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News
Search giants in privacy race
Ask.com has announced plans to make web searches completely anonymous - a first among major search engines. In another move aimed at improving privacy, Google has announced that it will slash the lifetime of its cookies to two years.
Time may be a better measure
Nielsen//NetRatings has added the time factor to its internet audience measurement service aiming to provide a more accurate picture of user engagement on Web 2.0 sites.
Spielberg in Wii creative drive
Steven Spielberg and Shigeru Miyamoto, giants of the film and video games industries, have pooled their creative energies in a new game to be released on Nintendo’s Wii console by Electronic Arts.
Ad spend grows at fastest rate in seven years
Riding on a wave of increased marketing budgets and robust growth in ad spend for the second successive quarter, the latest IPA Bellwether Report highlights internet advertising as the one area registering the strongest growth at 6% of all marketing spend. One-in-five companies now allocate at least 10% of their total spend to the internet.
Comment
An abundance of fish and butterflies
Relevancy in search engine marketing is the key to winning consumers; increased sophistication in systems and targeting, raises advertiser interest and spend. Yahoo! Search has launched a new platform, code named “Panama” that hopes to do both.
Bitesize
Slim overtakes Gates
Carlos “Slim” Helu has raced ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to become the world’s richest man.
Calling all closet Catgirl creators
Are you a closet Frank Miller in the making with the next Batman character up your sleeve?
Swedish granny connects at lighting speed
A 75-year-old woman in Sweden who previously didn’t even own a computer has been supplied with a 40 gigabyte per second broadband connection, a speed even the geeks in Silicon Valley can only dream about
South Korean search solution
Ask a South Korean for directions and they’d be really keen to help.
Diddy's digital recruitment drive
In a first for the celebrity job market, rapper and RnB singer P. Diddy has gone straight to where he knows he’ll find his fan-base to recruit a PA—YouTube.
The Numbers Page
Strong growth in US and UK online advertising revenue
Although total UK online advertising revenue, at $2.65 billion (£1.3 billion), was well below the US total of $17 billion, itrepresented an eight-fold increase between 2001 and 2005.
Top 10 US and UK sites based on time
There are similarities between the most engaging sites in both countries but AOL ranked first in the US while eBay was No.1 in the UK based on Nielsen//NetRatings time-based measurement.
Total broadband subscribers
The US is clearly ahead of the UK with 60.4 million broadband subscribers (Point Topic: March 2007). The UK, with just under 14 million, ranks 7th behind South Korea which leads the world in household penetration.