I meant to post about this earlier, but remember way back when on Friday night when, during the presidential debate, John McCain mentioned a study costing taxpayers $3 million to study bear DNA as an example of pork-barrel spending? “I don’t know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3 million of our taxpayers’ money. And it has got to be brought under control,” he quipped.
The clock is ticking on the great Google-Yahoo search union of 2008, yet new hurdles keep rising up. The latest challenge: Canada’s Department of Justice has retained a big name litigator, David Kent, to look into the deal’s underpinnings.
Updated: The curtain went up last night on MySpace Music, a joint venture with major labels and indie distributor the Orchard to provide free ad-supported music streaming.
Yahoo’s taking it from all sides over its impending search ad partnership with Google. The latest group to complain is The World Federation of Advertisers, which has requested that the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition block the deal. The organization of organizations believes it will be a detriment to competition and increase ad prices worldwide.
Congratulations are in order for my colleagues over at the event programming team at Search Engine Strategies (SES) and Search Engine Watch who’ve been promoted.
Since launching six months ago, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said the online video site has picked up 90 advertisers.
The site, a joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox Corp., has also partnered with 90 content providers.
SearchAnyway.com’s blog is a really good place to find out more about PPC arbitrage. Too many people think of only Google AdSense arbitrage when Google is clearly making it hard for this to work on their search engine. Some people are making a good living from SearchAnyway and it could be worth a look because they are more transparent than Google - At least we know how much they plan to pay us per click unlike Google.
Here’s a video of Sanjay, who works for SearchAnyway, on the best sources of PPC arbitrage traffic.
Best Buy has agreed to buy Napster, partly for the chance to sell tech products to its user base.
Forget about the selling just 20% of your products that bring in 80% of your sales. Keep selling the other 80% of your products because they still can make a lot of money is what Chris Anderson is trying to tell you in his book, The Long Tail.
I should have read this book earlier. If you haven’t, please check out my review of The Long Tail to see what you have been missing.
“The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” has been out since 2006 and there is even a new revised version that was released some time this year. I should have read it earlier but I didn’t think I needed it 2 years ago.
The long tail approach to search engine optimization refers to the targeting of lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases in larger numbers instead of trying to target higher traffic and high demand keyword phrases. High traffic and high demand keyword phrases are scarce while the lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases are abundant.
Outside of the SEO context, the long tail refers to this:
Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, goes on to describe how online businesses like Apple’s iTunes MP3 music store and Amazon.com go about stocking up hundreds of thousands of titles, which helps to sell a lot of the less popular products in addition to the hit titles.
Forget about the 80/20 rule when it comes to product variety and profitability. Chris advocates that you carry a wide variety of products for the sake of allowing different types of customers to buy them instead of dumping 80% of your product line for 20% of your products that sells really well. It does not matter if they sell slowly as long as it sells.
I personally find this book rather long-winded because there are way too many examples and they seem to be repetitious. It seems like applying this information for businesses with physical products would be a huge challenge because of the limited shelf space they have. Not everyone will be able to have big warehouses and lots of space to stock up on a wide variety of products.
Chris recommends using “virtual inventory” by making a deal with your supplier to supply you with a product only when it sells. I am sceptical about this idea but I know it works for Amazon. But what about the small companies?
Overall, I like this idea of not forsaking the long tail end of products that you could potentially sell to your target market. This long tail idea seems to work perfectly for digital products. However, I do have some concerns about the feasibility of some of the author’s ideas on how to implement them in businesses that sell real physical products.