Online Ad Revenue YoY (via techcrunch)

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have all finished reporting their earnings for Q4 of 2008. The result? Growth! After seeing their revenue growth decline every quarter in 2008, their ad revenues actually started to pick up in Q4 by 3 percent. Together they showed a 8 percent growth year over year. In Q4 of 2007, the search engines showed a 12.7 percent growth year over year. By Q3, growth rates was only 0.6 percent year over year.
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I recently did a post on Flash and SEO, discussing how search engines (primarily Google so far) are now crawling and indexing Flash.  The bottom line was that while Flash is still not really SEO-friendly despite recent advancements, there are very good reasons to use Flash in many cases, and there are some excellent techniques to help sites that use Flash to get good SEO rankings.

One of the techniques for helping pages that use Flash to rank well is the use of “swfobject”.

swfobject is basically a JavaScript loader for Flash.  It provides some important benefits for users, such as detecting support for Flash, version compatibility checking, support for downloadingFlash updates, and graceful support for showing alternate content to users who don’t have Flash.  It is designed to work well with all major browsers. Read the rest of this entry »

Several sources close to Yahoo and Microsoft has mentioned that a search partnership deal between Yahoo and Microsoft is likely to be worked out now that Yahoo has named it’s new CEO, former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz.
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Yahoo has announced Carol Bartz, 60, to succeed Jerry Yang as the CEO of Yahoo. Bartz is a respected tech veteran who served in Autodesk as the CEO from 1992-2006. Autodesk is a software company which grew from $300 million to $1.5 billion during her 14 years of service. Autodesk’s stock price during that tenure grew ten-folds. She also comes with past experience as an executive at other major tech companies such as Digital Equipment Corp, Sun Microsystems, and currently serves on the board of Cisco Systems and Intel Corp.
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Growth in Holiday Spend? Where?
According to comScore, the fastest growing online category in the 2008 holiday season was sports and fitness. This category grew 18 percent compared to 2007 as consumers were more inclined to purchase higher priced fitness machines online instead of offline.

Sports and Fitness was followed by Video Games (14 Percent Growth Year over Year) and Apparel & Accessories. All other categories unfortunately saw a drop in growth due to consumers curbing their purchasing due to the poorer economic conditions.

Who is Spending More?
Growth in online spending occurred in households with income over $100,000 (7% Growth), while all other income segments showed declines in online spending. $50,000-$99,999 Household Income Consumers showed a -8% Growth Rate, while those under $50,000 showed a -13% Growth Rate in Spend.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM