Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Nothing upsets me more than when a company tries to take advantage of their situation. As I mentioned in my SEO Domain Strategy 101 article, I own great deal of domains - in fact the exact number eludes me but I know it is around 1,800 or so. I have been buying, building and collecting domains since at least the mid-90’s and for a few years in the late 90’s I used Yahoo’s Domain service for most of my domain purchasing and hosting. Even though I have since moved all of my hosting away from Yahoo I still have about 150 domains that are housed and auto-renewed with Yahoo. Most of these domains I have never done anything with or have just held onto since I registered them for whatever reason. Every year I get my annual auto-renew letter, the price usually fluctuates, but it has always stayed in the $9.95 to $14.95 range. Whatever, no big deal since all my good domains are housed elsewhere and I have it on my list to transfer all of my domains to one company (not Yahoo).

Well imagine my surprise when I received the below email from Yahoo this morning. Yahoo is now charging $34.95 for domain renewals. Are you kidding me? $34.95? I am shocked when I see domain renewals costs over $10…$34.95 had me thinking it was an error. So, I proceed to call Yahoo and their helpful customer service staff confirmed the price change that went into effect July 1st. Wow. I am absolutely stunned by this. Anyone with any sort of domain knowledge will say that this is an absolute rip off by Yahoo and will result in a mass exodus of domains.

After digesting this for a few hours I started to think about what was Yahoo’s reasoning behind the price increase considering they are now nowhere near competitive. My first conclusion was that they wanted out of the domain business, so basically if  you don’t transfer your domain you would pay 3 - 4 times the going rate Fewer domains, higher profit margin. Hmm, doesn’t make much business sense since the new fee of $34.95 a year per domain would probably not cover all of the domains they ended up losing. My next thought was that they are trying to up sell me different services (like domain hosting and email), that when bundled together would decrease my overall renewal cost - for example, sign up for Yahoo’s $9.95 monthly web hosting and get your domain renewal free. This is a very common practice…however, when you look at the email below there is no mention of any other service. Housing a domain costs nothing except a $.20 yearly ICANN fee and a few bytes of space.

So what is the deal Yahoo? Did some moronic product manager slip this one by while Yahoo has been in chaos? If anyone has any idea as to Yahoo’s logic behind this ridiculous increase in domain renewal fee please share. In the mean time I will be busy transferring my remaining domains away from Yahoo.

When you are fighting for your life you need to do anything you can to save it. Yahoo executives, who are fighting for their jobs, are using their most valuable asset - the Yahoo.com Homepage - in their fight against Carl Icahn.

The Yahoo homepage, which is the most visited single page on the internet, is being used to let shareholders know the “truth” about Carl Icahn and convince the voters that his plans are wrong for the future of Yahoo. As you can see from the image at the bottom of this post, Yahoo didn’t just give the Icahn / Microsoft fight some meaningless real estate, we are talking big graphical call-outs on the right side and footer…space that is probably worth a very high CPM and garners millions of daily eyeballs. When you click on one of the two locations it takes you to a “Yahoo Stockholder Information” page that calls out Icahn and focuses on two big points: “The Icahn Slate Is Not the Right Answer for Yahoo!” and “Yahoo!’s Experienced Board and Executive Leadership Are Positioning Yahoo! for Future Success”. Basically, Yahoo points out the many flaws in Icahn’s plans and tries to discredit his business experience by calling out his not so good recent involvements with public companies.

So what exactly is Yahoo looking to get out of this? First they are trying to get every single Yahoo voting shareholder to side with the current executive team, there is even a convenient “vote now” button. Secondly, I am sure that Yahoo, who has been hammered recently in the press, could use any positive sway in public opinion. However, I would assume that any shareholder that cares to vote are well versed in what is been going on since every major media outlet online and offline has covered this Yahoo / Microsoft / Icahn battle in great detail from the beginning.

To me this reeks a bit of desperation, however it is understandable desperation. The fact that Yahoo has leveraged its homepage for their proxy fight shows that this battle very close - probably even more close than anyone expected.

In what was no shock to anyone, Twitter officially announced their purchase of search engine Summize for roughly a few million in cash and Twitter stock (hearing different numbers from different sources). Rumors of the purchase have been floating around the internet for over a week now and most people were just waiting for the official announcement. Today we saw what was once Summize.com now direct you to Twitter Search (Search.Twitter.com),which is the same Summize user-interface but with Twitter branding.

Summize was always the best Twitter search application around, I regularly used it to not only monitor specific keywords but my own name. Summize gained a great deal of traction and traffic when Twitter was having their technical issues the past couple of months. Twitter users flocked to Summize and other search services to make sure they caught all of their @replies and friends messages. I, like many others, never stopped using it once Twitter (sort of) got their act together.

On the surface the purchase of Summize drastically improves the internal search functionality of Twitter. But, as I have discussed in previous Twitter Monetization posts, this acquisition is another step in bringing in actual revenue. How? First, they can sell ads on the Twitter Search results pages. This is the easiest and most logical immediate step as everyone would be up in arms over any sort of advertisements within the main Twitter interface and Tweets. Secondly, Twitter can license out the Summize API to other micro-blogging / Web 2.0 services to power their own internal site-search, in this scenario they can either get paid for the use or have a rev-share deal in place.

The great thing about this deal is that it is a win-win for Twitter. They have improved the user-experience, brought in some top engineers and maybe created a much needed revenue model.

Now if only they can get rid of the “Fail Whale”…

Last night Yahoo announced the launch of another piece in their “open” puzzle by releasing Yahoo Search BOSS. BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service, allows anyone to build and launch a custom search platform that is powered by Yahoo! search’s proprietary technology and infrastructure.

I played around with BOSS today and it is pretty cool, however it really isn’t that innovative considering both Microsoft and Google already offer their own custom search solutions. The difference with BOSS is that Yahoo really does give more control over the key part of any search engine - the rankings and results. Basically, Yahoo allows the user to manipulate the rankings however they see fit, this will really come in handy for more advanced users that are looking for their own unique search engine but do not have the resources to build it themselves.

Here is a list of features that are currently available with BOSS (Yahoo plans on rolling out more features over the next few months).

• Ability to re-rank and blend results.
• Presentation flexibility: no Yahoo display / branding requirements.
• BOSS Mashup Framework: allows developers to mashup search results with other public data sources.
• Access to web, news and image search.
• No rate limits on daily queries.

So why is Yahoo! launching BOSS? Two main reasons: 1) to grow their share of the search market and 2) create new revenue streams. I am not exactly sure how successful they will be with both but here is what Yahoo had to say about it…

“First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.”

Since I have used Google’s Custom Search Engine on numerous properties for some time now, the question becomes would I switch to BOSS? Not right away, but once Yahoo releases some other features and I see BOSS in action more, it is definitely something I will consider.

Is there a day that goes by where some new micro-blogging “Twitter Killer” isn’t launched? Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, FriendFeed…the list goes on and on. Each comes out the gate promising to be the next big thing and outside of a few earlier adopters they usually fizzle into social media purgatory - some good user numbers but nothing to get that excited over.

The latest entry into the micro-blogging field is Identi.ca and the buzz around them is of course very loud. So what is the big deal? Well, first they copy the Twitter minimalist approach in terms of user-experience. They avoid cluttering the site with other features / content and stay away from displaying content in a new way (e.g. Plurk) - Identi.ca sticks to the basics. However, the key differentiation is that while other micro-blogging services are looking to capitalize on Twitters technical issues (Fail Whale anyone?) Identi.ca actually tries to solve it. Identi.ca has made its code open-sourced and encourages users to host Identi.ca on their own servers - this approach would distribute the load if the service became extremely popular and theoretically avoid the downtime that plagues Twitter.

So why wont Identi.ca, or any other micro-blogging service, take down Twitter? The answer is simple, long-term user adoption. There is a difference between just signing up & updating a few times and actually contributing on a regular basis. For micro-blogging the power is in the conversation and right now Twitter wins hands-down. During Twitters technical issues, where it seemed like it was down more than it was up, many people tried out other services, however the majority of users have always come back to Twitter in some capacity. It is true that some other services, like FriendFeed, have better features but if you look at the traffic (see graph below) Twitter has too big of a head start in terms of users and conversations. Any other micro-blogging service who launches is automacially put behing the 8-ball and must play serious catch-up and face, in my opinion, insurmountable odds.

Right now, FriendFeed is probably the biggest Twitter competitor in terms of functionality and industry buzz.  All of the big social media players are users and some (like Jason Calacanis) have become fans and have threatened to start migrating all of their conversations to FriendFeed and away from Twitter. However, the success of a micro-blogging service has to do more than just having Calacanis, Arrington, Scoble, Israel, etc, use it - I already read their blogs and subsribe to their feeds so really how is that providing new content discovery? It isnt.

On top of users and conversations, Twitter also has two other areas where they are killing the competition: their API and mobile strategy. Just about every Web 2.0 service offers their API’s - Twitter is no different. However, because of the volume of traffic Twitter generates, numerous third-party developers have built applications that truly enhance the Twitter experience - Summize, Twellow, TwitterVision, Twirl, the list goes on and on. Granted every other micro-blogging service can replicate each of these applications, but again it comes down to users and Twitter just blows everyone else away.  In regards to mobile, Twitter has gotten this right from day one. Micro-blogging is about sending quick updates and the ability to do that from your mobile phone via text message or applications (e.g. TwitterBerry) adds another layer of ease to the conversation.

At the end of the day micro-blogging comes down to two things - users and conversations, and you cant have one without the other. Twitter has both. Twitter does need to overcome its technical hurdles and there are definite improvements to be made to the user-interface but in the end Twitter is the only micro-blogging service that doesnt have to be perfect to succeed.