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Cashing Out: Week of Dec 7th – 13th, 2008 in Online Marketing News Plus Holiday Contest
This Special Edition of Cashing Out will feature a Holiday Contest with the prize being Affiliate Summit Gold Tickets. But first this week’s news:
Google Opens the Floodgates to Domainers
Previously AdSense for Domains was restricted to domainers with 1 million page views or greater. In a move that will let them eat at the same trough with companies like Parked.com, Google has opened up Adsense for Domains to everyone. Here is an excellent step-by-step guide by search blogger Brad Geddes for advertisers who want to opt out of this feature.
Layoffs Continue
Online companies continued announcing layoffs this week including:
Sony – Had the biggest announcement this week cutting 8,000 jobs about 4% of its workforce
CBS Interactive – Eliminated 275 jobs about 10% of its staff (including jobs at Last.fm)
TechTarget – Let go of 76 jobs about 12% of its workforce
The Cobalt Group – Cut 45 jobs about 4% of its staff
Stalwarts of the Newspaper Industry Take a Hit
The newspaper industry was hit with a one-two punch as both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune struggle to survive. Perhaps the harder hit of the two was the Chicago Tribune which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Tribune owns 8 major dailies including the Los Angeles Times and over 20 regional tv stations. The proceedings listed the Tribune with assets of $7.6 billion against a debt of $12.9 billion. Also at stake and not covered by the filing are the Chicago Cubs baseball team which is part of the assets that Tribune owner Samuel Zell is currently attempting to sell.
The New York Times didn’t fare much better this week announcing that it was seeking a $225 million dollar loan against its Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The Times also announced a wage freeze for 2009 impacting all non-union employees. An interesting side note and what may indicate a future trend is that Times GM Denise Warren highlighted the roll out of custom widgets for RSS feeds allowing readers to focus on certain content like luxury.
Accel Partners Raises a Cool Billion
We usually don’t talk about VC companies raising money but considering all the normal doom and gloom this weeks announcement by Accel Partners seems like a bright spot. Partially on the strength of a portfolio that includes huge names like Baidu, BitTorrent, Brightcove, comScore, Facebook; Accel celebrated a major coup this week raising just over a billion dollars in funding. The money was raised by Accel Growth Fund, $480 million, and the Accel European III Fund raising $525 million. Accel’s investments focus mostly on the information technology industry like digital media, mobile, and networking.
IZEA’s Kmart Blogger Promotion Sparks Broadsides and Brouhaha
Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang fired off a question on Twitter that ignited a debate about the transparency and credibility of bloggers participating in promotion by IZEA on behalf of Kmart. While six bloggers where enlisted in the campaign including Shoemoney, the brunt of the controversy was weathered by social media expert and all around upstanding fellow Chris Brogran. The whole flare up created some very interesting discussion and debate which is well worth reading: Jeremiah Owyang’s post on the matter, Chris Brogan’s post on the matter.
ReveNews on Affiliate Marketing Insider with Linda Woods
The discussion focused on positive aspects of the online economy this Holiday season and predictions for Q1 next year. Listen to the archive of the show here.
Cashing Out Holiday Contest
Interested in going to upcoming Affiliate Summit West? ReveNews is giving away five Gold Passes to the show as a thank you to our readers. How do you win? Simple, answer the following five questions correctly and send your answers to angel /at/ revenews.com
1) When was the first installment of Cashing Out?
2) How much did Affiliate Marketer’s Give Back raise during the Susan G. Komen Seattle Walk for Breast Cancer?
3) What did CPAEmpire change its name to?
4) Whose infamous piece of linkbait asked you to “Kill Your Blog”?
5) What company boasted it’s biggest Black Friday ever?
First five people to send in the right answers (all of which can be found in previous editions of the Cashing Out segment on ReveNews) will win the passes. Contest open until the next Cashing Out segment is published on December 21st. Thank you for reading and good luck!
google adsense domainer article by Brad Geddes is excellent. he shows the two ways to impact this channel, that’s important because there are times when my testing has shown me that parked domains aren’t an unmitigated disaster and will actually generate some sales, so you want to be able to deftly manage the choice array here, covering the kill-throttle-allow spectrum. obviously Brad knows his shitake, his article shows you the methods you’d need to properly execute your preferences.
Are you kidding? I’ll totally enter this!
Now let’s just see if I’m fast enough!
Go fingers!!
~GM