Greg Hullender, where are you?

I met Greg Hullender in August at SES San Jose. He was acting msndude at the time. Recently, msndude was posting less & less on WMW and Barry noticed. I just found out today that he resigned from MSN Live Search recently. Not sure if that means he’s not with MS at all or just wanted a change of scenery within Redmond. But if not MS, it does make me wonder where he’s headed….

Greg & Matt spoke quite a bit about the two different paths MSN & Google are taking towards search. Greg honestly seemed to believe that he (MSN) was catching up and had the better long-term strategy. I wonder if Matt & Google thought there was something to that machine-learning & they went and poached another MS employee.

Greg, I wish you the best of luck wherever you end up!

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John Chow broke the story about Google’s Premium Network. It’s been picked up now by all the usual suspects, so I’ll post what I know.

They are creating premium audiences (or “clusters” as they are calling it) for specific verticals. Within the verticals are hand-selected sites they feel are best for big brands. These sites are presumably being paid under $5 CPM to show display ads or video ads. They must be above the fold.

The advertiser can select a cluster (and a DMA if they wish), and their video/display ad will be shown only on those hand-selected sites. This is Site-Targeting the way advertisers have said they want it. There will eventually be 60+ clusters, but right now only 8 are available. These include Pop culture, movies, family, music, etc. CPMs are $5-$15. This is above remnant network ads, but below what you’d typically pay to be on most of those sites they have selected. Read the rest of this entry »

This is an old post that was private that I decided to make public:

I was doing some domain speculating this weekend & kept running across Marchex sites everywhere. Then I read an article over at dnjournal that talks about Marchex and their $164M investment into direct navigation (domains). So I figured I’d get my hands dirty and see what they really had behind all those numbers. It kind of shocked me…

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming not even two weeks after the last Dilbertization, I ran across another one today.

We now have an acronym for a project that is “WTF”. Not done on purpose…no joke.

Brad Garlinghouse, a senior VP at Yahoo, has allegedly sent out a “memo” that is now making the rounds. I wonder if he’ll be a part of crafting a unified vision for Yahoo or if he’ll be asking “who’s comin’ with him” next week. He’s pretty harsh and makes some good points - I’d work for him.

Yahoo’s hands really are in everything & Garlinghouse is calling for exits to some of those current silo-ed businesses. He calls for heads to roll and a staff reduction of 15-20%. Personally, I hope they focus on search again - they’re going to be beat by not only Microsoft, but also ASK if they keep on the current path. Maybe we’ll see some innovation out of them again - behavioral targeted text ads - branded rich media ads on search - anything besides buying more companies and not really doing anything with them.

And lose the 10 cent minimum bid already.

Ding Dang Dong by Nora Dalasta with Alexis & Glenda Disselkoen

This was my engagement gift from TheWife - then TheFiancé. I particularly like the “spontaneous combustion” line.