Here’s your daily dose of goodish news about the Web ad business, courtesy (again) of Mark Mahaney, who says display ads are perking up. Or at least some of them are.
More upbeat–but not too ecstatic–chatter about the state of the Internet advertising market this morning from Wall Street: Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth is raising his estimates for Google, citing “improving macro conditions [and] a stronger ad market.” Other online advertising bulls: Investors, who have been pushing up Google stock for months, and CEO Eric Schmidt, who has declared that the worst is over.
Waiting for the economy to come roaring back? So is Google. The search giant had a decent quarter, but not one that’s going to blow away Wall Street or convince anyone that the economy is roaring back. But it’s an okay performance for a media company in a recession.
Is the ad market really starting to rebound? Or is the (muted, cautious) happy talk we we’re hearing this spring just happy talk? Time to take a peek at Google’s quarterly earnings this afternoon, which might give us some insight.
As per Google’s last report card, Wall Street is expecting the company’s revenue to decline from the previous quarter–unthinkable for Google in prior years, but now no longer a shock. But Wall Street will be looking for both numerical and qualitative hints that things are getting better, or at least have bottomed out.
An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.
That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.
Even as the rest of the retail world stumbled in the past year, Amazon kept cruising and increasing market share. So if a cratering economy can’t hurt the e-commerce giant, what could? Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney throws out a suggestion: Movies, books and music–the same stuff that helped Amazon get the lead it enjoys today.
I’m pecking this out from the bowels of the New World Stage, where Day Two of the Twitter-centric 140 Character Conference is meandering along. But the most interesting Twitter-related news is coming from outside the conference: Data from comScore showing that Twitter-related search has become both measurable and meaningful.
Well, measurable, at least.
The Palm Pre debuts this week. Next week, we should hear about a big update for Apple’s iPhone. And by the end of the summer we’ll have new phones running Android platform. So who’s going to emerge as the winner? Easy, says Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney: It’s Google. But Mahaney isn’t talking about Google’s smartphone platform. He’s talking about Google’s core search business, which he thinks is finally about to see significant lift from mobile users.
More fuel for the “things may not be getting worse, and may even be getting a little bit better” meme that I’ve been detecting (or perhaps promulgating ) recently: Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney notes that the Internet stocks he covers are up an average of 28 percent so far this year while the tech-heavy NASDAQ is only up seven percent and the broader S&P is down two percent. If this keeps up, we might have an M&A market again. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
Netflix has been one of the rare winners during the recession/depression: Customers are flocking to the movie rental service and investors love the stock. This meant that expectations were very high for the company’s first quarter, and it appears to have met them.
Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected. This is what Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been saying every three months or so for the past year. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff. The upside is also old news: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.
Here’s a tiny bit of sunshine, via ComScore CEO Gian Fulgoni: E-commerce sales were up two percent in February. That’s not much, but it’s better than the fourth quarter of last year, when e-commerce sales declined for the first time ever, dropping three percent. Best-case scenario? “We might well have bottomed out with consumer spending.”
If flat is the new up, then a four percent growth year for Google will be something to celebrate in 2009. But first, a really unpleasant first quarter.
Can’t wait for the debut of Kindle 2.0, which should arrive around 10 a.m. this morning in New York? Here’s a splash of cold water, courtesy of Jeffrey Lindsay: The Bernstein Research analyst says Amazon’s much hyped e-book reader is merely a “niche product”–and that the e-commerce giant wants to keep it that way.
Also, look for MediaMemo’s liveblog of the Kindle event soon.
Amazon is set to unveil Kindle 2.0 next Monday at a New York press event. But how many of the original e-book readers has it sold already? Don’t ask Jeff Bezos and company. But Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney figures Amazon sold 500,000 devices last year and that the Kindle will be a billion-dollar business by next year.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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