Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as possible. I have a personal goal of reaching one million readers. I can achieve it with your help.

  the Software View: Agog over Google

Welcome back, gentle readers. For those of you with Web access and an Internet browser, please click here:
http://www.softwareview.com/
Scroll down the page and you will notice a link entitled, "Daily view weblog". The daily news page is also known as a "web log". It is en vogue and the fashion of these days to call it that. Click on the link, click "reload" on your browser or clear your browser cache to ensure that you always receive the freshest, hottest daily news concerning Java^TM, Linux®, XML, wireless, downloadable music, and the software industry! The link never changes, but I will be updating the HTML file page behind it every day. Please, do take a gander at it every day.

Also, gentle readers, the Software View is an Associate Internet World Wide Web site of Amazon.com. I'd like to extend my sincere, heartfelt gratitude and thanks for your patronage. I'm offering links to books, et cetera that you can purchase from my web site. I'd greatly appreciate it if you would purchase software industry books from my web site. Help support my newsletter and web site by purchasing items from Amazon.com from my web site. Here is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
Click here

Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!

SEARCHING FOR DOLLARS

If I visit one of the popular Internet search engine web sites and type in a search, one or two demurely unobtrusive advertisements will perch above the results, with perhaps more riding down along the side. Since the advertisements are explicitly related to something I've just typed that I'm interested in, they can be very useful. If I type "bird watching" into Google, I find not only the usual motley assortment of web sites, but also ads for binoculars, bird houses, and guide books. It's like giving the Yellow Pages a college education.

For all the flash and animation that marketers have sunk into building Internet advertisements, the geeks have figured out the real trick: relevance is more important than style. We're turning to the Internet more and more in the ordinary course of our daily lives. Whether I'm researching a person or company, next week's vacation, seeking a movie review, buying a book, or learning about bird watching, I turn to Google first, then I move out. The marketer that can reach me with a relevant message while I'm searching will win.

Companies (mostly small businesses) are beginning to get wise. Paid keyword-search advertising (also known as Pay-Per-Click) is growing even as Web ads in general are declining. This market for advertising to Internet searchers is growing at a rate of 35% per year - far outpacing the growth of any other advertising medium. Conservatively, it will be a $3 billion industry in 2004 and grow to an $26 billion (United States Dollars) industry by the year 2010 (but don't take my word for it. Click here.) - a reasonable figure, considering that the U.S. Yellow Pages sales alone totaled over $14 billion last year. My fingers do much more walking on my keyboard.

The reason for this is that paid placement search works for every type of business: small, medium, or large. It's cost-effective and, most importantly of all, is completely traceable with advertisers able to easily measure return-on-investment (ROI) from paid placement search campaigns. Paid placement search is not only open to all sizes of business, but it is also not dependent upon how large the advertiser is or how high profile its products are. Instead, it can be deployed across a wide spectrum and can be relied upon to provide consistent results and cost-effectiveness. More and more companies are shifting their advertising budget towards the Internet.

And, in perhaps the best sign that advertisers like this new way of reaching customers, they're paying more for it. Overture and Google, among others, sell their advertisements in an auction style, offering up keywords to the highest bidder. Google has about 150,000 paid search customers. Overture has 88,000 advertisers.

Jupiter Research says that 15% of all paid-listing revenues now come from marketers that control media budgets of $1 million or more. The trend is for these large marketers to buy large numbers of keywords. Almost a quarter buy more than 1,000 key words - and to be very active in their management of these key words, with 87% updating their campaigns on a monthly basis or even more frequently.

Overall, one-third of paid search marketers (and half of large marketers) said they have trouble managing key word auction bids across multiple paid-listing vendors. Jupiter found that large marketers are more than twice as likely as small marketers to look for help with paid-listing campaigns, with 48% turning to a third party to manage their paid search marketing efforts.

Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich

Join my free e-mail newsletter called the Software View by clicking here or by sending an e-mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org