Online Marketing Articles by Web Profits

Wired Magazine

Although my entire life is spent in front of the laptop, analysing statistics, managing campaigns, researching competitors, launching new businesses… I also like to relax with a good magazine.

Up until recently I couldn’t find a magazine that spoke to my interests, to my needs… with news that impacted me and my clients directly.

Whenever I walked past a newsagency I would walk inside and review the computer section. Mostly I would find magazines about computers or video games, but there wasn’t a magazine targeted to those in the online space… a magazine which discussed relevant topics to my industry and the Internet as a whole.

Just a few weeks ago, on a weekend away with my fiancee I stumbled across a magazine call Wired. It was perfect. Every single page contained something interesting to me, and the articles discussed topics like YouTube, MySpace, Spyware, Google and a number of other very relevant (and exciting) articles.

To the average person these topics may seem boring, but to an online marketer this magazine is gold.

I highly recommend anybody interested in keeping up to date with new developments and discussions in the Internet marketing world to check out Wired magazine. You won’t be disappointed.

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Google Launches Docs and Spreadsheets

Google has recently launched its second step in competing against Microsoft for its Office products.

Earlier in the year Google Spreadsheets was launched, making available spreadsheet functionality which was only available to Microsoft Excel users in the past.

Recently, Google Docs was launched to compete against the Microsoft Word application.

The service provided by Google is free… but as it is still very early on the functionality is not as good as the Microsoft products. But there are some benefits.

In the words of Google:

“With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can:

- Use our online editor to format documents, spell-check and more
- Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text
- Download documents to your desktop as Word, PDF and more
- View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version

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Google Buys YouTube for US$1.65 Billion

Google has announced today that it will acquire the video sharing giant YouTube for $1.65 billion dollars in stock.

In the words of Google CEO, Eric Schmidt…

“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful… our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on YouTube and across the Internet through websites, blogs, and e-mail. YouTube currently delivers more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily and it has quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment.

Following the sale of MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for US$580 million, YouTube is yet another story of a company starting out with an idea and in less than 2 years selling out for megabucks.

The Dot-Mobi Domain Name Rush

A new type of domain is currently available for registration… the DOT-MOBI, and many companies that profit from online marketing are rushing to secure their domain for the new advertising medium… the mobile phone.

This unique type of domain has been created for sites catering to mobile phones and other wireless devices.

So rather than seeing a condensed version of a particular website on your phone you can visit websites specifically built for mobile content devices.

Since the launch in August this year there has been a huge rush to secure dot-mobi domain names… registrations are now open to everybody.

Here are some interesting facts about the mobile content space…

- There are 4 times as many mobile phone users in the world as there are internet users

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Internet Advertising Hits Record Highs

The facts speak for themselves…

Internet advertising is really becoming the best method of advertising in the world.

In the first 6 months of 2006 internet advertising hit a record 8 billion dollars with the estimated expenditure for the full year of 2006 estimated at 15.7 billion dollars… according to a recent study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

… that’s the same value as the annual GDP of countries like Uruguay, Iceland, Panama and Yemen!

Search marketing has grown by a staggering 40% over the past 12 months proving that having an online presence is critical in achieving business success in the 21st century.

Is This The Beginning Of A New Era?

I was just reading in the USA Today about an issue in the United States congress between Internet content providers, such as Google and eBay, and phone and cable giants, such as AT&T and Verizon.

The phone companies are proposing to offer premium-priced delivery services to offset their multi-billion dollar investments in broadband. How this would work is that the phone companies would charge Internet content providers a ‘fee’ to provide faster services for website visitors.

The Internet content providers are arguing that if phone companies start charging extra for content delivery that it would create a ‘two-tiered’ Internet, with many upstarts being priced out of the market.

But what does this really mean?

Most Internet users have little or no patience when it comes to waiting for a page to load, especially if they have broadband. Any successful website owner knows the importance of having fast loading web pages.

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