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I’d like to thank Guy Kawasaki and Neenz Faleafine for having added a domain name category to the popular AllTop.com news aggregation site!
The listing of domain-related news feeds on Alltop will help further promote the domain business. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted the blog feeds!
According to this GigaOM article on CNN Money, yesterday’s presidential election has set a traffic record as people from all over the world went to news websites in search for the latest information on the candidates or the election in general.
What’s especially interesting, is that some television networks actually saw viewer numbers tumble compared to the 2004 election. On the Internet, however, visitor numbers rocketed high.
CNN’s website, for example, received a record 27 million unique visitors on November 4 and there were almost 5 million users of its live video stream service. The website of ABC News also received a record number of visitors with 3.4 million unique visitors and more than 24 million page views. Live streaming services like Mogulus and Akamai saw traffic peaks when Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech, too.
The 2008 presidential election campaign has truly been an Internet campaign. Barack Obama and other candidates have made extensive use of the Internet, buying advertising spots on popular websites and setting up profiles on social networking sites.
Today, one day after I wrote about Google and Yahoo having modified the terms of their search advertising partnership, Google officially announced on its blog that it would end the agreement with Yahoo.
Google justifies its decision with the ongoing criticism from government regulators and some of its advertisers. The search engine company wanted to avoid a long legal battle and further investigations that would only have led to more delays and uncertainty.
While the decision to end the agreement marks a setback in Google’s rapid growth, it could be a chance for Yahoo. The reason being that the modified agreement, which Google had just handed to the antitrust regulators, limited Yahoo’s earnings potential to 25% of the total search revenue. Now, Yahoo can continue to monetize its search traffic on its own and, more importantly, it can look around for other partners.
Microsoft seems to be the most logical choice, given that the software corporation has been interested in Yahoo for a while and that Carl Icahn, member of the board at Yahoo, is still trying to sell the company to Microsoft or at the very least to get it into a partnership with MSFT.
Yahoo is an attractive acquisition target because it is the number two search engine behind Google. The additional traffic from Yahoo’s search business and from its portal sites would immediately push the buyer into a top position in the coveted search engine market.
Yahoo’s share price is up more than 7% today, but it’s still cheap compared to the company’s market cap in 2007. Google is down almost 4% as of this writing. Microsoft is down 2%.
Web search leaders Google and Yahoo have formulated and submitted a new agreement outlining their advertising partnership to the U.S. Justice Department. The companies have been subject of discussion due to Google gaining too much power in the competitive online search market, hence the Justice Department has been investigating whether the GOOG/YHOO partnership would lead to imperfect competition and further extend Google’s lead in the market.
Apparently, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else, the U.S. Justice Department found signs of unfair advantages for Google and Yahoo, because the companies have now changed their partnership agreement in order to please the competition watchdogs.
Formerly, the ad deal should have been valid for ten years, but that duration has now been reduced to two years. In addition, Google AdWords clients will now have the choice to opt out of Yahoo’s advertising network.
To be honest, I don’t see how these minor changes could allow for a better market environment. Google would still gain another significant percentage of the worldwide search advertising market, and the traffic and advertising value of Yahoo’s portal and search engine is not to be underestimated!
I understand that Google and Yahoo are still in talks with anti-trust regulators, so more changes could be made to the agreement soon. The fact that the search engine companies have been willing to cooperate with the Department of Justice will certainly improve their chances of getting the ad deal approved.
In the meantime, billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who owns five percent of Yahoo and is a board member of the company, is still publicly pitching Yahoo’s search business to Microsoft. At least, he wants Yahoo to enter into a paid search deal with Microsoft instead of Google. The Redmond-based software giant has made numerous offers for Yahoo in 2007 and 2008, most of which valued the company significantly higher than its actual worth in the stock market at that time, but those offers were rejected. For example, Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for almost $50 billion earlier this year. Since then, Yahoo’s stock price has fallen almost 50 percent. Yahoo’s market cap is below $19 billion today.
The outcome of the search advertising deal between Google and Yahoo could influence MSFT’s decision to make another bid for YHOO. If the deal gets rejected by the Department of Justice, it’s possible that Yahoo will try to enter into a partnership with Microsoft instead, which could ultimately lead to the company’s acquisition.
AOL unveiled its new When.com project this morning. It’s a search engine for local events. The media company already owns some other websites for local content, including MapQuest and AOL CityGuide.
When.com automatically recognizes where you’re located when you go to the website, but more personalization is available upon registration. It’s working for international users, too. For example, I visited When.com from Hamburg, Germany and I was instantly presented various upcoming events in Hamburg.
Most of all, I like the site’s domain name. First, When.com is a generic one-word domain. Second, it is a four-letter domain, so it is short and easy to type in. Third, the domain is very easy to remember, which makes it perfect for marketing and branding. It’s also an intuitive call-to-action domain name.
This makes AOL’s When.com yet another example of a corporate end-user understanding the great value of a keyword domain name.
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