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Monday, December 29, 2003 |
Dave Winer Starts Moderated Mail List for RSS Users.
Over the Christmas holiday I started a new moderated mail list for people who use RSS. It's off to a great start. No flames of course, and lots of good ideas, and a discussion about feeds with excerpts. [Scripting News]
10:54:45 AM 
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Online Shopper Behavior: Becoming more directed?
Study Indicates Online Shoppers Spend More Time Buying, Less Shopping. A DoubleClick study examining spending habits of online purchasers in the third quarter showed that online buyers are becoming more directed in their purchases, spending more time on fewer pages and spending more on fewer transactions relative to the previous quarter. Other interesting tidbits include the fact that the conversion rate of visitors to buyers declined 34 percent while the average transaction amount increased 44 percent. Shoppers also abandoned in un-checked-out shopping carts almost as much as they purchased. [summary] [MarketingWonk - The single source for no-nonsense Internet marketing news]
10:50:18 AM
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Display Ads Hanging On.
Read between the lines on this one. It doesn't really say that display ads are coming back, only that they didn't decline as much as expected in the spring of 2003. Where to spend your money on advertising is still a big question. Do tests and measure the results. Because businesses may still be buying display ads does not necessarily mean that all businesses are making sales from them. Consider banner swaps and affiliate programs as one way to find out what works and what doesn't, without spending a pile of money on ads. -- BB
After a Dip, Display Ads to Make Comeback. With so much attention paid to search engine marketing, one might assume the lowly display banner to be dead. Looking at research from Jupiter and PricewaterhouseCoopers/IAB, that's just not the case. While display ads were expected by Jupiter to decline 6 percent to $3 billion in 2003, ad sales for all categories were expected to increase to $6.3 billion in 2003 making display ads fully one half of all online ad revenue. Additionally, while display ads were found by PricewaterhouseCoopers/IAB to have declined to 22 percent of all ad revenue in Q2 from 32 percent of all ad revenue in Q2 of 2002, the format still accounted for 23 percent of all online ad revenue in the first half of 2003 - second only to search at 29 percent. IAB reports. [summary] [MarketingWonk - The single source for no-nonsense Internet marketing news]
10:43:28 AM
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The Rising Influence of Weblogs.
I am doing something that I had resisted before. This post opens a new category, dedicated to politics. To the best of my ability, I will keep it non-partisan. The intent is to highlight the good ideas and the loony/dangerous trends that exist within all of the political parties, mainly to help entrepreneurs identify where they want to place their support in the coming US election and after. (For the record, I am not crazy about Bush and I think Dean is the wrong answer. If the Democrats nominate Dean, I'm voting for Bush. If the Democrats nominate Kerry, we have an actual race. If the Democrats nominate someone else, I'm still going to be paying close attention.) -- BB
The Rising Influence of Weblogs in Journalism. OJR looks back at 2003 and asks "What do you think were the most important developments related to online journalism (media, video, blogging, etc.) in the past year?" The most cited is the use of Weblogs in reporting. Jeff Jarvis says:
"Watch Weblogs and citizens' media bring freedom of expression and democracy to other lands next year. Whether in a small town in Iran or Iraq or America, citizens' media means that anyone can now own a printing press and has the power that goes with it. That will revolutionize news, media, politics, government, and marketing." 2004 is going to be such an interesting year in this field. It's still so cool to be out in front of it, to have at least some functional understanding of what this all means. I really think that with the crush of the election coming near, we're going to see the Weblog envelope pushed in ways we haven't yet seen, and that we'll be in much different company by the end of the year. [Weblogg-ed News]
10:34:48 AM
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Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003.
This list is a good one to review as you think about your web site redesign goals. The linked page also includes links to past Web design mistake lists. As the article states, the old mistakes haven't gone away -- review them too. Entrepreneurial success depends on analyzing and correcting the things that didn't work. -- BB
Nielsen watch 2003.
Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 make interesting reading this year, covering topics including undated content, incomprehensible thumbnails and overly specific forms. In previous years Jakob's complaints tended to center around far more obvious problems such as horizontal scroll bars and fixed size fonts. Either the field of web usability has matured to the point where the common issues are less glaringly obvious or Jakob is running out of low-hanging fruit. [Simon Willison's Weblog]
9:57:24 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Bill Brandon.
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