knows much, much more. Think about it, much fewer people have a Google profile than a Facebook profile; those that have both generally reveal much more about themselves in the latter compared to the former. Of course, it's easier for Facebook to know who you are if you're logged in to Facebook. Many of us log out as soon as we're done but as Facebook accounts become increasingly available as means of logging into other sites (in this case, Yahoo) Facebook's cache of knowledge becomes more and more valuable. Wpromote's CEO, Michael Mothner has suggested that with this knowledge, Facebook could engage in display advertising in direct competition with Google. Whereas Google focuses ads based on where you are, Facebook could focus ads based on who you are. Whereas Google might populate clothing ads on a fashion blog or concert ticket ads on a music site, Facebook might know that you posted an update saying that you love the Lakers, and post ads related to Laker tickets and merchandise as a result. 

If Mothner's theory is correct, then Facebook could very quickly dominate the display advertising landscape. If Facebook ads are better ads and better ads are more valuable, then it's an easy decision for website owners to choose to run ads powered by Facebook over ads powered by Google. Yahoo's decision to allow people to log in using their Facebook accounts could be a major step in the direction of display advertising dominance for Facebook. 

So, when you're deciding on whether to start Rashard Mendenhall or Peyton Hillis next year, don't be surprised if the ads on the page are eerily similar to things you've been thinking about buying... especially if you've mentioned it on Facebook!