Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

With the holiday season fast approaching and the state of the economy in doubt consumers are flocking to coupon and discount sites looking to save money wherever they can. Yahoo is looking to help consumers find the latest and greatest deals with the launch of their latest shopping destination called Yahoo Deals.

Yahoo Deals, which is part of the Yahoo Shopping platform, offers coupons, notices of store wide sales, digital circulars and daily deals. Here is a run down of what a shopper will find on Yahoo Deals:

• Handpicked daily deals from partners like Woot!, Amazon and BradsDeals.
• Thousands of coupons from retailers like Macys, The Gap, Nike and Apple.
• Comprehensive list of store wide sales.
• Digital versions of weekly store circulars from some of the biggest retailers..

Yahoo Deals is a good site offering a needed service, however it isn’t anything original and I have to ask what took so long? Yahoo should have had this site up and running years ago.

Earlier this year Yahoo bought web analytic service provider IndexTools, yesterday Yahoo announced IndexTools is now Yahoo Web Analytics and is being released into limited Beta. The new service will be deployed initially to Yahoo! Small Business customers and a select group of advertisers.

“Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.”

I am eagerly anticipating when Yahoo Web Analytics is released to the general public. From my experience and from what I have seen the service could become a serious competitor to not only free service Google Analytics, but also other paid web analytic providers.

TechCunch is saying that that the off-again / on-again merger talks between Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL are on-again and the deal could go through as early as this month. The deal has been talked about for the better part of this year and it makes as much sense as ever for both struggling companies. Time Warner has been dieing to get rid of AOL since the 2001 deal completely bombed. Yahoo, who has fought off Microsoft and has been in panic mode ever since, is looking to make some sort of blockbuster deal to give shareholders some confidence and hope. The actual details of the deal are yet to be known, but If the merger of Yahoo and AOL does goes through it would involve Yahoo getting all of AOL except their dial-up business (why hasn’t Earthlink bought this yet?).

Here is why I think the deal would be great for both companies. First, AOL has a laundry list of tremendous web properties that the far superior Yahoo Ad Platform could better monetize. Secondly, the integration of Yahoo & AOL mail / AIM & Yahoo Instant Messaging can not be underestimated - add the web properties with the web services and you are talking about a lot of eyeballs.

If this deal does go through, I would suggest Yahoo sell of its search business - get out of that losing battle and focus on web property and services  monetization. Let Microsoft / Google battle for search share while Yahoo can start to dominate everything else.

So a couple months ago I wrote a blog post about how Yahoo’s Domain Service is a Rip Off. Without going into too much detail the bottom line is that I had about 150 domains I have yet to move from Yahoo Domains to my other, cheaper and better, domain hosting companies. Well, back in July Yahoo made the announcement that they are now going to charge $34.95 for renewing domains - an outlandish sum considering every other domain service charges far less. Well, after seeing a couple renews coming up on my charge card for $34.95 I finally took action. The bulk of the Yahoo domains I am moving over to my GoDaddy domains account, their normal yearly price for .com domain is a about $10.50, which is obviously much better than what Yahoo plans on charging me. However, I signed up for their bulk domain discount service which, for $89.95 a year, I get a steep discount on all renewals and new domain purchases. Basically, those Yahoo domains that were going to cost me $34.95  year will now cost me $6.95 - that is a $300+ in savings right off the bat. Plus, GoDaddy has awesome customer service, a full suite of hosting packages and a user-interface that makes domain management a breeze.

Like I said in my previous post I am assuming that this outrageous domain charge is the result of Yahoo wanting to get out of the domain registration business. No one in their right mind would pay what they are charging.

Google took the offensive today in defending its partnership with Yahoo by launching a “Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement” website. YahooGoogleFacts.com (nice domain) sole purpose is to squash any fears about anti-competitiveness / ad monopolization the partnership would create through putting all of the details on the table.

Highlights from the website include:

• Facts about the deal
• What people are saying (testimonials)
• What the deal means for advertisers
• Why the deal is good for competition
• Terms of the deal
• Voluntary delay for regulators
• The below document that covers the partnership in specific detail:

For a company with Google’s size and power it surprised me that they felt the need to put up what basically is a public relations portal….too me this says that they aren’t  confident the deal will pass government review. The website covers the basic facts people would be interested in, however it lacks exact details of when, how and where.