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Cashing Out: Week of February 1st-7th, 2009 in Online Marketing News

Feb 8, 2009
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Drugstore.com Finally Profitable

Congratulations are in order for Drugstore.com. For the first time since it went public in 1999 Drugstore.com announced that it reached profitability in Q4 of 2008. Increases showed 243% growth year-over-year, the highest ever in company history at 5.4 million in adjusted earnings (EBITDA). Looking ahead the company is targeting net sales goals in the range of $93.0 million to $97.0 million in Q1 of ’09.

TweetTornado Ups Micro-Spam Stakes

As Twitter’s popularity grows spam will become more and more of a problem. According to a PC World article in Yahoo Tech News, the makers of the Tweet Tornado application seek to cash in on those spammers by allowing for the creations of multiple Twitter accounts that can be sent identical updates through proxy servers. Of course Tornado’s developers are touting the negative reviews from ZDNet and others as proof of concept. Hopefully Twitter will find ways to combat such applications.

MySpace Launches Video Advertising Initiative Auditude

Following in YouTube’s footsteps MySpace capitalized on its partnership with Auditude by launching a pilot video program designed to help monetize the vast collection of videos on its network. The initiative places an informational overlay on the video that encourages the view to click for more information about the band or product. Initially MySpace seems to be focusing on music leveraging their ties to Warner Music Group to test the program on videos from such groups as My Chemical Romance and U2.

Google Leverages RIAA Hammer on Music Blogs on Blogger Platform

If the previous MySpace blurb was a positive story of the music industry leveraging technology to monetize content uploaded both by users and by the industry itself; then this apparent action by Google is the exact opposite.

According to the LA Weekly, music bloggers who host their sites with the platform Blogger have had multiple posts disappear with little to no warning. Apparently Google who owns the blogger platform, partially to enforce its user agreement and partially due to agreements it has with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), is simply deleting posts it feels are in violation of its terms. What’s interesting is that many of the bloggers interviewed in the article received promotional content that was meant to be reviewed. Hopefully Google will change its tact and allow bloggers some sort of process to confirm whether they have rights to use the material.

Filed under: Cashing Out
  • http://www.whoisandrewwee.com andrew wee

    Re: Google RIAA hammer on blogspot music blogs
    Yet another example why blanket “curation” AKA censorship is bad.

    I’d figured that they would do a manual review of a couple of thousand of posts before letting some delete-crazy content filter run amok on the blogspot network – almost like a reverse worm.