With new evidence from Online Publishers’ Association showing branded environments are much more effective venues for online advertising than directories and portals, many directories come more into focus as SEO-only spends. How do you measure their effectiveness? What role do they play in your advertising or the advertising you recommend to clients? Has this changed in the last year or so? A lively discussion would be fun!
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Abigail Hamilton is a professional with over a decade of experience in small business, enterprise, and business-to-business design and marketing. She loves writing for the Web, creating and maintaining brand identities,…
Seattle Weekly just did a story about the company behind Sound Publishing, a large NW newspaper group for which I used to be Corporate Art Director. The Weekly covered the business model really well, including an acknowledgement that many people find it to get a free paper that is delivered-to-your-door-whether-you-like-it-or-not, full of massive amounts of chain store circulars and coupons that need to be recycled.
The story also mentions how the company doesn’t consider its online properties to be as important as its print titles. I think this is reflective of how hard it is for veteran print salespeople to sell online…
Without comments, blogs aren’t conversations, aren’t fulfilling their mission. They’re de-facto old-school articles being published. That works for some of the big guys who turned off comments because they weren’t enriching the dialogue (Calacanis, please do read this). In fact, when bloggers turn off comments for thoughtful reasons, it shows how much they respect and value the role of comments and don’t want their sites to be places where comments detract or are otherwise counterproductive.
But for the rest of the blogosphere, comments are a reflection of the blog’s ability to engage readers. And many bloggers love a lively debate with people…
The top 50 online advertisers (measured by media value, via ClickZ) in April of this year included 21 financial institutions (A full 42% of the biggest spenders). The top spender 
among those was Countrywide Home Loans, which has been at the center of the mortgage crunch. I wonder what share financial institutions — especially mortgage related ones — had in previous years?
Compare: 7 out of the 50 online advertising giants are tech companies, 6 are media and entertainment, and 4 are retail. The rest have smaller shares.
Oddities: University of Phoenix makes it onto the list twice at 4 and 24 (online…
