Cashing Out: Week of October 26th-November 1st, 2008 in Online Marketing News

Amazon Corrects SEO About Obama Gone Horribly Wrong

Chalk it up to on overzealous marketing or corporate dunderheadedness but Amazon has done the right thing by removing a tag that designated a Barack Obama mask as a “terrorist costume”. Amazon claims the tag was added by a customer using a dynamic product feature.

Layoff Troubles

Online companies continued to announce layoffs including:

Motorola – Was the biggest announcement this week cutting 3,000 jobs
Symantech – Eliminated 800 jobs amounting to 5% of its workforce.
SpotRunner – Cut 30% of its staff amid rumors of even more layoffs
Circuit City – Reduced its staff by 17%
Razorfish – Trimmed 2% of its staff

J.P. Morgan Predict Further Slump in Online Ad Market, Mostly in Display

J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan has yet again revised ad growth projections from earlier in the year. Most notable slump was in Display dropping from an estimated 16% growth to an estimated 6% growth. Recently released stats by the Rubicon Project seem to support this showing remnant media buys dropping 11%. It will be interesting to see how and if spending cutbacks impact CPA buys.

Google Settles with Authors

Google paid approximately $60 per author totaling $45 million dollars as part of a settlement (pdf) with The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The lawsuit arose over Google’s Book Search function which contains works protected under copyright that were scanned in without the author’s permission.

Zazzle Adds Embroidery

Affiliates and consumers can now get something new in Zazzle as the company announced it would add embroidery to its portfolio for ways to customize. According to Zazzle this move represents the first on-demand service of its kind and will be offered on shirts, jackets, hats and bags. Embroidery is an estimated $47 billion dollar a year industry.