Bottree :: Internet Marketing Commentary

A friend pointed me to this site yesterday:

http://www.adgridwork.com/

Users of this network can place their ads and share them with other sites, so long as they’re willing to accept ads from other site owners. It’s not really barter, in that I’m getting ‘hard’ goods from someone else in exchange for something, like the strawberry jam we just made last weekend.

Instead, you’re just trading spaces.

This concept works really well when you’re a small business and you’re dealing with one or two brands or strategies.

However, what does it mean for agencies and Fortune-500-type clients that have a certain ‘process’ in place? What will happen when clients look into these products and start to realize that they best way to generate new advertising opportunities is to leverage the value of their brand. Surely, the value of a Toyota ad or IBM skyscraper outweighs Joe’s plumbing. Right?

Another perspective here is that we may be looking at the virtual exchange of ads, not on a paid basis, but on a P2P basis. We know what P2P did to the music industry (and what it will do to the movie industry). What will it do to the agency business if clients just start swapping ads with each other?

What do you think? Post your comments below.

It looks like cooler heads are at the helm of the FCC in the United States:

Full Story Here.

A really good idea presented by net neutrality advocates (something I suggest for the Canadian framework as well):

… the FCC should also impose monetary penalties on companies that violate neutrality principles. “Going forward, there has to be a fine,” [Marvin] Ammori [general counsel of the net neutrality group Free Press] said. “Otherwise, Internet service providers would have no incentive to be honest with the public.”

However, there was a big ‘however’ with the story:

At the same time, advocates cautioned that it’s premature to declare victory because the final FCC order in the case might end up being very narrow.

Post your comments below. How do you feel about net neutrality? Does it have an impact on companies or publishers that you choose when planning? If you’re an advertiser, does any of this really matter? Is Bell throttling efforts similar to what’s happened in the US with Comcast?

The time is coming to have a serious discussion concerning the perception of hostility that companies like Bell, Telus, Rogers and others seem to have towards Canadian internet users.

In this article, the American Free Press author Mike Finch presents information that concerns the economic strategies of Canada’s largest ISPs.

Basically, the suggestion is that they will seek to introduce ‘plans’ that only provide access for the top 100 or 200 web sites, restricting access to the millions of other web properties.

If this is true, what does this spell for a company like Google, which offers those millions of sites to media buyers through the Ad Sense / Content network media buying tool?  And what about the dozens of other ad networks that are gaining more and more of the financial pie, at the expense of the top 100 or 200 sites that Bell and Telus will support through these restricted access programs?  Will these new companies be able to tolerate massive drops in usage, translating to the disappearance of ROS and CPC pricing?

If speculation like this is true, should we demand an investigation to ensure that these one or two companies will not ruin the internet for everyone else?  As media buyers, should we vote with our conscience and say that we cannot buy from companies that are planning to suffocate our very livelihood?

Or is the whole thing bunk?

What are your thoughts?

The following really has nothing to do with Internet marketing, but it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, what with one announcement after another about how production at various plants in Ontario are being shut down.

Ford, GM and Chrysler have a combined market cap of approximatley $22 billion and sinking.

Market Cap of GM: $6 billion
Market Cap of Ford: $10 billion
Market Cap of Chrysler: $6 billion.

These three companies determine the fate of the Province of Ontario.

I have a proposal: we buy them. For a cool $22 billion (amortized over several years, of course), the people of the Province of Ontario would be able to dictate the future of automobile manufacturing around the world.  It’s that easy.

The actual global assets of these companies have to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, so why is it that someone is not scooping them up?

We’d seal our fate as car manufacturers and we would finally be able to demand the type of cars that we want, whether it’s hybrids, ones that ran on solar power or cars that could run on the dark side of the moon.

I feel like I’m suggesting an insane idea, but why is it really all that crazy?  We’re in the liquor business and gambling, so why not sponsor the manufacture of a whole new line of cars.

And think of the fun we could have with naming them.  We could have the Beaver (the sporty type that’s good in water), the Moose (the big lumbering SUV that uses biofuels) and so on.

Post your thoughts and comments when you get a chance.

Finally.  Full story here.

The world of text-driven search results and unique Flash-driven creativity have an opportunity to get along.

I’ve worked with a lot of clients that have pages that are either based in Flash, javascript or other languages that pretty much negate any SEO / SEM efforts.  Now, we’re back on track to getting these extremely creative sites online in a searchable manner.

Timeframe?  Apparently now:

The optimized Flash technology will now allow search engines to identify text within Flash programs that would otherwise have escaped them without requiring any change in behavior on the developers’ part. The result should be millions of newly searchable RIAs [Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic experiences, including brand experiences on the Web.

Expect a few hiccups, but also expect to be able to start seeing some tangible results within a few days of reacting to these new changes.

As they note in the article, Flash should still be used as a part of the program when building web sites and shouldn’t be all consuming.  Use a little balance when putting together sites so that you’ll get the best of all worlds:  cool sites that can always be found.

Which is worth more?

Michael Arrington, with TechCrunch, grinds through the numbers to identify which social media property is worth more.

Full article here.

This is easily one of the coolest videos I’ve seen recently. Yes, I’m a nerd that loves LEGO. I’m not quite sure my wife will let me spend our vacation doing the same thing, but if the folks at LEGO want to make me an offer (and want something from me in return as an expression of my everlasting gratitude), please let me know.

ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has been determining the fate of top-level domains (TLDs) for some time.

The challenge: if you’re crafty enough, you won’t need a really funky TLD. Just a good SEO program.

See, more and more people are using Firefox, which is able to detect (using Google search as its core) pages without having the user type in “Http://” or “www….”

Try this:
- Open a new window
- go to your link field and type in “bottree”
- Bottree.com shows up.

Cool eh? Internet Explorer does the same, but it’s nowhere near as sexy and always seems to take 5 times longer.

What Firefox is doing (through Google search) is selecting the best pick for that request and loading it automatically as opposed to giving you a list of search results (which it will do if it gets a little confused).

So why overpay for a TLD if you can just make sure that your site is easily found by Google?

Google’s Ad Planner is causing a big stir in the marketplace.

While the feedback in this article seems mixed, my thoughts are that there’s nothing but upside. For some reason, Google has aligned its fortunes with the stars and has been able to pick the right products off the market and morph them into their own roster of powerful, easy-to-use tools.

Many folks probably feared AdWords and the process of centralizing all of their words and ad copy (and results) into a program that could conceivably be tapped into by Google to gain competitive insight. But they didn’t. And they haven’t cannibalized their expensive cousin, DART for Search, a program that costs thousands per month to operate and is like AdWords on steroids.

Same story with Analytics: Analytics = open source, easy-to-use, lots of data collected. No harm done to advertiser OR their more expensive Urchin product.

Same again with Doubleclick’s DART for Advertisers (DFA) and Publishers (DFP).

I can still hear the ‘what ifs’ out there in the marketplace, but can Google afford to be sloppy with data that they collect or preserve? Not when nearly a trillion in market value is at risk.

But let’s get back to me: I’m a small business owner that understands all of these tools and, while it’s about to get a little more competitive, I believe that there’s such an immense range of opportunity because more people will be using the net as an advertising medium.

This is something that Googlers seems to understand quite well:  we don’t necessarily want a world of 100 billion-dollar companies that advertise.  What we really want is a million $100,000 organizations that  ensure some level of stability for everyone in the marketplace, especially Google.

Final thoughts?  To repeat an oft used quote: “The Internet (in this case, Google) is the great equalizer”.

I couldn’t help but chuckle a little when I read this article by the New York Times.