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In-depth analysis and expert insight intoAutomating the Herd Mentality
Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s still a dangerous plan: market swings already tend to happen when investors overestimate the information content of others’ trades; letting them do this by default seems…
Facebook Updates Facebook now offers ads optimized for “Objectives” such as likes, installs, or ad clicks. That should bump up the low bids, raising the effective CPMs for their pages. It’s unclear how popular any of these options are, though. Zynga’s OMGPop purchase has raised their estimated Daily Average Users by about 25%,…
Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings?
SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches, Wikipedia owns proper nouns, and a smattering of other obvious sites own various common query categories. Interestingly, Amazon is trending upwards: whether this is due to…
Why do Car Comparison Sites Have So Much Pricing Power?
Digiday notes that car comparison sites are price setters, unlike nearly everyone else in the online ad world. This seems counterintuitive, especially since it doesn’t apply to sites one level downstream (e.g. eBay Motors) or one level upstream (like auto blogs).
Turntable.fm Signs Record Deals…
Google Updates Google is already using their new privacy policy to offer search across devices; a desktop search (for a restaurant, for example) will be connected to the mobile search experience (giving users a shortcut to the restaurant’s location and hours, for example). This shouldn’t have a measurable revenue impact in the short term, but…
Google Updates Google’s new privacy policy is now in effect. Expect the sky to fall, or for all of your ads to be slightly better-targeted. Danny Sullivan points out that although Google+’s numbers don’t look good, Google is forgoing lots of revenue to promote the service. That’s telling. This Google search screenshot is making the rounds. The…
Google Updates Danny Sullivan has much more information on the “Don’t be Evil” tool. He actually makes a pretty good case for the bookmarklet as a genuinely useful piece of software: if it weren’t for the life-or-death struggle search and social companies, this kind of thing would be an obvious feature to add. Google may be
Netflix Splits DVDs and Streaming
Netflix has split its DVD business from its streaming business, perhaps in anticipation of spinning off one or the other. In the announcement, Netflix’s CEO specifically calls out AOL, which is facing exactly what he wants to avoid: half of the business belongs in some kind of asset-stripping private equity…
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