MySpace in trouble on $900 million Google deal

MySpace in trouble on $900 million Google deal. MySpace in trouble on $900 million Google dealDuring the News Corp (NWS) earnings call, CEO Rupert Murdoch and COO Chase Carey both mentioned that the entertainment company's deal with Google (GOOG) to deliver ad space to social network MySpace was in trouble. Murdoch said, "It's quite simple. We've not been making our minimum guarantees so our search revenue will not be what our revenue was." "We're still losing traffic," Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp told the Financial Times. "It's a business in transition."

The deal with Google, which runs from the first quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2010, was expected to bring News Corp $900 million. Murdoch indicated that the payments might come up as much as $100 million short because of traffic shortfalls at MySpace.

MySpace, once the most popular social network, has lost that spot to Facebook. According to September figures from Comscore, Facebook is now the fifth most popular site in the U.S. with 95.5 million unique visitors. Figures for News Corp's online business Fox Interactive, which includes MySpace, were only 85.6 million. Global Comscore data from the beginning of this year showed an even wider advantage for Facebook.

The current Google deal is only part of the problem. News Corp will need to get a new search engine partner when the current deal runs out. It's unlikely that it will get anything close to the financial terms of the partnership it struck with Google, undermining Murdoch's dreams of having a great online empire.

The question still lingers as to whether social networks will ever be a good medium for advertisers. Industry experts believe that Facebook will only have revenue of $500 million this year. Targeting users on a social network is harder than it is with a portal like MSN where portals are organized by subject. Financial advertisers on portals can run in a section with financial content. Put another way, social networks may never be very big business. [ dailyfinance.com ]

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This is absolutely delightful news

This is absolutely delightful news - The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on the Latin alphabet in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or ICANN — voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea's capital. The decision follows years of debate and testing.

The decision clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

"This is absolutely delightful news," said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing, emphasizing that the Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education. Yu spoke ahead of the approval, which had been widely expected.

Domain names — the Internet addresses that end in ".com" and other suffixes — are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A-Z — as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters./AP

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Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools

Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.

"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true," says Moskwa. "We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Barry Schwartz Search marketers are wondering why Google tells people not to focus on PageRank and removes it from Webmaster Tools, but still keeps it in the Google Toolbar. "Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar," says Schwartz. "I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out. Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google's executives allowing it."

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a "comfort blanket for SEO Noobs." He adds, "I say this, with a high degree of confidence that most experienced SEOs pour over the data in Google Webmaster Tools, whereas those new to the industry likely let the toolbar be their only guiding light."

He also notes, however, that PageRank data can still be useful. For example, it can be a good indicator of a site's behavior in Google's index. "Any green means 'go.' No green, means there's something to investigate," says Beal.

Despite this usefulness though, Moskwa pretty much closes the case on Google's position on it. In fact, she even points to a FAQ page about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that webmasters shouldn't even bother thinking about it. It also says that PageRank is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.

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Will Google be Doing Transformative Acquisition ?

Will Google be Doing Transformative Acquisition ?. Google Inc.'s success has left the Internet search leader sitting on a pile of cash — $22 billion at the end of September. Executives say they are ready to spend more money to take advantage of what they believe will be even better days ahead.

That will include buying other companies, although perhaps not on the scale of Google's $1.76 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006 or $3.2 billion purchase of DoubleClick last year. Google CEO Eric Schmidt provided some insights into his thinking Thursday in a third-quarter earnings conference call with investors.

QUESTION: Will Google be doing a large transformative acquisition or will its policy still be to make small technology-oriented acquisitions?

RESPONSE: The way we think about acquisitions is we have historically done an acquisition perhaps one a month or so. And those are typically small and they are typically complete in offering. They are typically technology-intensive. They are not very expensive in the scheme of things ...

We're certainly looking for larger businesses to buy, but in those cases there would have to be some specific — some major, major user base that we do not currently have access to, and so they are going to be quite infrequent.

So if you think about it, our two largest have been DoubleClick and YouTube, both of which look as though they are going to be incredibly successful. But the integration costs, the acquisition costs itself was quite significant.

So those will be relatively rare and if I were to estimate the frequency, it's hard to say, but it's certainly not monthly. Maybe every year or two. But certainly not every month.

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Google is Such a Dominant Force

Google is Such a Dominant Force. Google Inc. shifted into a higher gear in the third quarter and began to leave the recession behind as the 11-year-old Internet search leader recorded its biggest profit yet.

Revenue growth also accelerated for the first time since the U.S. recession began in December 2007.

The results released Thursday are the strongest indication yet that the Internet advertising market is bouncing back from its worst funk since the dot-com bust at the start of the decade.

Google is considered a good barometer for the state of online commerce because its search engine serves as the hub of the Web's largest advertising network.

"The worst of the recession is clearly behind us and because of what we have seen, we now have the confidence to be optimistic about our future," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told analysts in a conference call.

Schmidt's optimism echoed his public remarks leading up to the earnings release. That sentiment has helped propel Google to a succession of new 52-week highs this week, a rally that continued after the company put out its third-quarter numbers.

Google's shares rose $17.13, or 3.2 percent, to $547.04 in extended trading. In regular trading earlier, its shares fell $5.41, or 1 percent, to close at $529.91. The stock remains well below its peak of nearly $750 reached almost two years ago, but has more than doubled from its 52-week low of $247.30.

Google earned $1.64 billion, or $5.13 per share, in the three months ended in September. That represented a 27 percent increase from $1.29 billion, or $4.06 per share, at the same time last year.

Excluding expenses for employee stock compensation, Google said it would have made $5.89 per share — above the average estimate of $5.42 per share among analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Revenue for the three months ending in September climbed 7 percent to $5.94 billion. That is Google's fastest growth rate so far this year.

In a telling sign that things are picking up again, Google's third-quarter revenue rose 8 percent from the second quarter. That's the biggest sequential quarterly increase since the end of 2007.

After subtracting commissions paid to Google's advertising partners, the company's revenue totaled $4.38 billion — about $140 million above analyst estimates.

Schmidt and other Google executives left no doubt that they believe the Mountain View-based company is poised to scale even greater financial heights in the next year or two. Among other things, they said the company's popular video service, YouTube, is getting closer to making money three years after Google bought it for $1.76 billion.

Feeling more emboldened, Schmidt said Google will start spending more liberally again after skimping on its expenses for the past year. The commitment includes hiring more employees after Google pruned its payroll for the past two quarters, paring its work force to 19,665 people at the end of September.

Google could be further along the comeback trail than other companies that depend on Internet advertising.

Part of the reason is because Google is such a dominant force; it process nearly two-thirds of the Internet search requests in the U.S. Advertisers are more likely to invest in search marketing because it only costs them when Web surfers click on their commercial messages.

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