Things are about to heat up (and get dirty) between Amazon and Apple’s digital music venture as Amazon announces that it will soon be launching its DRM-Free MP3 digital store. Amazon’s digital music store boasts of around 3.3 million songs from the four major U.S. music labels as well as around 33,000 independent labels. This [...]

  In what first was seen by the search and branding community as the perfect mix of Yahoo’s social properties and advertising, Yahoo has now discontinued its Yahoo Brand Universe initiative, exactly one year after its birth.AdWeek reports that a Yahoo rep said the destinations “did not fit into the broader strategy laid out by CEO [...]

  According to DomainTools, Google is about to stop monetizing domains that are less than five days old, effectively killing the practice of “Domain Tasting“. There is a huge amount of money involved in domain tasting, where AdSense for Domains ads can be thrown up on domains during their free five-day grace period.Potentially, one could [...]

  Despite rivals’ concerns that Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick may increase the cost and difficulty in advertising online advertising, EU regulators reviewing the case are likely to approve the $3.1 billion takeover deal. The European Commission is about to make their ruling on the acquisition, and with the US already having approved it, it is not [...]

  Let’s all take the time to stop checking our rankings, searching for new blogs in TLA and sending link request emails to envision an alternate universe, a world wide web where Google does not exist. An Internet where link anchor text does not influence ranking, because link based ranking does not exist. Let us pretend [...]

  Earlier this month, Microsoft filed a patent application that presents a method of collecting information about users’ “cellphones, geolocation systems, credit card information” and other sources of data to select and display “targeted advertising”.  While collecting user data to target advertising is nothing new, Microsoft’s filing points to another source of data: offline sources.This collection [...]

  Search queries on Google and other search engines for informational terms dealing with “tech support”, “how to…” and “trouble shooting” have been constant and traffic driving queries for years and are ripe for the picking for those who can fully optimize for them.Sites like eHow and WikiHow have been capitalizing on this space for some [...]

  The hotly anticipated U.S. federal auction of mobile phone airwaves begins today, and some are speculating that Google - who famously announced their intentions to bid - may spend less than investors have anticipated and let the telecoms win after all. Why after all the hoopla would Google just let them at it without [...]

  Datran Media (an online marketing firm specializing in email marketing) recently published the results of a survey which consists of 2,000 online marketers in December 2007 on the best performing medium for their online marketing efforts. eMail marketing came ahead of search and display. There are some very interesting statistics in this survey that [...]

  General search engines like Google are great, but sometimes a more specialized search engine will get the job done much better. That’s the idea behind a new search engine that launched on Wednesday - Roost, a real estate search engine.Roost differs from many of the more established home buying sites in that they are [...]