What a Crazy Week
Posted On: 2007-04-20
When you look back over this week it really has been one crazy time. There have been some incredible things happen in the real world and online and the sad thing is that many of us won't have learnt one single thing from everything that's happened.
No matter what happened this week people will still go on doing the same dumb things over and over again. I'm not even going to touch the crazy things that have gone on this week out in the real world. Those things are way beyond the scope of this column and there have been plenty of crazy things that have happened online to fill today's column several times over so let's look at some of those.
Corporate takeovers have certainly been plentiful this week. Obviously everyone has head that Google wants to buy Double Click and so extend their reach even further into online marketing. Even 12 months ago something like this move would have almost been the stuff that fantasies were made of but not any more. Google is out to dominate the world of advertising because they see that the marriage of advertising with all the personal search data they have access to will put them in an unassailable position.
Today it was announced that Hitwise has been sold to Experian. Hitwise is an interesting company that's been around for about 10 years and has developed what the Hitwise CEO rightly calls 'a truly unique digital intelligence service'. The depth to which that company can mine data is definitely unique and they can paint an incredibly detailed picture of the surfers who hit your site. Knowing all the details that they can give a client enables that client to apply some sharp focus to their websites that no one else can.
eBay is rumored to have made a bid on StumbleUpon that could amount to as much as $75 million. StumbleUpon is a social networking site and at first that might seem like a strange match for eBay but when you think about it there really is an interesting opening there for eBay. If you haven't been to StumbleUpon before then it's well worth a visit because that site can give you some valuable links if you don't go stupid and try to spam it.
Corporate profits have also been interesting this week. Google's first quarter profit is reported to have risen by almost 70 percent while Yahoo reported a drop in net profit for the same period even though revenue was up by 9 percent.
Lenovo (China's version of IBM) is also not happy and has started laying people off and getting into reorganization mode in an attempt to stay competitive. Dell has also taken a bit of a dive while Hewlett Packard is now considered the world's biggest manufacturers of PCs.
Regardless of who is manufacturing them there are still a lot of people who don't want to buy them with Vista installed and it seems that the take up of Vista hasn't necessarily been as great as Microsoft's spin would have you believe.
Corporate dumbness and greed (I would have liked to have said ‘stupidity and greed' but …) reached new heights this week when Google showed just how lacking in foresight it is and how greedy they are.
Now they want to crack down on paid links because, they say, it destroys the relevance of the search experience for the surfers out there. What they really mean is that it's something they want to stamp out because it's money they can't get their hands on.
Their idea of cracking down on paid links is to get a whole lot of Cutlets (Matt Cutts' little sycophants) to report every site that they think has a paid link - man there's going to be some fun times ahead when that little snafu begins to happen.
But I've already talked about that in the last two columns so I'm not going near it again. Instead we're going to go on developing our little mainstream empire for the long-term and the Cutlets can slowly fade away as they almost always do.
The sinking dollar got a whole lot worse this week. Here in Australia the Aussie dollar rose against the greenback almost every day and that seems to have been the same situation for many of the World's other major currencies.
If you aren't affected by the declining value of the greenback then spare a thought for those who are. Let me put it into some perspective for you by telling you about a friend of ours who came round yesterday while he was holidaying back here in Australia.
He's a chef in Hong Kong and he's paid in US dollars. He sends a good proportion of that back to Australia to pay for some real estate investments he has here. Over the last three weeks, because of the continual fall of the US dollar, he has basically taken a 30% pay cut.
Could you survive if that was happening to you? Fortunately we saw this coming quite some months ago and we're already well on the way to refocusing our mainstream business to back here in Australia and if you're an overseas webmaster then that's something you should think of doing too.
If you don't have a mainstream part of your business that you can take back to your own country then start looking for the few affiliate programs that pay in Euros and GBP and focus on them. Even if you're in the States it might be worthwhile to look at those programs too. If you do that you'll earn the sort of returns that many of us did until the dollar started to sink - and who would have thought that day would ever come?
Well if this week has been so crazy then I wonder what next week holds for us. It will be interesting to find out.