Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Google has reported that a full-blown introduction of display ads on their site could generate $3-4 billion in yearly revenue, based on the revenues of other sites like Yahoo and AOL from their ads.

With Google’s stock price slipping a bit from its lofty heights, Marissa Mayer today gave the first indication Google may be planning on phasing in display ads in the very near future, starting with ads on image search.

Monetizing image search has been a problem for Google. Users don’t respond well to text based ads in image search, but display ads may make more sense. Users are already looking a bunch of pictures anyway.
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Due to a default judgment in a lawsuit brought against the similarly named Orion Bancorp, a Florida court has ordered Orion Residential Finance to declare “orion” a negative keyword in any broad search advertising they embark on in the future.

What this means is that if Orion Residential wants to do search advertising on words like “bank” or “finance,” they must make Orion a negative keyword so that if somebody searches for “orion bank” or “orion finance,” their ads must not appear.

Orion Bancorp brought the suit arguing that the two had a confusingly similar name, and ended up winning when Orion Residential didn’t file a response to the lawsuit. Their default led not only to Orion Bancorp getting the orionbank.com domain name, but the judge added the following restriction:
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There are finally some concrete numbers from both Hitwise, Compete, and comScore about microblogging site Twitter’s rise in popularity.

According to Hitwise, Twitter.com is recording eight times as many hits now as it was a year ago. However, very few of the hardcore Twitter users ever visit Twitter.com–most of the traffic comes from smartphones or Twitter apps.

Hitwise report lists Twitter as having 1 million users, 200,000 “active” users, and about 3 million tweets being sent per month.
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Last Thursday at a web conference in Beijing, Google introduced the latest step in visual search technology, VisualRank.

Currently, image search delivers results based on the text associated with each picture rather than anything about the image itself. Theoretically, if somebody labeled a ham sandwich as the Taj Mahal, your image search of “Taj Mahal” would show you a sandwich. Google wants to eliminate this method by an analysis of many of the more popular images on the web.
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At a time when some expected Apple’s hot ride to slow down, brisk sales of Macs during Q2 saw Apple exceed earnings expectations and keep their stock sky-high, if not higher.

The $7.5 billion in March quarter sales is an increase of 43% over last year. While iPhone and iPod sales were relatively close to expectations, over a quarter of a million more Macs (with their high price tags) were sold than industry insiders projected. Apparently, consumers are satisfied with the current iMac as sales were 50% higher than the same time last year.
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