SEM News

This article titled Google's Paid Click Business Slipping - ComScore has got to be one of the biggest yawners yet and another indication of a jittery stock market. As to the source.... In 14 years I've yet to see data from comscore that I'm not skeptical of the numbers and the way the data is gathered and possibly skewed by the polled audience or source/process.

8 Theories For Adsense Fluctuations and Adsense Earnings Down by Jason Lee Miller of WebPro News should give Search engine marketers lots to think about. A number of the recent changes to AdWords have had me to some degree stumped. Quality Score which should have reduced costs increased them. Huh? I thought the QS was supposed to take "Made for AdSense" arbitrageurs out of the game.

My first inclination if I were a MSFT stock holder would be to sell confident that some time in the next year Mr. Softy will be 20% cheaper. The combination of Yahoo! and M$ search technology is not likely because they look to be on different platforms/OS. It is more likely you'll see one or the other rolled out on both sites to start with and then a new one developed for integration into a single site.

I have read quite a few articles making predictions about the SEM industry for 2008. There has been a lot of discussion about the Google purchase of DoubleClick as you will see by my predictions below I'm not a big believer that Google can do any better than anyone that has preceded it in the display advertising biz.