AdViking

Some of AdViking’s first thoughts from the ICMA General Meeting in Brussels.

The Publishers as a whole get that Print is in decline, Online is growing and they need to ramp up their online strategies.  Though, AdViking is sure they would love to have the growth in Print that India enjoys!

Only a few, seem to understand that a good Monetisation strategy is fundamental to their success and now’s the time to do it.  A lot less questions than the B2B folks about why don’t I just partner with Google and that’s my online strategy.

It’s a mixed bag on those Publishers who also get that Search is critical.  Which is strange if you think that for Classifieds, how can they be anything but Search (even if they have put together a taxonomy driven approach - that’s still Search).

The future is about vertical, niche sites that share an underlying common platform (e.g.:  Search).

In general, everyone is a bit brow beaten by the success of Schibsted and are looking for someone else to proof out what the Norwegians are saying.

It’s not a huge jump anymore for the Publishers to think about joining forces with non-competitive Publishers in their markets to band together for some sort of network play.

Phrase capture:  Monetisation is fundamental.  Mapping is Key.  Some believe they are in the position to mimic Directories and become SEMs to their advertisers.  MOBILE is key - especially for untethered countries (e.g.:  India) - though no-one gave truly compelling reasons to accept the channel.

Tag capture:  Synergies for assets.  Utilise high performing.  Explore under performing.

All in all, a much more upbeat and dynamic event compared to the B2B one.  Go get them Classifieds.

In an interesting week when Microsoft is pushing ahead with the Yahoo attempt, the Ray Ozzie thumbprint is felt in the cloud, the deal to purchase Fast Search & Transfer (disclosure below) has been announced to have been closed.

Now the deal has closed, Microsoft will be able to deliver on the strategy that Bill Gates outlined in his final keynote at the Sharepoint Conference 2008.

Disclosure:  Some of AdViking is employed by FAST and Microsoft.  More details on About.

Now that we have reached the point that Search is the Portal, we can all be forgiven for thinking that the user experience is no longer critical.

AdViking just read the excellent Dead Man Walking article on FastCompany  on the continuing demise of AOL that proves this is far from the truth and in fact that User Experience is more important than ever.

Or better, let’s rephrase that to knowing what experience user’s want when they use your Search is more important than ever.

In response to a fall in Search traffic at AOL (38.9 million visitors in November 06 vs. 35.2 million in May 07). Ron Grant*, the new COO for AOL, took the executive decision that the fall was due to the fact that AOL returned a rich results set (e.g.: multi-media, pictures), that was reported to have a higher than Google effective return on advertising. And so deciding to buck the movement towards a richer search experience (ASK’s 3D search, Google’s Universal Search), Grant ordered the results set to be more look Google’s.

The results of this change could be considered catastrophic. Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield said, “Management was blindsided by how disruptive the change to search was.” In a period of industry growth, AOL’s Search revenue fell from $232 million in Q1 to $156 million in Q2. To put it bluntly, one could say that the changes made to the AOL’s Search Experience could be blamed for the drop of $76 million in one quarter!

It appears that Users liked the Search Experience on AOL and the fact that is was different was the just the point. That is users were in a different mindset when they came to use AOL Search. Meaning, knowing who your users are and how they use your site is critical.

Finally, on the trend around richer Search experiences, enquiro research wrote an enlightening whitepaper, Search Engine Results: 2010. It’s based on interviews and research on the impact of user interaction with these richer results. The interviewees included: Jakob Nielsen, Marrisa Mayer, Greg Sterling and Danny Sullivan.

* Time-Warner company men, Steve Falco and Ron Grant, have been put in place as the CEO and COO of AOL. Employees and now the wider industry appear to have started to refer to Falco and Grant as Mr. Burns and Smithers.

Eric Schmidt is singing a different tune from his troops this week in an attempt to calm down a storm brewing with the World Association of Newspapers, the defacto global organisation for newspaper publishers, about WAN’s attempt to level/organise the playing field around the way content is distributed across the Web.

Last week, at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit Rob Jonas, Google’s head of media and publishing partnerships in Europe, said in his keynote that the current standard (robots.txt) “provides everything that most publishers need to do”. In response, Gavin O’Reilly, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers and COO, questioned this stance as from his view Publishers strongly disagree.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt changed the tune and told ITWire actually the problem is not that Google doesn’t want to implement it, it’s just that they are having problems implementing it.

• Current standard, Robots.txt is limited to telling crawlers that you can or can’t crawl the content
• New proposed standard, Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) provides Publisher with much more control, such as putting a time stamp on how long content can be used.

It’s probably too obvious a point to make and maybe AdViking is getting too jaded here. But it seems to be that isn’t in Google’s self-interest to solve the tech issues to implement this new standard that gives Publishers much more control over how their content is used. If I was working at Microsoft Live Search, ASK even Yahoo! in the crawler team, I would be looking to pony up to WAN and the other publisher groups to get ACAP supported and get a quick PR win.

Off the main topic of AdViking, but interesting none the less. As predicted in the post about Getting Religion about Search, some more visibility into Microsoft’s thinking about the importance of Search and how they see FAST helping in this battle was revealed at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008.

In the Bill Gates keynote, he talks about the Microsoft approach to Enterprise Search, which is there are three levels to enterprise search and for each of these they have an offering:

1. Entry Level - Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
2. Infrastructure - MOSS 2007
3. Specialized - This will be covered by FAST

As for FAST, Bill then goes on to say this:

FAST is best in class enterprise search, and it’s got great scale, it handles special data types. In a lot of businesses, this has turned out to be a very, very important tool for them.

Bill then introduces Richard Riley, Senior Technical Product Manager, who does a demo of Search Server Express but more importantly does two demo’s of FAST/SharePoint integration. The first being a great demo of FAST entity extraction to provide navigators mashed up with Silverlight to show the coolest document preview AdViking has seen so far. The second is a demo of zero-term search and how that can applicable to a SharePoint deployment.

You can get the video here (750 kbps) or you should be able to find it from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/sharepointconference/materials.mspx

• Scroll to 14:25 to see Bill Gates last day at Microsoft (In case you haven’t seen it)
• Scroll to 47:50 to see Bill Gates discuss search and FAST
• Scroll to 54:45 to see the FAST/SharePoint integration

Also, Microsoft has made some interesting announcements about providing SharePoint and Exchange as online services. All of this, mapped up with the proposal to purchase Yahoo! reads to AdViking like Microsoft is starting the year very aggressively and are looking to take the fight to Google.