The Catalyst Code

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

John Gapper responded today to Esther Dyson’s WSJ op-ed on the coming revolution in advertising.
I’m with John in being doubtful that friending is the future of online advertising. Someone will no doubt come up with a creative way to do some form of advertising for the millions of eyeballs on the social networking […]

Esther Dyson’s commentary on “The Coming Ad Revolution” manages to be both wrongly optimistic and wrongly pessimistic. Common ground is that there is a coming ad revolution. According to the article, online will become increasingly effective through the use of behavioral targeting, viral marketing on social networking sites, and sophisticated methods that are being dreamed […]

It has been quite a week for the search and online advertising industry. Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has dominated business news as it attempts to close the gap on industry behemoth Google. What these headlines have deflected though is the fact that Google’s market cap has fallen by $57 billion since the beginning […]

There’s lots of opportunity for online ad volume to grow. A few years from now mobile phones and television sets will mostly have Internet connections and be prime targets for companies that have the know-how to sell and target ads to those media. (For an in-depth look at how online advertising makes money, […]

Google’s CEO is “bullish” on mobile advertising. If he doesn’t want to see Google’s stock go into free fall—it’s lost about $42 billion since the new year—it had better be bullish and right. Google’s future is tied to getting ads on more places besides PCs and the mobile phone is the obvious place. You’ve […]

Making data transportable between websites sounds like a great idea and it has lots of really smart people behind it. You’ve plugged all your friends and their details into FaceBook and you’d like to have them available on MySpace or the next super social networking site out there. With transportable data you just pluck up […]