Hyperlinks Are Dumb And...

Editor’s note:  Oliver Roup is the founder and CEO of VigLink, a service that makes it easier to use affiliate programs on your blog or website. When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who it’s from but their entire web imprint . LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman you spoke with earlier in the year at a conference. And rest assured that the dining room set you checked out over the weekend at CrateAndBarrel.com will haunt your online experience for the forseeable future. Data — its collection and manipulation at scale — has revolutionized how we interact online. Homepages, banner advertisements and what we see in our Facebook timeline are all tailored-to-fit the reader, and we don’t give it a second thought. But the hyperlink, the key feature that distinguishes hypertext from text has remained largely unchanged since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web. Websites generally, and search and online advertising specifically, would be barely recognizable today by their younger selves. But hyperlinks — their structure, how they’re authored and how we use and track them — have barely changed in 20 years. Consider: Inserting links by hand is a labor intensive process and has few tools. How about a recommendation engine to augment our own efforts? (Note: companies like Zemanta are a first step in this direction.) If a link is never clicked (i.e. 0% of the world finds it useful), why does it remain in content, distracting from meaningful / useful links indefinitely? Keywords in referrer logs have been mined to great effect by companies like BlueKai . (Although Google is slowly but surely taking that information away .) Isn’t where a user clicked out to just as informative? Why are we almost always ignoring it? Why do website visitors in Asia see links to online merchants in North America they are unable to purchase from, let alone access? Hyperlinks, in many ways, are dumb. And as a result, harming your user experience and potentially bleeding money from your company — when they could be a tool for better engagement, increased revenue, and deeper analytics. Now, there are a cluster of companies innovating by recognizing the power of the link — Omniture , Vibrant Media and Yieldbot , to name a few. But, this isn’t a problem companies can hold off on thinking about until the perfect tech pops up to solve it. There was a time when SEO was considered a “pro-tip” — a way for startups to get ahead of the game. Today, it’s standard best practice — and companies that don’t think strategically about the way search engines view their sites are at a strong disadvantage. Hyperlink optimization is similar. While link optimization might be a “pro-tip” now, it won’t be for much longer. Companies that aren’t thinking strategically about link placement, closely tracking results, and taking subsequent action, will find the companies that ARE doing these things at an advantage. The most critical areas to spend time on are tracking outbound hyperlinks, building a linking strategy, and refining it based on results. Let’s briefly dive into each. Track your Outbound Hyperlinks The first step to optimizing a site’s outbound traffic is to understand what that traffic looks like. Where do visitors go when they leave your site? What do they do on those other sites? While there is still a lot of room for growth within the outbound analytics space, Omniture (paid) and Google Analytics (free — but requires a modification to the standard Analytics code you add to your site ) both offer tools to help you understand what happens when a reader leaves your site. VigLink (disclosure: I am the CEO there) also offers an outbound analytics suite as part of its content monetization solution. Build a Hyperlinking Strategy What do you want your outbound hyperlinks to do for you? Do you want them to earn you revenue? Do you want them to serve an SEO purpose? Be purely informational? Should they be scarce (keeping readers on your site)? Or abundant (allowing readers to exit as it is helpful)? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a plan for when your team includes a hyperlink, and when it does not — opening up opportunities for a better reader experience, and deeper engagement. Refine, Refine, Refine Combine a plan with data to track that plan’s performance and you’ve got a gold mine on your hands.  Notice a link that is never clicked and your plan requires that links must be useful to readers? Take it out. Or, a heavy percentage of links pointing to non-eCommerce properties, and your goal is monetization? Incorporate fewer links to those non-commercial sites. Refining your hyperlinks will improve reader engagement and overall site performance. Do It, and Make the Web Better Hyperlinks should make the web better — more connected, easier to navigate, and intelligent. Hyperlinks should make your site better — more actionable, insightful and profitable. Today, hyperlinks are falling short. They’re static and largely untracked. Sometimes useful — but often not. As the web becomes ever more crowded, and an organization’s site optimization toolkit begins to produce diminishing returns, the hyperlink is obvious low hanging fruit. What that means to site owners: It’s time to plug the outbound data leak. Implement a tool today that will track your outbound traffic. Choose a hyperlinking strategy and share it with your team. This is at least as much a human problem as a technology one – deciding what you want is always the first step. Be on the lookout for technology that addresses these issues. There are already solutions to track your outbound clicks and the value they deliver but 2012 is going to be the year the hyperlink gets smart.

Dish Network Risks Biti...

Dish Network is giving customers what they want — commercial free TV. The next sound you hear is that of network execs screaming. The device that is causing all the ruckus is Dish’s Hopper, a DVR that allows you to automatically hop past all the commercials on a network TV show. You know, kind of like you already do with show’s you’ve recorded, only the Hopper does the work for you. Understandably, the networks are furious. Commercials pay for the shows they produce. If networks don’t produce shows, then Dish Network wouldn’t have any content and they’d go out of business. On the other hand, if Dish doesn’t keep their customers happy, they’ll go back to cable and again, Dish will go out of business. Either way, they’re biting the hands that feed them. The question is, who has more clout, the consumer or the networks? Dish is putting their money (literally) on the consumer. They know the networks will grumble, but in the end, it’s not like they’re going to stop making TV shows, though they could pull them off the Dish Network. The New York Times says that the networks are also offering Dish a taste of their own medicine by refusing to air Dish commercials. The Hopper ad is one of the most annoying commercials I’ve seen in a long time, so I’m behind the networks on that move. The reality is, people skip commercials and when they don’t skip them, they walk out of the room to get a snack or use the facilities. Instead of fighting the Hopper, networks need to find new ways to engage the consumer. Instead of forcing an increasing number of commercials on viewers, networks should be rewarding them for their attention. Second screen apps are perfect for upping engagement. The Celebrity Apprentice app delivers the most points on questions asked during the commercials. If you want to win the game, you have to stay and watch. What do you think? Is Dish making the right move by putting the customer in front of the client? Or is this going to come back to bite them someplace other than the hand?

T-Mobile Launching New ...

T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm noted during their last earning call that their prepaid users helped make up for the loss of 510,000 postpaid subscribers, and now it seems that they’ve got another bone to throw to the their legions of contract-averse customers. Starting on May 20, T-Mobile will be rolling out a slew of new, no-contract data plans to go with their line of mobile broadband modems, hotspots, and tablets. The plans aren’t too shabby — longer term users can shell out $25 for 1.5GB of access per month, while paying $35 and $50 will net them 3.5GB and 5GB of sweet sweet wireless data per month respectively. On the other hand, if a user really doesn’t need to lean on an HSPA+ connection for very long, there’s also a 300MB pass that lasts one week that’ll set you back $15. Without that contract in tow though, expect to pay a bit more for the corresponding hardware (unless you’ve already got said gadgets laying around). It goes without saying that T-Mobile offers slightly better deals to people willing to sign their wireless allegiance over the for the long term, but that’s the game you play when you don’t want a bill sitting in your mailbox every month for two years. At the very least, these new plans make their older prepaid counterparts look lousy in comparison — I wouldn’t be too thrilled if I had to pay $30 for one measly gigabyte of monthly bandwidth.

Forrester: 32.1 Million...

Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least one TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try to wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey , it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far. Why? Microsoft, MCquivey argues, currently has a massive lead over its competitors thanks to its Xbox360. According to a new report by Forrester , the number of U.S. households that watch online video on a TV set is now up to 32.1 million, up from just 24.8 million a year ago. The majority of these households use their game consoles to do so. The adoption of connected TVs is also moving ahead quickly. Forrester estimates that 18.5 million households now use them to stream online video in the living room. Over-the-top set-top boxes like the Apple TV, Boxee and Roku, however, are still niche products, with just 4% of U.S. online households owning one at the end of 2011. Looking ahead, Forrester estimates that by 2016, 66.8 million U.S. households will have connected their TV sets to the Internet and 89% of HDTVs sold will be connectable. In this quickly growing market, McQuivey argues, it’s all about who owns the platform. Microsoft is in the lead right now, but still, only 49% of Xbox 360 owners currently connect their consoles to the net. McQuivey argues that in order keep its lead, Microsoft has to push this number to 75% and highlight the numerous video options beyond Netflix it already offers. Google, says McQuivey in his blog post today, “has to push Android onto every TV device, including the Motorola set-top-boxes it is about to own.” Apple, of course, is widely rumored to be working on a TV set as well. McQuivey and his colleagues, however, think that Apple shouldn’t just sell a replacement TV. Instead, the company should focus on something more akin to a smaller, 32-inch screen iHub that could be used in the dining room or kitchen to create a central hub for the family to gather around and use a shared calendar, Facetime, and view photos and videos. [image credit: stevestein1982 ]

Study Says Social Media...

In a shocking development, a research company has chosen this particular week, of all weeks, to post their forecast for what is in store for social media ad spending in the US over the next several years. Do you think it was just dumb luck that it coincides with Facebook’s IPO ? Hey, who can blame BIA/Kelsey for jumping on the train that is the Facebook IPO Express? Here is the picture version of this predicted US social media spend through 2016. Let’s consider the whole Facebook IPO thingy in light of these numbers. In 2011, Facebook did somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion in revenue. That revenue is in total, not just in the US. What percentage of revenue is international I don’t know. Right now US users number somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million which would be about 17% of Facebook’s total user base. It is likely that the US market spends more than most, however, and it is fair to think that the US proportion of revenue contribution is higher than that 17% of total users. With the US numbers for ad spend which are projected here, one wonders where all the revenue will come from in the future to support the reported valuation Facebook will receive this Friday. Let’s compare this to Google whose market cap sits just below $200B but did just under $38B in revenue last year and is tracking to go well north of $40B this year. Does anyone else see a disconnect with valuing Facebook at 50% of Google’s market cap while only currently generating less than 8% of Google’s total revenue? Marry that with the Kelsey numbers that caps the social media advertising spend potential at $10B annual in TOTAL for the US (remember all that spend won’t be just for Facebook) 4 years from now and you have to scratch your head just a little. Facebook will need to do something other than advertising especially if that facet of their business is being called out by some as ineffective . The other side of the Kelsey data shows that Facebook’s idea that their advertising value is best for big brands could be right on point as much of the ad spend will be on a national level. But wait. If national big brands will be the bulk of ad spend in social media in the next four years (according to this study only mind you) but Facebook is being outed as being ineffective by some big brands (which could be turned around to also read that said big brands and their agencies are clueless as to what they are doing in social media advertising) then where is all the revenue for Facebook going to come from to support what is supposed to be an earth shattering IPO? One assumes that it would have to be the international market that Facebook is banking on but with a shaky world economy and very different approaches to media and advertising in different areas of the world (as well as China currently being a walled garden of sorts) how reliable will that be for Facebook? I am not a financial analyst. I have not done any type of in depth analysis here. I am just looking at some numbers that are being thrown around and wondering if Facebook math is creating a “1 + 1 = 3 or more” scenario. I have no skin in this game and I, like the rest of us, would figure out a way to carry on in this world if Facebook were to do a MySpace. I’m not saying that will happen at all but anyone who can add 1 + 1 and get the correct answer should have a few questions here, don’t ya think? I would also be just fine if Facebook hit a grand slam and killed this thing. It will be what it will be. So what do you think it will be? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!