Daily Bits

Arnold Zafra

Yahoo to Shut Down Geocities, Long Live Geocities!

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For those who grew up in the Internet during the 1990’s, Geocities would certainly ring a bell.  Back then, Geocities was the closest thing you can get to have an online presence and a social community.  I’m feeling a bit nostalgic right now as I remember the several Geocities account I created which died a natural death. Speaking of death, that is where Geocities is heading as Yahoo is quietly announcing that it will be shutting down the service soon. Quite interestingly, just as Geocities has become a dormant service, Yahoo is also quietly disclosing its plan to discontinue Geocities.  In fact if you’re not going to visit the Geocities landing page at geocities.yahoo.com, you wouldn’t know that it is going to the dead pool this year. [Read more…] about Yahoo to Shut Down Geocities, Long Live Geocities!

Users Prefer Brand Mentions than Online Ads

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If you are involved in online marketing,  you might be wondering why some of you online ads are not effectively pulling users to your product site.Online advertising may not be an effective tool anymore. Well at least according to this study by ARAnet  which says that brand mentions are making users to take action rather than reading online ads, email offers, sponsored search engine links, and banner/pop up ads.

Specific results of the ARAnet study reveals that 51% of respondents are somewhat/most likely to read or take action when they read about product mentions on regular articles (blog posts?) which users read from sites they follow regularly. Users also prefer product advertisements which are written like an ordinary online article.

Although the study did not mention the specific type of articles, this could be in the form of blog posts, right? I mean, how many of us click on links provided by our favorite bloggers who write about something new online? And we all know that some famous and widely read blogs do some paid product reviews.  

Going deeper into demographics, the study showed that younger users  are the most likely to respond to this form of product advertisements than the matured users.  Specifically,  these users are in the 18-34 age range.

Interestingly, pop-up ads continue to be least favored form of online advertisers among the respondents of the study. And good news for email marketers and paid search ads workers, these forms of online ads still managed to elicit favorable actions among users. 

So, how are you doing your online product marketing? Still stuck with email marketing? paid search engine ads? or pop-up ads?  Are these forms of online advertising still effective for your products?

Facebook is the No.1 Social Network in Europe, What Else is New?

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 As if it’s not yet a known fact that Facebook is now the no.1 social network worldwide, comScore made an analysis of Facebook’s growth in Europe for the past year. And guess what? Results of the analysis reveal that Facebook increase by 314 percent from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009.  Interestingly, these increasing number of audience are not just one-minute visitor of Facebook, but are actually spending an average 3 hours per month visit. [Read more…] about Facebook is the No.1 Social Network in Europe, What Else is New?