Bing takes on Google, secondary markets’ SEC challenge, and a new market for...
Why do Car Comparison Sites Have So Much Pricing Power? Digiday notes that car comparison sites are price setters, unlike nearly everyone else in the online ad world. This seems counterintuitive,...
View ArticleDivesting Rent.com, texting among teens, and the unimportance of validated ads
Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings? SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches,...
View ArticleIs a Google Monopoly a Negative Externality?
Contemporary cricitisms of Google revoles around the fact that they’re pursuing a monopoly. Google, of course, denies this—if they didn’t have to, PR departments wouldn’t be a cost center. But it’s...
View ArticleBankRate’s smart buy, Groupon’s earnings miss, and who wants privacy laws,...
Facebook Updates Facebook now offers ads optimized for “Objectives” such as likes, installs, or ad clicks. That should bump up the low bids, raising the effective CPMs for their pages. It’s unclear how...
View ArticleA Turing Test for Not-Quite Spam
The Daily Dot recently ran an interview with a Pinterest spammer, which they almost immediately retracted. The spammer’s technique is worth noting: he submitted pictures of products to Pinterest, and...
View ArticleWhy Amazon’s AWS and Google AdWords Fuel the Startup Boom
A current YCombinator company founder who also participated in the summer 2009 session has compared and contrasted his experiences. The most sweeping change: valuations are far higher than they used to...
View ArticlePlus VCs as lobbyists, what Groupon does to Yelp ratings, and why ads should...
VCs as Lobbyists One symptom of founders getting stronger relative to VCs is that VCs have been forced to expand their repertoire. YCombinator has an in-house designer, Sequoia has an in-house PR...
View ArticleComcast violates net neutrality, cell phone penetration, and 9GAG’s...
Automating the Herd Mentality Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s...
View ArticleFacebook Buys Instagram, Pays the Distraction Tax
Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion. The most aggressive estimate is that Instagram has 13 employees, so this is likely a record. And, weirdly, Facebook bought just days after Instagram...
View ArticleVIPShop Branded Query Volume on Baidu Down 7% Quarterly
Less people are searching for Chinese e-commerce discount retailer VIPShop (VIPS) on Baidu. An analysis of a basket of 22 popular VIPShop branded queries – queries that have VIPShop’s Chinese name...
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