To keep up with Google Buzz, users with Yahoo! and Facebook accounts can now link their two accounts to share updates and messages across both platforms. Users will be able to see their Facebook newsfeeds on Yahoo! pages and share content from Yahoo! straight to Facebook.

“As the place that 600 million people visit every month, Yahoo! is in a unique position to bring together different social experiences from across the Web to a single place”, this post can be read on the official Yahoo! Yodel Anecdotal blog. Thus incorporating email with social media platforms makes sense as social media is about real-time and by linking these accounts it has made communicating and receiving information a whole lot more efficient.

This was a strategic move to encourage people to spend more time at Yahoo! website’s, resulting in more opportunities the company can use to make money through their advertising model. In Feb 2010, Hitwise found Australian searches from Google accounted for 87.26% (using Google.com.au and Google.com).

However, will this strategy really enough to significantly take away any significant market share from Google and their continuous market dominance?

National Cyber Security Awareness Week 6–11 June 2010

‘Stay Smart Online’ is The Australian Government’s website which aims to help raise awareness and help people better protect themselves and stay safe online.

This site provides a lot of useful resources which combine cyber security from various government agencies.

You can find 6 important (quick) tips that everyone using a computer or the internet should be well aware of. We really urge you to take the time to at least view these 6 steps, and help protect yourself online.

Visit the Stay Smart Online website.

Falling newspaper advertising demand and lower circulations as readers move online are some of the reasons that have prompted Rupert Murdoch’s attempt at reshaping the market for online news. The plans are to introduce his new subscription model in June before the World Cup where readers of the websites The Times and The Sunday Times will be charged for access.

Murdoch recently announced charges to use its online content. Readers will be charged:

• £1 for a day’s access – the same price as the weekday newspaper
• £2 for a week’s subscription to the two sites
• International visitors are charged $2/€1.50 a day or $4/€3 a week

While print subscribers to these newspapers will receive free web access, paying for online newspaper content in the past has been targeted to more specialist newspapers such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. So if free content is readily available on other news websites and blogs, will people be willing to pay for this?

David Grunwald, media consultant at Deloitte, said the key to paywall success would depend on the uniqueness of the content. “If a publisher has content that is readily elsewhere available, then readers will migrate away,” he said. “But if a publisher can offer niche or premium content such as brand-name columnists, top restaurant critics – it may well be that more people will be encouraged to subscribe.”

The internet has opened up many new methods of information distribution where countless sites are free to use. If Murdoch’s news content isn’t unique and can be found on sites at no cost, time will tell whether this paywall will succeed or not.

We would like to welcome Liz Lum to the team. Liz is an addition to the team and joining us as social media and SEO expert. Her background/degree is in marketing. With Social Media playing such an important part in website marketing strategies Liz will be a great addition to the team to further develop this area of the business. While her focus will mainly be on Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other areas of Social Media, Liz will also be working on other areas of web marketing such as SEO.

According to comScore, a leader in digital marketing intelligence, their recently released online video rankings metrics report found Google video property sites ranked first with 13.1 billion videos accounting for 43.2% of all videos viewed online. Hulu ranked quite far behind in second with 3.2% of all online videos viewed, followed by Microsoft sites ranked third with 2.1%, and Yahoo! sites at 1.2%.

With Google’s proposed introduction of Google TV, a combination of TV and the Internet, what impact will it have on the global entertainment industry? 

Google TV would open access to millions of video channels online, and with video-sharing communities growing rapidly such as YouTube who experiences 24 hours of new video uploaded every minute, viewers will no longer be confined to the current limitations of their set top box. TV shows and movie downloading are so prevalent, this may pose a dilemma for pay TV companies.   

It was also found that Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network with a reach of 92.6 million viewers, making up 52.1% of the total video viewing audience. Amid corporations investing millions on 10 second ads, looking to more cost effective channels like online video may be a more viable and sustainable strategy in the future.

Technology is dynamic and how companies utilise the relevant channels will determine how well they continue to stay in the game.

Could this see the end of Pay TV, or will we see the Pay TV model evolve into something else?

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