STATS: Google Paid Clicks Rise; Rivals' Fall

Google Paid Clicks Rise; Rivals' Fall

from WSJ.com: Media & Marketing

Google saw better-than-expected 20% growth in U.S. paid clicks in April compared with the same period a year earlier, according to new data from comScore. Paid clicks for Microsoft and Yahoo meanwhile declined.

Google moves further ahead of Yahoo in paid ad clicks

...click on paid advertisements is crucial for Internet search companies and in that department Google just jumped further ahead of its main competitor, Yahoo.

Google posts strong April paid click figures

Posted by Dawn Kawamoto

Google's U.S. paid click-through posted a strong performance in the month of April, while Yahoo and Microsoft gave up ground, according to figures released late Wednesday by ComScore.

Google's paid click-through climbed 20 percent in April, compared with year ago figures, marking its best performance since November, according to a research note by Ben Schachter, a UBS analyst.

Yahoo, meanwhile, saw a year-over-year decline of 4 percent and Microsoft's MSN saw a drop of 9 percent.

And on the click-through rate, which takes the total number of searches divided by the sponsored clicks, Google's rate fell slightly in April to 10.5 percent, compared with 10.9 percent in the previous month. Yahoo posted a 12.5 percent click-through rate for April, verses 13.2 percent a month earlier. Microsoft, however, noticed a slight increase to 10.3 percent in April, compared with 10.2 percent, in the previous month.

"Paid click data released from ComScore is a positive read-through for Google's second quarter," Schachter said in his report. Shares of Google were up 2.91 percent in late morning trading to $584.80 a share.

Meanwhile, Google's coverage rate, which takes into account the percentage of search pages delivered with at least one paid ad on them, fell to 44.1 percent in April, compared with 45.5 percent in March.

"With fewer advertisements and more paid clicks, it appears that Google's advertising relevancy initiative is beginning to work," analysts Clay and Fred Moran of the Stanford Group stated in their research report.

Google's relevancy initiative aims to reduce the number of advertisements that appear on the right side of its search results, yet make the advertisements that it does carry target the desired audience with greater accuracy. As a result, Google hopes to charge a higher cost per click.

The coverage rate for Yahoo also fell in April to 69.4 percent from 70 percent in March, while Microsoft's MSN dropped to 63.8 percent in April from 65.5 percent.

In sizing up Yahoo, the Stanford Group stated: "Overall, there was nothing to get excited about for Yahoo...Queries also fell on a year-over-year basis, down 3 percent, suggesting that any initial year boost from Panama (has) tapered off as the company continues to struggle to maintain share in the market place."

Google and Microsoft, however, both posted double-digit increases in Web search queries. Google posted a 33 percent year-over-year increase in April, while Microsoft's MSN climbed 22 percent, compared with the previous year.

Ed: comScore monitors US users on search sites. 

• Use grew 33% y2y for google; 22% for microsoft - good news for the Internet ecosystem and for Google.
  
• Ad coverage reduced to 44.1% - when ads do appear, are there more per page? what % are image ads with larger click areas?
• CTR of 10.5% - down slightly m2m; huge drop y2y.
• Resulting in 20% y2y paid growth

Did CPC grow more than 11% to offset reduced CTR? 

As DoubleClick's CPM model merges with CPC, comScore won't be able to distinguish a click on CPC versus CPM ads. Thus, their data will become less meaningful.

Code is Mightier than the Sword - Time for Change

The saying "Pen is Mightier than the Sword" is almost 170 years old. Perhaps it's time to change the expression to "Code is Mightier than the Sword."

The pen is mightier than the sword - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The pen is mightier than the sword" is a metonymic adage coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. ...

Origins of Sayings - The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword 

About the history and origins behind the famous saying the pen is mightier than the sword.

mightier than the sword - My Poetry Blog 

mightier than the sword - Because many of my poems are written from the heart they often touch ... Verification code: Verification code: Generate a new code ...

Pen to Words

Millions of blogs have re-discovered the power of the word. From personal expression that touches the heart of a few to mass media that allows a few to communicate with millions - blogs and the Internet will displace legacy publications. Time and economics favor free self expression. 

Code versus Word

Coding is a specialized form of writing. It's syntactically less forgiving, but the well-designed user experience can impact more people than words. 

The best results are simple, but impactful - like the iPod, iPhone, or Google Search. Complexity brings slow death, like Windows or Yahoo's expanding websites and projects.

Like characters and events that live in the writer's imagination - and come to life in words; a program is a set of objects and methods that germinates in the mind of a programmer; and lives as a website or widget. 

Measured by new wealth, Paul Allen, Sergey Brin, Steve Chen, Larry Ellison, David Filo, Bill Gates, Chad Hurley, Steve Jobs*, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, and Mark Zuckerberg trace their roots to code. (*Jobs was a fontographer with similar intensity to a programmer.)

Do these individuals have more power than top editors, and world leaders? Have they impacted billions of people?

War for Coders

Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Myspace, and Yahoo have loosened the flood gates to fight for the sole of the best coders.

Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

from CNET News.com - Business Tech

At Google I/O, search giant will tout its work to make the Internet a better foundation for applications and browsers better at running them. Plus: a new Android SDK?

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

Still Seeking Coders Interested in Journalism

from MediaShift Idea Lab by Rich Gordon

It's now been almost exactly a year since we announced (thanks to a Knight News Challenge grant) that programmer-developers could earn full scholarships to study journalism in the master's program at the Medill School at Northwestern University. We've got plenty of scholarship money still available -- but we have not been overwhelmed with applications...

Why?

Words are cheap, but great words have meaningful value. 

Great code changes worlds.

NEWS: We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment

We're all guinea pigs in Google's search experiment

from CNET News.com | Tech news blog by Stephen Shankland

SAN FRANCISCO--When it comes to search quality, Google has a split personality.

Google uses a method called split A/B testing to measure exactly what changes it should make to its main search Web site--both to its famously Spartan search box and to the results it produces. With the approach, Google shows different versions of the pages to users and measures how they respond, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in a speech at the Google I/O conference here Thursday.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, speaks at the Google I/O conference.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

For example, Mayer said, the company wanted to find out how many search results to show users--the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they'd like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise.

Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters.

"As Google gets faster, people search more, and as it gets slower, people search less," she said...