The Increasing Profitability of Google AdSense

Google Adwords offers no more quick win to small-time advertisers. The pioneers of online marketing have already moved on from Adwords, while the masses and big brands are getting onboard. In Adwords, the keywords are much more expensive and there’s a lot more competition all around. This trend was well presented by Andy Brice on …

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Only Few Finnish Startups Born Global

How many Finnish online products are targeting European markets? More specifically, consumer oriented online products? If I’m not wrong, there are very few. Overall, the number and scale of B2C product businesses in Finland is much less than in the neighboring countries. Among these few are some that are “born global”. As a rule, their target market …

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Online Business Requires Fast Page Load

The most underrated feature affecting user experience is speed. Fast page load must be a priority, along with great concept design. We’ve all heard the classic case: Amazon generated 1% more sales for every 100ms they shaved off the page load time (the original slide deck by Greg Linden). That was almost a decade ago, but …

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Who’s the Best to Sell Your Online Ad Space in Finland?

Many online publishers in Finland have asked me who’d be the best partner for selling their ad inventory. It’s a crucial question. The right media sales partner can multiply the value of your ad space, and help you in developing an offering that adds value to both the big brand advertisers and your audience. Here’s …

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Should You Delete Your Google Web History

Google’s new privacy policy kicks in on March 1st. According to their announcement, the new policy makes possible for Google to integrate their different products more closely. So, instead of having a separate privacy policy for Youtube, Calendar, Gmail, Search, Analytics, Picasa, Docs, Adwords, etc etc there will be one account and one policy covering …

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Wasting Time or Improving the User Experience?

I’ve become a fan of cohort analysis! Cohorts provide a great way to focus on product development and the effect our RnD is having on customers. Cohort analysis tells us if we’re making the product better or just adding clutter and obsolete features. Often it would be the best to “simply” focus on the existing …

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Right Timing for Email Marketing

You’d better send your marketing emails weekly on Saturday mornings. Then it will get the most clicks and least unsubscribes. That is what the statistics tell us. MailChimp, the email-marketing service, scanned through 10 billion emails as part of their Email Genome Project. Their findings were surprising. Dan Zarrella of HubSpot put together an interesting …

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A Groupon Deal Analysis

Stephen Joyce wrote a great post on how Groupon advertising works. He offers insight into Groupon’s impact on sales and profitability from a local small business’s perspective. The bottom line is: you’re gonna lose! Groupon is the 2-year-old group buying service that has received a great amount of attention (and a billion $ in venture …

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99,9% of Display Ads Are Not Clicked

Are the websites relying on display ads doomed to fail? Only 0,1% of banners get clicks. Most people downright ignore banners altogether. Compare this with search-related ads’ 35x higher click rate and it becomes obvious why so many online media are resorting to gigantic panorama banners and other desperate measures in order to increase their …

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High Margin = Poor End User Experience

Tripadvisor really knows how to monetize travel. And according to a post on Techcrunch: “It’s more or less the worst experience in the world for an end user.” The worst end user experience somehow generates spectacular growth: Tripadvisor’s revenue for Q3/2010 grew by 40% from 2009 (.pdf). It means their revenue for 2010 will be …

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