Lots of people seem to be confused about how competition works for search-based advertising. If you think that competition among search engines will lower the prices advertisers pay, you would be one of them. [Check out, The Importance of a Competitive Search Market.]
So here’s a primer and then some observations.
1. Most […]

Microsoft just announced that it’s giving cash rebates to consumers who use its search engine to find and buy products. That’s good news for consumers and advertisers and is just the direction the search-based advertising business should be going. Here’s why.
Today there’s no price competition among search providers for keywords—advertisers bid for keywords […]

Computer businesses can only do it once according to what Randall Stross calls the “Single Era Conjecture” in an insightful piece in yesterdays’s NYTimes Read Article. It seems right. IBM didn’t make the transition from mainframes to PCs despite its awesome power. And as Clay Christensen has reminded us in his several books, including The […]

Social networking sites should take the indictment of the evil Mom who used MySpace to drive her daughter’s friend to suicide quite seriously. I’m sure the folks at MySpace feel terrible about this and, like all of us, their hearts go out to the family of the dead girl. It was a real and senseless tragedy.
 
But […]

Ignorance could delay contactless-payments adoption according to a heading in Cardline, which quotes some wags who suggest that contactless isn’t going as fast as it might because of “the technology’s unfamiliarity among merchants and consumers.” (CardLine, subscription required).Of course it is hard to tell whether potential customers don’t choose something because they are ignorant or […]

Card rewards are going to disappear and fees are going to return according to a recent research report Disruption in the Payments World. That’s a distinct possibility. Between the interchange fee lawsuits and Congressional pressure for the card associations to get rid of interchange fees it is possible that the US could go the way […]

In its latest stick ‘em in the eye approach to the mobile industry Google came out swinging at a recent forum sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission Google Pushes Open Mobile Platform at FTC Event.
According to Rich Miner, who’s heading their Android mobile software platform initiative, when someone controls a platform “it stifles innovation” and […]

With the abrupt stop of the mating dance between Microsoft and Yahoo we can talk about other questions about the future of the online ad business.
Here are some of mine.
For social networking: How much will eyeballs however measured sell for on social networking sites—will they be more or less valuable than the […]

Ok, all of you are probably sick of us writing on mobile. But I thought the recent article in the New York Times Mobile TV Spreading in Europe and to the US was pretty interesting.
The Swiss it appears are going crazy watching TV on their little screens—40,000 a day which might actually […]

My post last week Blah, Blah Mobile… Blah, Blah Mobile really prompted a lot of discussion about the topic of mobile payments – and maybe even touched a few raw nerves in the process. I thought I would follow up with a few observations given the discussions that took place last week on and off […]