The Catalyst Code

EBay reported 22% growth Wednesday, exceeding Wall Street expectations. While a number of factors are involved in its strong showing, eBay’s new CEO has recently implemented a number of changes to the site to make it more competitive with sites such as Amazon.com.

Google’s Q1 profits shot up 30 percent and beat the Street’s earnings estimates. This comes after all the hand-wringing about the reported dropoff in Google’s search-ad clicks reported by comScore. As I noted in What’s Down with Google? investors still seem to be figuring out what makes Google tick—lots of ingredients go into maximizing the […]

With Google’s stock down 40 percent since the beginning of the year you have to wonder whether some investors have misunderstood how Google makes money all along. Google’s stock too a big whack a few weeks ago when ComScore released stats showing that number of clicks the search-ad giant was getting were down. What the […]

Media companies are engaging in a bit of co-opetition as they form ad networks for selling advertising across member properties. (See the recent AP article Media Groups Share Content in Ad Deals.)
Sometimes competitors are getting in bed together because they figure, I guess, that they don’t want to lose the money for selling […]

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years before a huge impact rendered them all but extinct. They never saw it coming – one day they were the dominant species; the next, they were all but gone. Ad agencies might just end up being the dinosaurs of modern business. The impact that has created […]

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the […]

A recent blog post ponders the future of Amazon’s Unbox video service given its reported inability to “make a dent in Amazon’s business.” This service, which was launched nearly 18 months ago, is a movie download service that allows movies to be downloaded right to set-top boxes (thanks to a partnership with Tivo). Recently, Amazon […]

Industries like people sometimes do not live forever. The whaling industry was the major source of fuel for Americans in the 19th century. Great fortunes were made and Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world. It died as people switched to gas and electricity. The typewriter industry had an almost century run […]

Some of eBay’s sellers have organized a strike of the giant auction site for having raised prices to them. Like any company, eBay has to abide by the law of demand (if customers don’t value your product enough they’ll go somewhere else) and the law of the jungle (competitors will eat you alive if […]

A recent announcement at the Mobile World Congress that Apple iPhones produced 50x more Google searches than any other handset got a ton of news coverage. Hello, can anyone really be that surprised? Apple’s killer app is really its browser – it was the first mobile handset to make web surfing humane. And more web […]