Data from Comscore showed that Cyber Monday may have been the heaviest online spending day in history with a record-breaking $1.028 billion in online spending — a 16% jump in spending when compared against the same day last year.
Up to now ,in this year's holiday season ,more than $13 billion has been spent online ,and cyber monday (29/11) was the heaviest online shopping day with the money spent over $1 billion dollar .
Cyber Monday’s 16-percent growth in sales versus year ago was driven primarily by an increase in average spending per buyer (up 12 percent) while the number of buyers on Cyber Monday grew by a lower 4 percent to 9 million. The average spending per transaction grew 10 percent to $60.05, while the total number of transactions increased 6 percent to 17.1 million.
“The online holiday shopping season has clearly gotten off to a very strong start, which is welcome news. At the same time, it’s important to note that some of the early strength in consumer spending is almost certainly the result of retailers’ heavier-than-normal promotional and discounting activity at this early point in the season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
Google Instant Preview is a new feature following the September roll out of Google Instant which completes searches while they’re being typed into Google’s search field, with the goal of significantly reducing time spent searching. But is the new feature really going to speed up the searcher’s experience, or is it yet another complicated layer on what was once a simple and easy-to-understand search interface? Google’s own research revealed that on average searchers using Google Instant Preview are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search results they click after seeing a visual preview next to the organic listing.
Google Instant Preview essentially gives users the ability to see a website before they visit it. Google accomplishes this by taking a screenshot of every webpage in its index and giving users access to it via a magnifying glass icon that sits to the right of every search result.
When a user clicks on the magnifying glass icon, a screenshot of the webpage in question will appear to the right of the search result listing. It’s an at-a-glance view of the website page without actually having to visit the webpage.
One of the key elements to Instant Previews though is that Google sometimes highlights a section of the page where the page description occurs. This becomes a useful feature when you’re trying to find information on a specific person on a page that lists dozens or hundreds of people. Instead of having to scroll through the entire page to find the person, you can just look at the Instant Preview and see where they are on the page.
“We realized early on that this kind of experience would only make sense if it was lightning fast. Not long ago simply downloading an image could take 20 or 30 seconds, and even today many websites take four or five seconds to load,” Raj Krishnan, Product Manager wrote in the Google Blog. “With Google Instant Preview, we match a search query with an index of the entire web, identify the relevant parts of each webpage, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customised to your search–usually in under one-tenth of a second.”
SEO expert Peter Bowen at First One On says, “while Google Instant Preview is designed to speed up the searching process what it actually does is to speed up the decision-making process of choosing whether or not to click on the link by previewing the visual screenshot of the resulting webpage.”
“Google currently provides a lot more data to help the searcher. At one time search engines just displayed the first two lines from a webpage under a search result, but now they include information like site links, date, cached content, jump to links and even Google Places.”
Instant Previews can be helpful for many kinds of tasks. For example, say you looked at a page before and need to find it again – with a preview, you can tell if any of the results look familiar. Or perhaps you’re looking for an official website – look for a logo and formal style and you’ll probably be able to identify it. Or maybe you’re looking for a how-to guide – it’s easy to spot a page with clear illustrations and step-by-step instructions.
From an SEO perspective the big question is how will Google Instant Preview affect our understanding of traditional SEO, and what changes should we consider making to webpages so that they can be easily previewed in a tiny screenshot?
When a searcher performs a search and sees the search results page displayed, they do have a choice of whether or not to activate the Google Instant Preview feature by clicking on the magnifying glass icon.
“However, clicking on the magnifying glass icon is less of a commitment than clicking on a link, and you still need to convince the searcher that it is worth their time to preview a website” says Peter Bowen. “Therefore it becomes more important than ever to have a well defined and well written description of what the website page is about and it has to fit within the 150 character limit. So the Meta content description is what you will have to change and be aware of here.”
As we already know, Flash is not SEO friendly because it cannot be read by search engines and is even worse for Instant Preview as it shows as a black rectangle and cannot be rendered. The same is true for video files that also display a black rectangle in the preview, so consideration of this is important too.
It should be pointed out that because the image size of the screenshot is so small, unless the text in headings is large enough, it will be impossible to read.
So what does all this mean? Well, we have to start thinking about the overall page layout and if it looks good at postage stamp size or if it is just a blur of text with no images to make it look appealing. This means creating pages that pay more attention to navigation, titles and headers, spacing, colors and objects, such as call-to-action buttons. Having a good looking page with relevant titles now may count as much as the content on the page itself.
It is likely that we will begin to see a lot more webpages with well defined graphics and other visual aids designed to get a searcher’s attention. This makes SEO even more important than ever, make sure that your images are named with keywords and their file names and alt text are descriptive and accurate.
Google Instant Preview is here to stay and designed to make the search selection process easier and according to Google faster, but in the end, good SEO practices are what is going make the difference of whether or not you get discovered on the search engine results pages.
(written by Peter Bowen )
Peter Bowen is a seasoned SEO Marketing specialist who has been involved with the internet since 1994 when he won the Entrepreneur of the Year award for developing an online internet shopping mall. He has developed software for learning and now concentrates his efforts on helping others to understand and market their products and services through effective search marketing strategies. First One On helps clients through the maze of SEO to get top rankings for their clients.
In September ,fb.com domain has been sold to an undisclosed buyer by the American Farm Bureau .However, Domain Name Wire has revealed that the domain’s whois has been updated to reflect that Facebook (Facebook) is the domain’s administrator.
It is said this domain using in Facebook internally ,but doesn't know what facebook gonna do with it .
Most likely, Fb.com will become the e-mail domain of the company’s 1,400+ employees. Yahoo does something similar; its staff uses @yahoo-inc.com e-mail addresses instead @Yahoo.com in order to avoid confusion between its employees and the hundreds of millions of users of its e-mail service.
By the way ,Facebook has been updated their message system to work like email . Maybe in future ,we can use email with @facebook.com ?
Intel has agreed to acquire McAfee Inc. for approximately $7.68 billion ($48 per share in cash), the company announced today. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the deal, which is expected to close following shareholder approval and regulatory clearances.
It’s a huge deal for Intel, primarily a hardware company, to acquire a security-oriented software company, especially one as big as McAfee. However, Intel believes that security has become an integral part of computing, which makes it their business, too.
“With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of Internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online. In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO.
The fact that McAfee has experienced fantastic growth in recent quarters probably spurred Intel to go through with the deal, too. Be it hardware-enhanced security or pure software security products, there’s no doubt about it: Intel is now one of the market leaders.
McAfee will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary, and it will be reporting to Intel’s Software and Services Group.
Publishers are clamoring to get their magazine titles onto Apple’s iPad, but many may be facing a new challenge: photographers.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that Time Inc. has been forced to delay the release of its People magazine iPad app, in part because of disputes with photo agencies over licensing agreements as they pertain to the iPad.
Time Inc. has already released iPad variants of its Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated titles, and had hoped to launch People earlier this month.
While a spokeswoman for People says that the iPad application launch delay has “absolutely nothing to do with the photo agencies,” statements from various agencies belie those claims. THR reports that at least eight different agencies are banding together to withhold their photographs unless People grants them additional compensation for iPad usage.
In other words, if People doesn’t agree to pay more to use photographs in the iPad app, the magazine will have a much more difficult time obtaining photos of Lindsay Lohan once she leaves rehab.
Photo agencies that sell celebrity photographs to media publications like People make the majority of their revenue by selling the print rights to those photographs. Online usage fees command a much smaller price, in part because online photos rarely generate significant ad or subscription revenue. As Brandy Navarre, VP at X17 notes, “When you’re talking about paid apps supplemented by advertisements, that’s something different altogether.”
People’s position is that it shouldn’t have to pay anything to use the photographs because the iPad app is just a replication of the print product. Aside from paying for any photos that aren’t in the print edition — for things like photo galleries — People thinks its current contract with photographers should cover iPad usage.
Furthermore, People also argues that because it views the iPad app as a marketing tool, it can use photographs under a clause in its contract with photographers that allows for promotional repurposing.
Photographers and photo agencies, already feeling the pressure of an ad recession, don’t want to write off their rights and fees for what many think could end up being the next big avenue for publishing. Agencies want to avoid what happened to many unions when the DVD platform took off. It took a prolonged writers’ strike for the WGA to gain royalties from DVD and digital sales of its members’ work.
So why are other magazines not facing the same pressures as People? In part because People has the highest circulation in its field — more than 3.5 million for the first half of 2010 — and as THR notes, it has a much more diversified agency pool than many of its competitors. People is also known for being willing to shell out big money for exclusive photographs at a level that other publications just can’t match.
The resolution with People could end up having a big impact on other photo-heavy publications that want to bring content to the iPad or other tablets.
The evolution of publishing is certainly taking place digitally — and often online. The debate raises an important question that many publishers are still trying to find an answer to: Where does the line between digital and web publication lie? Furthermore, do those differences necessitate different rules for licensing, pricing and access?
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments
Jeremy Liew invests primarily in the Internet and mobile sectors, with a particular interest in social media, commerce, gaming, financial and methods for increasing monetization. He joined Lightspeed in early 2006.
These are interesting times in the social gaming industry. Two weeks ago Disney acquired Playdom, and last week Google acquired Slide. Just like that, two of the largest social game publishers have become part of larger companies. This activity all comes on the heels of EA’s acquisition of Playfish late last year.
Social gaming, as a category, has grown incredibly quickly, becoming one of the dominant drivers of usage on Facebook, and an increasingly core component of people’s entertainment. This growth represents a real threat to other forms of entertainment, and has precipitated the three deals that we have seen so far.
3 Factors in Social Gaming Viability and Acquisition
The acquisitions show three commonalities. The first is strong management. Playfish is run by Kristian Segerstrale, a co-founder of Glu Mobile, a leading mobile game publisher. Playdom is run by John Pleasants, formerly COO of EA. And Slide’s CEO is Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal. In each case, the leadership brings real experience, not just in social gaming, but also from previous successes.
The second is revenue scale. Each company was generating millions in monthly revenue at the time of acquisition, with valuations on exit being driven higher for the companies with the highest revenue at time of exit. To move the needle for companies as big as Google, Disney and EA, an acquisition needs to show the potential to drive hundreds of millions in annual revenue within a few years.
The third is capacity for repeatability. Games are a hit-driven business. While it is valuable to have a hit game, it is much more valuable to have a game factory that can repeatably produce more successes. There is uncertainty about the chances of any given game being a hit, so part of repeatability is about a company’s ability to take many shots on goal. The more studios and game developers that a company has, the more shots on goal it can take at any given time. At time of exit, each company had hundreds of employees building games, and had multiple games at some level of revenue or usage scale.
However, the ability to take a lot of shots on goal is not enough. The other key driver of repeatability involves helping a game reliably find a scale audience. This can come from a large installed base of players, or from the ability to justify paid customer acquisition through high monetization. Each company had one or more of these abilities when they were acquired.
Social Games Have Value for Different Types of Companies
The three acquisitions also differ in some meaningful ways. Each acquirer comes from a different category. One is a traditional game publisher (EA), one a traditional media company (Disney), and one a large Internet company (Google). This gives us some clues about what other companies may have interest in the sector. Potential future acquisitions might come from companies like Ubisoft and Activision from the game side, Viacom, CBS, Comcast/NBC and Newscorp on the media side, and companies such as AOL, IAC, Microsoftand Yahoo! from the Internet side.
In addition, given the success of free to play games in Asia, there are a number of potential Chinese (Shanda, QQ), Japanese (Mixi, DeNA) and Korean (SK Telecom, Nexon) companies who could look to one of these social gaming companies to establish a market in the U.S.
Which Acquisition Will Be Next?
While there are many entities that might be in the market to buy a gaming company, there are only four still independent U.S.-based social game publishers that have the revenue scale (more than $1 million each month) to be attractive as a target; Rockyou, Crowdstar, Watercooler and of course Zynga.
Zynga is the industry powerhouse, and we’ve estimated in the past that they are doing more than $60 million a month in revenue. They benefit from the ability to support multiple large development studios building high quality games, and to launch those games with significant marketing budgets and unparalleled cross promotional reach. Their 200 million monthly active users is four times the size of their closest competitors. This allows Zynga to quickly hook millions of users on its new games within days of launch, as they have recently demonstrated with Frontierville and Treasure Isle. This is something that no other company is currently able to match.
But given estimates of Softbank’s investment in Zynga at a $4 billion valuation range, they may be too big an acquisition for many of the potential buyers. While many companies might wish to own them, they may be more likely to be on a track to go public themselves.
On the other hand, the other three companies may see a lot of interest over the next 12 to 18 months. In this game of musical chairs, there are far more players than there are chairs, and when the music stops, many of the potential acquirers may find themselves with no where to sit.
Smaller Players
There has also been a lot of activity at a smaller scale as well. Playdom and Zynga themselves have both been acquisitive, buying Acclaim, Challenge Games, Hive7, Lil Green Patch, Metaplace, MyMiniLife, Offbeat Creations, Serious Business, Three Melons, Trippert, Unoh, XPD Media and several others between them.
That still leaves a number of social game developers that have at least one game at scale and revenues greater than $100,000 per month, including Booyah, Casual Collective, 50 cubes, LOLapps, Meteor Games, Metrogames, Slashkey and ZipZapPlay. Some of these are newer entrants who have burst to prominence in the last few months, while others are older companies that are continuing to milk the success of an earlier game launch.
If we believe that value in social games is being attributed to management, revenue scale and repeatability, we may well see more consolidation at this level as well. Although these smaller companies may not be big enough to form the core of a social gaming group inside a big acquirer, they will be strategically valuable to the four bigger independent game developers who are continuing to build their scale and repeatability.
Furthermore, putting together some of these smaller players could create new “at scale” independent publishers with revenues greater than $1 million per month, and the core elements of repeatability, a multi-studio structure, cross promotional scale and know-how in virality and monetization.
The Future
This industry is exciting because of its dynamic nature, and I don’t expect that to change over the next 12 months. We will likely continue to see new game publishers burst onto the scene. At the same time, there will likely be further consolidation activity on three dimensions from giants buying the scale independent social game publishers, from the scale independent social game publishers buying smaller developers, and from some smaller developers coming together to create scale players.
Which company do you think will be the next to be acquired?