Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 3)

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? CL: When we started Travel Ad Network, Google AdSense had just launched its textlink product and everything was about textlinks and performance advertising. No one talked about users; it was all about clicks. And the terms “branding” and “online” weren’t used in the

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Google is Unbeatable

Hah! This morning, the hilarity of Google’s incredibly accurate algorithmic ad matching system produced a new level of precision. It pushed this ad on my site:

This Week’s Posts

In case you have missed them, I started two series coverages this week which will each continue for several weeks: Trend Radar 2008 and Deal Radar 2008. I also addressed a question that is on a lot of minds right now: Is Google Invincible? And in the Technology Stocks series, we covered Apple, RIM, PALM,

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Deal Radar 2008: Trulia Can Consolidate Real Estate

It is raining cats and dogs. Electricity was out this morning and we just got it back. I am very behind in everything, including my writing. But here we go … Yesterday, we discussed the Kayak-Sidestep roll-up deal, and its implications on Google. Trulia is a real estate vertical search engine that could be a

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Is Google Invincible?

Google is powerful. Of course. But is it invincible? According to Hitwise, Google accounted for 64.49% of all U.S. Searches in the four weeks ending October 27, 2007. According to RimmKaufman, Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market. Google derives 99% of its revenue from advertising.

Online Real Estate Sector Struggling

Naturally. let’s take a closer look at ZipRealty and Move. ZipRealty, a full-service real estate site, has been reviewed here before. On November 7, 2007, ZipRealty announced 3Q earnings with an increase of net revenues of 7% to $28.0 million, up from $26.2 million YoY. And the number of Zip Agents grew by 30%. However,

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Web 3.0 & Google (Part 4)

Acquisition Strategy Google has made several acquisitions this year. The key acquisitions were Adscape, Trendalyzer, Marratech, FeedBurner, PeakStream, GrandCentral, Postini and Jaiku. Google is yet to complete its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services. Google’s acquisition strategy is different from most other companies. Google has mostly

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Web 3.0 & Google (Part 3)

Web 3.0 Framework discussion Below is a quick overview of the Web 3.0 framework for the Google sites. This is, in fact, an interesting analysis, since Google’s horizontal approach is pretty much against the grain of the vertical nature of my Web 3.0 framework.