ReachLocal Expects More Financial Losses

In December, ReachLocal filed for a $100M IPO and released a few interesting numbers about their operations.

The company has a $6.1M debt obligation after acquiring the remaining shares of it’s Australia operations (in Sept ReachLocal bought the remaining 53% of shares it did not own). Somehow after this deal was completed ReachLocal reported a “non cash” gain of $16.2M on the transaction, but that the operations had already ran a deficit of $3.3M.

If you back out the one time non-cash gain and operating losses from the Australian acquisition, ReachLocal lost about $500,000/mo over the last 9 months on $143.3 million in revenue. In a pre-IPO regulatory filing, the company stated it “expects to report net operating losses in the foreseeable future”.

It was shocking to read about how much ReachLocal employees dislike their own company. This JobVent Poll shows reach scored at 14.5 out of 100 employer rating. Unhappy customers are likely to follow this trend.

YouTube Removes Stats for Number of Videos a User Has Viewed

YouTube has permanently removed the stats display for the number of videos a user has watched from user profile pages. Anyone who spends much time on YouTube quickly so the number of videos they viewed reach into the thousands or tens of thousands.

When I first noticed the display was gone, I assumed it was because people were complaining to YouTube that they did not want the world to know they had watched 300,000 videos. By chance I was browsing a YouTube developer/bug report forum on their site and came across the following post from a legitimate YouTube staff member:

“We’ve seen some of you asking what occurred to the number of video views displayed on your channel. Unfortunately, due to technical constraints, we had to permanently disable this feature. This is not a bug, it is no longer an available feature on the site.”

Looks like you can kiss that stat goodbye.

Facebook Tops Google Traffic For 3 Days in One Week

Facebook topped Google’s traffic again on New Year’s Eve, marking the 3rd time in a 7 day period the Social Networking giant exceeded Google’s US Visitor count according to Hitwise, an independent traffic monitoring firm.

Apparently people were constantly updating their status with their latest meal highlights and wishing holiday greetings to their 300 friends more often than they were searching for how to bake a ham, or find driving directions. Facebook kicking off 2010 as the number 1 site in the US seems appropriate after the huge year the company had in 2009.

Facebook Advertisers Are Not Cheering
There has been a noticable decrease in Facebook Advertising performance over the past several weeks. It seems like most of the additional traffic is not as productive as the standard daily user, I’d have bet the opposite. Stats have been delayed over the past 48 hours as they are updating or fixing the ad system. Over the past 24 hours, we saw only one ad approval cycle.

Google Serving Personalized Results For Everyone

Christoph Cemper gives a great overview of Google’s Decision to provide personalized results for all searches. Should SEOs be worried?

Learn why Google Analytics is now illegal in Germany. Find out how many of the world’s websites now use Google Analytics and get up to date on Google’s new DNS services.

Christoph says don’t freak out, but should you?

Kim Kardashian Tosses Carl Jr’s Salad

First off, Kim Kardashian doesn’t eat at Hardees, or Carl Jrs, or whatever they call themselves depending on which state you are in.

If you think she does, you probably also think she uses the Teeth Whitener you’re still getting rebilled for, or the amazing Berry Juice you don’t even notice getting billed to your cell phone.

The best things in life are messy? She is taking a bath with a crouton..and blowing a piece of fruit. WTF is this commercial?

Here is the commercial:

If I see a bunch of construction workers murdering these salads the next time I go to Hardees I will apologize for this article. Please, someone, anyone, find a way to get her to stop endorsing more products! I’m tired of getting punched in the ribs every time one of these come on Television!

Teeth Whitener I can understand..but do ppl really buy this load of crap?

Facebook Click Prices Take NYE Rest

Finally, after more than seven days of outrageous prices, Facebook ads are back in the zone. Noticeably, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, and Canada are showing cost per click declines around 50% versus one week ago.

Are advertisers simply taking a break for the New Years holiday? Did affiliates burn up their ad spend during the pricey Christmas Holiday? Are some of the larger Brands done with their Christmas spending blitz for another year? Maybe it’s a combination of all the above.

Looks like anyone who decided to skip the Holiday vacation is going to be rewarded nicely.

More Money For Bloggers in 2010?

Web publishers are reaping huge profits as the 2.0 bubble heats up. Google has become better at weeding out spam, allowing higher quality sites to rise to the top and finally starting booking some serious revenue. As the popularity of adwords increases, so does the balance of blogger’s bank accounts enrolled in the adsense program.

Even sites focused on small towns and small communities are able to make a substantial amount of money because local service businesses are one of the most expensive online advertising niches, especially for high dollar items. I have recently seen prices as high as $50 CPM for specialized local service content oriented sites. .

A gigantic spike in click prices is likely to occur over the next 24 months. Google’s recent string of acquisitions plus the price for local service clicks exceeding eight dollars tells me Google anticipates Adwords Advertisers seeking cheaper advertising solutions on smaller networks and is working to combat it by buying them. Bring on the antitrust.

Payouts to blog and website publishers are likely to continue to increase as advertisers abandon social networks because of increased cost, lower quality and volume issues. The fact is, Facebook advertising prices have increased faster than the number of accounts on their network. Businesses that built successful advertising campaigns on MySpace, Facebook and Google are rediscovering comfortable margins on smaller, third party ad networks (Etology, Adbrite, Bidvertiser etc) as these networks continue to improve their targeting capabilities and provide much cheaper traffic and easier ad approvals.

The end result, higher cost per click = good for publishers. Adsense publishers on average receive approximately $0.50/click for their traffic, the highest amount in history. Specialized sites focusing on medical, dental, and insurance are seeing well above $1.50/click as advertisers are finally learning how to properly target sites in the adwords content network. Expect your banner spots to pay more than just your hosting bill in the near future.

The Facebook FriendFeed Fail

Remember back in August when Facebook bought FriendFeed for approximately $50 million to go to war with Twitter? The terms of the deal were actually $15 million in cash and the other $32.5 million is in stock (based on a Facebook valuation of $6.5 billion at the time). With Facebook’s IPO coming closer, it’s likely the stock position of the FriendFeed founders will be worth more than $35 million.

Traffic has plummeted on on FriendFeed since the acqusition. Over the past month there have been several days with less than 5,000 US visits. (shown here on quantcast,click on day).

With 12 employees at Friendfeed, this amounts to around 400-500 unique US visits per employee per day. As any blogger knows if you post 5 posts per day on relevant or trending topics you will exceed this number easily.

Now, just picture that $50 million dollars. Ouch!

Google Goggles Search App for Android

Google impresses me with their vision for “Goggles”, the new search app for Android Mobile Phone users.

Instead of typing words for your search, “Goggles” allows you to take a picture using you cell phone, then it returns relevant search results.

Google can also provide information for nearby businesses and restaurants based on what it sees in the picture you take.

In the future, Google Goggles may allow you to take a mobile picture of a spider, then immediately return the name and information about the spider. This could be very cool to use with plants, animals, cars, etc.

The Google engineer in this video says that eventually it could even give you advice on which chess move to make, or other strategic advice!

Does Domain Registration Length Affect Search Rankings?

Domain registration length does seem to be a small factor when Google is trying to make up it’s mind where to rank your site in search results.

I’ve spent time reading snips of blogs, watching YouTube videos, and the only thing I can really determine is your might as well register the domain for 5 years and use a public registration. When you register a domain for a single year you generally renew the thing anyway.

It makes sense to me that Google might trust a domain a small bit more if it’s on a 5 year registration. Typically spammers will register a domain and burn it out (get blocked by blacklists, etc) within a few months, of course they use 1 year registrations…maybe not for long.

Contact me or drop a comment below if you have some hard facts on this, or can point me in a clearer direction.