Internet Marketing Weekly News Update #032 January 27, 2010

Social media study shows brand "friendships" are about more than money.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa found that people who register as "friends" of brands on social media sites want to learn about special deals, but they also want more qualitative benefits. Especially among heavy social media users, there is a desire to learn more about a company and its products, and even to be entertained by brand content.

Baby boomers are catching up with TV/Internet convergence.

Internet usage rates among baby boomers, already over 70%, continue to grow. Meanwhile boomers are showing increasing interest in connecting their televisions to the Interent. The percentage of boomers expressing interest in doing that has crossed the 50% mark in recent years, and is catching up with the percentage of younger people expressing that interest.

Google founders plan to reduce holdings, but not their hold on the company.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have revealed plans to each sell five million shares of their holdings in the company. Although this would take the pair's voting rights down to 48% of the company's total, given the 10% of voting rights held by CEO Eric E. Schmidt and the difficulty of organizing near-unanimous dissent among other shareholders, the founders should retain a tight grip on the company.

Search activity continued staggering growth rate in 2009.

According to comScore, global search activity grew by 46% year-over-year in December of 2009, with over 131 billion searches conducted during the month. The U.S. led the way with 22.7 billion searches, followed by China with 13.3 billion, Japan with 9.2 billion, and the United Kingdom with 6.2 billion.

Fueled by online advertising, Google shows strong earnings growth in the 4th quarter of 2009.

It may be a shaky economic recovery for some, but not for Google. Google's quarterly earnings neared $2 billion, as revenues were up by 17% and earnings were up by 10%. This was Google's first double-digit earnings growth since the recession began.

Retailers continue to ramp up e-mails.

Marketing e-mails by top online retailers jumped by 12% in 2009. Volume increases over 2008 levels were evident throughout the year, with the biggest rate of increase occurring in November as more retailers tried to get a jump on the holiday shopping season.

E-Bay posts above-expectations earnings thanks to PayPal growth.

E-Bay beat analyst earnings expectations for the fourth quarter of 2009, and the biggest hero was its PayPal division. PayPal, which represents over a third of E-Bay's revenue, saw its revenue grow by 28% in the fourth quarter.

Retailers spend more on search ads as customers become harder to reach.

A report on retail advertisers by Efficient Frontier showed that they spent 17% more on search advertising in the 4th quarter of 2009 than in the corresponding period of the previous year, even as consumers became more elusive. Click-through rates declined year-over-year, as did the average customer purchase size.

Apple's iPad format may give periodical ads a reprieve.

One possible outcome of the launch of Apple's iPad reading tablet is that it could revive the fading newspaper and magazine advertising model. By preserving more of a traditional periodical layout format than Amazon's Kindle, the iPad could be more conducive to placing ads alongside copy.

Yahoo looks to squeeze more profitability out of consumer data.

Despite some challenges resulting from the recession, Yahoo managed to eke out a profit in the fourth quarter of 2010. Still, that profit was below analyst expectations, and one of the ways Yahoo wants to respond is by making greater use of its consumer information to appeal to advertisers.

Social media boom to attract more marketing dollars.

Led by Facebook (in terms of total unique visitors) and Twitter (in terms of growth rate), social media web sites continued to post impressive visitor numbers in December of 2009. In response, some 66% of marketing professionals worldwide said they would invest in social media over the next year, according to a study by Alterian. 40% of those marketing professionals say social media will represent more than a fifth of their marketing budgets.