AOL gains, Google loses in Nielsen metrics change
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Blog: Nielsen metrics changes benefit AOL over Google by looking at the amount of time users spend on a Web site instead of just unique visitors.
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com. America Online Inc. on Wednesday launched new features in its Singingfish search site for audio and video on the Web. AOL, a division of Time Warner Inc.
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Nielsen//NetRatings has issued the findings of their December 2006 search share rankings, which shows increases in year-on-year growth rates for every major search engine in the US market except for MSN / Windows Live Search: Provider         (000)    Growth   Searches Google Search    [...]
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Shares of Google Inc. GOOG.O jumped  13 percent to $167 on Friday after the Web search leader posted  its first results as a public company, and one broker said the  stock could hit $200, rekindling dot.com-era fervor.
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(InfoWorld) - Reactions to Time Warner Inc.'s decision to sack AOL LLC's chief executive officer (CEO) range from lukewarm endorsement to strident disapproval, as the industry tries to make sense of a move many observers find perplexing. Jonathan Miller, who guided AOL through a complicated transformation from an Internet has-been to a credible player, got his walking papers last Wednesday. Randy Falco, a TV industry veteran who was president and chief operating officer of the NBC Universal Television Group, will take over as AOL's chairman and CEO. "It's a strange move, because AOL is on the way up. Miller was responsible for turning around the ship successfully, so it's not clear to me why they're replacing him," says industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. Miller, named chairman and CEO in August 2002, had the difficult task of changing AOL's business model from one focused on dial-up Internet access subscriptions to one centered on online advertising. This involved tearing down AOL's "walled garden" and making freely available on the Web the content and services it previously reserved for paying members via its proprietary software. This leap of faith assumes AOL will make up and surpass with online advertising the revenue it will give up by abandoning its Internet access business. Early indications suggest the plan is working. Although in Time Warner's third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, AOL's revenue declined 3 percent, due to the shrinking access business, online advertising revenue increased 46 percent, faster than the industry average, which hovers between 33 percent and 37 percent. This prompted Time Warner officials and financial analysts to shower Miller and other AOL top leaders with praise. Privately, however, the recovery signs may have come too late and been underwhelming for Time Warner. At a time when an Internet startup like YouTube Inc. gets bought for $1.65 billion, Time Warner may have astronomical expectations for AOL that it didn't see Miller meeting. "Miller's accomplishment is that he transitioned AOL from a fee model to a free model, which gives AOL a future. The problem is that AOL remains a property in trouble, one that isn't performing particularly well, certainly behind Google and Yahoo. That has been the big disappointment. Today, if you have a [company with a] Web model, you're looking for a very rich return on investment," says industry analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group. But as it searches for bigger online ad growth with an Internet industry outsider as CEO, Time Warner risks turning AOL's recovery into a relapse. "Falco doesn't really know the business. That's going to be the problem: he's going to be learning on the job. It may not be a huge problem if he's packaging the company up for sale, but if he's going to try to run it, it's probably going to be a [long] learning experience," Enderle says. As learning goes, Miller is also credited with synchronizing AOL to varying degrees with key trends driving the rebirth of the Web economy, such as blogging, Internet search, digital music, online video and open-development platforms. Lately, he had been spurring AOL product teams to shift their philosophy from making simple yet integrated products and services to developing outstanding ones. "The emphasis today is to make stuff great," Miller said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco a week before he was dismissed. He added then that this focus is key if AOL wants to increase traffic to its Web sites, which in turn fuels its online ad business. Unlike his successor, Miller was no stranger to the Internet business when he joined AOL. He had been president and CEO of USA Interactive's USA Information and Services (USAIS), which included at the time businesses like Ticketmaster.com, Citysearch, Match.com, USA Electronic Commerce Solutions and Expedia.com. A Time Warner spokesman disputed claims that Falco is an Internet newbie, saying that at NBC he oversaw the launch of several Web sites, including one tied to the network's Olympic Games coverage , and of online initiatives, such as the joint portal for U.S. Hispanics that Yahoo and NBC's Telemundo network announced in May. Ultimately, however, Falco comes on board because of his ad sales and traditional media background. "His TV experience and advertising connections really dovetail perfectly with AOL's focus on video and advertising going forward," the spokesman said. "Randy Falco is the right person to take AOL to the next level." Falco will provide more details about what that "next level" goal is when he takes over at a yet undetermined date, according to the spokesman. Miller remains at AOL for now but will leave Time Warner at a date that also has yet to be determined, the spokesman said. At least one high-profile AOL official has decided to jump ship rather than work under Falco. Jason Calacanis, who sold his very successful Weblogs Inc. company to AOL last October and continued to run it as a stand-alone subsidiary, resigned on Friday, after writing on his blog about his disappointment over Miller's removal. Of course, there are precedents among Internet companies appointing chief executives from traditional media companies, like Terry Semel, who became Yahoo's CEO in 2001 after 24 years with Warner Bros., says James C. Goss, a media and entertainment financial analyst at Barrington Research. Whatever Falco does, it's clear his key mandate will be to leverage his experience in the TV industry to accelerate AOL's ad sales business. If he fails at that, his appointment will be seen as a major mistake. "Obviously, AOL has changed its stripes and this just seems like a reaction to the shift in its business, to have somebody as CEO who has a lot of experience in the media side and, from an organizational standpoint, with a large operation of that nature," Goss says. "This is reflective of the dramatic business model change and of the aspirations" that come with it. Be that as it may, some Internet industry observers remain befuddled. "From the outside, it doesn't seem to make any sense," Sterling says. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Google leads the charge of indexing information outside the web as it turns to TV. Also: Video-game maker Take Two buys a chunk of Sega & hellip;.  Google hiring practices raise eyebrows and speculations on future projects & hellip;. and more.
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Strong revenue growth for Web search  leader Google Inc. prompted analysts to raise share  price targets for the company on Thursday, but investors failed  to take the cue, sending the stock down 3 percent.
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Holiday traffic to Amazon.com surpassed traffic to eBay.com for the first time, according to Nielsen Online.
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Google, the new kid on the block in TV advertising, has signed up with The Nielsen Co., the venerable TV audience measurement company, in a deal that will increase the data available to participants in the Google TV Ads program.The agreement, expected to be announced Wednesday, calls for Nielsen to supply demographic data about TV viewers to Google, which in turn will use it to complement the information it already provides to advertisers and agencies in its TV advertising platform.Google TV Ads, operational since May, provides a platform for buying, selling, and distributing television advertising, along with tracking the effectiveness of campaigns.As it branches out into TV and other offline advertising markets like radio and print publications, Google maintains that it can apply to these markets the benefits of online advertising, in particular the possibility for targeting and tracking ads in a very granular way.For example, in its online ad system,&#160;Google matches ads to the topic of queries&#160;on its search engines and to the topic of third-party Web sites that participate in its ad network. Meanwhile, in Google&#39;s most popular ad format, called pay per click, advertisers pay only when users click on their ads.In Google TV Ads, Google captures and aggregates data from TV set-top boxes, giving advertisers constantly updated information about the distribution of their ads. Advertisers pay by set-top box impressions, according to Google.Wednesday&#39;s announcement is the first of a multi-year agreement in which the two companies will explore other opportunities to collaborate.Google didn&#39;t immediately reply to a request seeking comment on whether Wednesday&#39;s agreement also calls for Google to provide set-top box usage data to Nielsen.
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Web search leader Google (GOOG) Thursday posted a rise in quarterly profit that beat expectations and showed the company dodged the slowing growth trend that has hurt rivals Yahoo and eBay.
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(InfoWorld) - Google's revenue continued to climb in the second quarter with the company reporting revenue of $3.87 billion, up 58 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Net income for the quarter, which ended June 30, was $925 million, down just slightly from $1 billion in the first quarter. On a non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis, net income for the quarter was $1.12 billion, compared to $1.16 billion in the first quarter. Google-owned sites generated revenue of $2.49 billion, or 64 percent of revenue for the quarter, an improvement of 74 percent over the same quarter last year. Revenue outside of the U.S. was $1.84 billion, or 48 percent of total revenue for the quarter. That's up from 42 percent in the second quarter 2006. Google was pleased with its international expansion. "We continue to make significant international investments and we're seeing the benefits of this strategy," said George Reyes, CFO, during a conference call to discuss the earnings. Europe drove international growth for the search giant, with Spain, Italy, and France leading the charge and Germany and the U.K. also serving as significant revenue drivers, he said. The company continues to hire new workers in its international sites and expand product support in international markets. Paid clicks grew by 47 percent compared to the second quarter of 2006. That includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites as well as the sites of AdSense customers. Earnings per share was a bit lower than expected by analysts. Non-GAAP earnings per share for the second quarter was $3.56, down from $3.68 in the first quarter and a few cents shy of the $3.59 expected by financial analysts polled by Thomson Financial. Google's rift with eBay Inc. during the quarter didn't have a negative affect on earnings, executives said. In June, eBay pulled all of its ads from Google's AdSense network. The auction giant later returned to AdSense but at a significantly lower level. Even though eBay has been the largest advertiser on AdSense, there was no impact on Google from the change, said Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google. "EBay is a long term partner for Google and while it's true they adjusted their mix in our ad model, they continue to be a significant advertiser," he said. "We did not see an impact on Google from the changes they talk about that they made." During the call with financial analysts, Schmidt touched on Google's interest in upcoming wireless spectrum auctions. Google wants to see consumers buy any mobile device and be able to connect to a wireless network and use the full capability of the Internet, he said. That's because he wants those users to become Google advertising customers. "There's a direct connection between the open interoperable network we're arguing for in the FCC filing and so forth and the usage of Google services," he said. Google filed a document with the Federal Communications Commission urging the agency to make changes to the rules for an upcoming spectrum auction in order to ensure that the resulting networks are open. Google's earnings report comes against the backdrop of hints of a challenge to the company'sÂ proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hasÂ opened an investigation into the proposed $1 billion acquisition. The executives did not discuss the proposed merger, but Schmidt did touch on legal woes for the company. The two most significant lawsuits Google faces at the moment include those related to its book search project and the suit filed by Viacom related to YouTube, the online video site that Google owns. Schmidt called the suits very important and said he wished they could be solved by technology or otherwise. He also cautioned that governments around the world could potentially find some of Google's activities inappropriate and that could become the source of future legal troubles. For now, however, there are no such threats, he said. This story was updated on July 19, 2007 Â
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Google seemed to lose some of its sheen yesterday, after the company posted financial results indicating the online advertising market may be starting to slow.
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Google Inc.  stock jumped more than 12 percent on Wednesday to new highs, pushing the Web search leader past eBay Inc.  as the biggest Internet company in terms of stock market value, after trouncing quarterly earnings forecasts.
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Shares of Google Inc. slipped in pre-market trading Thursday after the world&#39;s most popular Internet search engine warned for the second time in a week that its fourth-quarter revenue growth rate is likely to slow from previous quarters.
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Web search leader Google Inc. in  April showed a sharp gain in market share among U.S. Web search  users, taking business from its three closest rivals, research  firm comScore Inc. said on Friday.
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For anyone who misses the late '90s, there's an easy way to get a flashback fix. Check out Google's stock. Shares of the Internet search engine Monday soared another &#36;14.97 to &#36;187.40, capping a 120% surge from its initial public offering price in August.
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NEW YORK -- Weak results from AOL tempered an otherwise strong quarter at Time Warner Inc., the company reported Wednesday, as gains from cable TV and the latest Harry Potter movie helped the media conglomerate meet Wall Street expectations.