Source: http://blog.compete.com/2011/09/08/forget-anchovies-hold-the-ppc-seo-management-helps-pizza-company-deliver-to-its-bottom-line/

After traveling through Europe on vacation the past couple of weeks, nothing said I was home more than grabbing a slice of New York pizza!

Deciding to do a blog post on the topic, I wanted to find out who the “big cheeses” were in the pizza world and see if I could find some insight into their web strategies.

Using the Keyword Destination tool on Compete.com to get a list of sites referred to by a broad match for the generic keyword “pizza”, I quickly found that Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com were the hands-down winners.  Approximately 16% of all “pizza” related search referrals went to Pizzahut.com and 5.8% went to Dominos.com.

Both Pizzahut and Dominos showed strong consumer brand recognition, as seen by looking at branded vs. non-branded search referral data collected by Compete:

With similar patterns in historical UV traffic, these two brands were ripe for comparison:

You would think that two strongly similar brands would show similar ad spend profiles, but I was surprised to see that visitors referred to Pizzahut.com via a search engine were 1.8X more likely to have reached the site through a paid search link as visitors to Dominos.com.

What’s the difference?

Using Compete.com again to analyze keyword search referrals to the two brands provided a bit more insight:

For the sake of brevity I am just including a few keywords, but the general trend was the same.  Pizzahut seems to struggle to rank for organic traffic for long-tail phrases, even those containing their brand name. Paid search helps augment low SERP placement by artificially ranking Pizzahut ahead of the couponing sites vying for this sort of referral.

The Bottom Line:

While there are certainly more “slices to the pie” that this brief analysis can’t cover, the bottom line is that there is a constant struggle going on behind the scenes between large brands and third party sites looking to ride on their coattails through coupon offerings, referral links, and product reviews.  If you find your manager questioning the value of SEO, consider that the average CPC for a “pizza” broad-match term was $0.63 (source: google adwords keyword estimator), and in Q2-2011 approximately 5 million search referrals were sent to both Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com. Strong SEO efforts can translate into significant savings through reduced ad spend on paid search!

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Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-hulu-plus-2011-7

Hulu Plus now has 875,000 paying subscribers according to CEO Jason Kilar. It pales in comparison to Netflix’s 23 million subscribers, but considering Hulu is primarily a free ad-supported video site it’s not too bad.

In a blog post revealing the data Kilar says,”we proudly and profitably pay the content community approximately $8 per subscriber per month for the content offering you see today on Hulu Plus. A portion of the $8 payment to the content community comes from our $7.99 subscription fee; the balance comes from the revenue we generate through advertising.”

This is good news for Hulu, but it comes at an uncertain time for the site.  Disney CEO Bob Iger said today Hulu’s owners are committed to selling the site, and it was just reported that Kilar is not under contract.

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• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google’s FTC Interrogation Not Analogous To Microsoft’s Antitrust History
• CHART OF THE DAY: Zynga’s Big Revenues And Smallish Profits*
• Google Is Thinking About Buying Hulu

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/22/wyoming-wholly-commits-to-google-apps-adds-more-flare-to-state/

Milestone-maker may not be the first words that come to mind when you think ‘Wyoming,’ but consider this: the state lays claim to the first ever national park (Yellowstone), the first national monument (Devil’s Tower), and to being first for women’s suffrage. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wyoming Governor Matt Mead put on his early adopter hat and marched all ten thousand civil servant soldiers into the Google cloud. It’s a major first for both parties, and might even help Google ease the federal government’s earlier MS-favoring snub. By switching solely to Google Apps for Government, Mead says the move will save his great territory significant coin, not to mention getting everybody under the Gmail umbrella like Los Angeles did back in 2009. Unintended consequence of the move? The inefficiency of, oh, about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine workers whiling away their days on Gchat. Check below for official video of the address.

Continue reading Wyoming wholly commits to Google apps, adds more flair to state’s firsts

Wyoming wholly commits to Google apps, adds more flair to state’s firsts originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-vc-exits-2011-6

The environment for early stage startup investing is very “challenging” right now because big exits are still rare, but Series A round valuations have grown larger and larger, according to Fred Wilson, one of the best known early stage investors in the world.

On his blog, Wilson highlights the chart below which comes from Mark Suster. It shows the number of exits over $100 million on an annual basis is relatively small. There are 1,000 early stage fundings annually, according to the NVCA, which means just 5%-10% are producing big exits.

“At at time when the average Series A round is now north of $20mm (based on very anecdotal evidence and not at all scientific), this poses challenges for the VC industry,” says Wilson.

Wilson simplifies the math to prove his point, but says assume a fund can get one company to exit at a $250 million valuation. If it invested in 20 companies at an average valuation of $20 million, then it has committed $400 million.

The one big exit isn’t going to provide enough of a return to cover the portfolio, which is how the VC business has traditionally worked.

So, either the VC model needs to evolve, or valuations need to come down.

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• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple’s Stock Flattens, Confuses Investors
• 10 Juicy Tidbits From Fred Wilson, GroupMe, And Foursquare
• CHART OF THE DAY: RIM’s Astounding Collapse In The U.S.

Source: http://kotaku.com/#!5791565/sued-ps3-hacker-says-hell-never-buy-a-sony-product-again

After a court order was issued preventing rapper-turned-hacker George Hotz from ever hacking Sony products again, Hotz is now boycotting the electronics giant’s wares.

As previously posted, Hotz agreed to, basically, never mess around with another Sony product ever again. He’s barred from “unauthorized access to any Sony product under the law”, and will be in deep trouble if he violates a Sony product’s terms of service, “whether or not Hotz has accepted such agreement or terms of use”.

If he’s found to have breached those stipulations, he’s liable to face a $10,000 fine per violation, up to a maximum “cap” of $250,000.

In the wake of this, Hotz is taking part in a Sony boycott. “I am joining the SONY boycott,” Hotz blogged earlier this week. “I will never purchase another SONY product.”

“I encourage you to do the same,” he added. “And if you bought something SONY recently, return it.”

If Hotz was buying Sony products to hack and tinker with, it doesn’t make much sense for him to purchase them. But it’s like he’s rolling over, taking his toys and going home. Not everyone likes what Sony did to Hotz, sure, but then again, not everyone tries to hack Sony products. Some people like to play video games on them.

Even with the order issue settled, Hotz doesn’t seem like he’s ready to let it go. In one of his most recent posts, titled “A New Topic”, Hotz continues to rail on Sony. He now says the focus of the blog will be the Other OS lawsuit. His next post details his appearance in the mainstream media. Go figure.

But why should anyone care what Hotz thinks about this Other OS case? He caved, gave in, agreed he wouldn’t hack Sony products again. Sure, he didn’t get sued for a gajillion dollars, but Sony “won”. Hotz did not.

Writes Hotz, “Basically if Sony does bad things, you better not call them out, or they’ll attempt to make your life hell.”

geohot got sued [Official Site] [Pic]

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/08/us-doj-approves-googles-acquisition-of-ita-but-not-without-sti/

The United States government may be dissolved tomorrow, but it’s certainly taking care of one final piece of business before going into shutdown: this. If you’ll recall, Google announced its intentions to acquire ITA for $700 million in July of last year, and as we cruise into the start of America’s summer travel season, all signals are go. Today, the US Department of Justice approved Google’s request to move forward with the buy, but rather than having the entire travel search market under its wing, El Goog’s going to have to make a smattering of concessions in order to get the right signatures. For starters, the search monolith will allow ITA’s existing client contracts to extend into 2016, and it’ll let both current and new customers license ITA’s QPX software on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.” No one’s saying when the integration will be complete (or start, for that matter), but we’re desperately anxious to see just how Kayak and Bing Travel react after this launches in earnest. Power to the searchers, as it were.

US DoJ approves Google’s acquisition of ITA, but not without stipulations originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/29/stocktwits-continues-to-expand-steals-vp-david-putnam-from-yahoo-finance/

StockTwits, a realtime platform for stock traders to share information, has been undergoing a rapid growth spurt of late. According to Quantcast, 465,000 people are now visiting the site per month, which means the company has more than doubled its visitors since early December, when less than 200,000 were checking in to share and trade. This seems largely due to the service’s continuing evolution beyond its TweetDeck roots and creation of its own true investor ecosystem chalk full of video, news and charts — all enabled by an AIR app.

What’s more, the company announced in December that Yahoo would begin pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages, complementing the similar deals it had already forged with CNN, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg.

And now it seems that, while Yahoo is pulling data from its API, StockTwits has been busy pulling senior executives from Yahoo’s staff. (I guess turnabout is fair play?) In yet another victory for a company not named Yahoo, David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management at Yahoo, announced on his blog today that he will be joining StockTwits on April 1 as VP of Product.

This comes on the heels of StockTwits hiring Chris Bullock as its new VP of Corporate Services. Bullock was formerly the senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ and is charged with bringing investor relations departments to the StockTwits ecosystem.

Putnam, for one, sees a bright future for the up-and-coming stock conversation curator, saying, “StockTwits is big, getting bigger, and going to be huge”. In leaving Yahoo Finance, Putnam is stepping away from, in his words, “the largest financial website in the world”, which he helped to grow to 45 million users a month. Aside from Yahoo’s notorious (and seemingly never-ending) struggles, that’s no easy feat. If StockTwits is hoping to one day take on the big players like Yahoo, nabbing the company’s execs is a great way to start.

As Putnam turns his sights to “helping build the biggest financial idea network in the world”, it will be important for the company to remain focused on building a rabid community and not monthly site traffic.

Investor relations will be a big area for StockTwits going forward, as quite a few companies have started using the service to disseminate information among investors and answer their questions. As part of its features, StockTwits distributes companies’ messages to Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, CNN Money and Bing Finance, a big selling point for many companies. If the service can continue to add to its investor relations, we all may be StockTwitting in the near future.

Today, there are at least five different versions of Android on the market. Many of them are highly customized to allow for new features and device differentiation, but that same customization also makes it harder for vendors to update them to the latest versions.

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