Google Personalized PPC/CPC Results – Hurts Advertisers

I have been noticing something over the last couple of weeks in regards to rankings of paid search listings in Google and their odd propensity to show up differently in different browsers. Odd you say? Yes I say. Thinking of why this might be, the only logical conclusion I could come up with was cookies. So I decided to test it out. I took a screen shot before I deleted my Google based cookies and then one after. Here are the before and after screen shots. (Obviously this is anecdotal at this point!) Before Cookies Cleared After Cookies Cleared So Google is personalizing Paid Search results, thanks for the heads up Google. Good for advertisers? Not really. By doing this Google eliminates some listings all together, or pushes them to never-never land, thereby...

Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million

It was bound to happen. Many people have pointed out the link between the tech crash and today’s Web 2.0 venture frenzy. It always seemed backwards (traffic -> venture capital -> make money). In the “real world”, businesses are expected to prove their worth before they get venture backing. You know, actually posting profits before getting funded. Well, it has happened. iContact (formerly intelliContact by Broadwick) has managed to do just that. With over 11,000 clients, the company turned itself to Web 2.0 by building RSS / Blogs and Syndication into its already hugely successful Opt-In Email Marketing Platform. Updata Partners recognized that, for once in the history of the world, a young, successful, profitable company was able to seamlessly...