Features That Mark Internet’s Next Generation

For those who are familiar with software, you are aware of the serialization of software versions. For example Internet Explore 6 was followed by IE 7, Windows 98 by Windows XP. The idea is that the later is usually an improvement of the former. The internet, being a technical platform too, has been for the last few years experiencing improvements too. The term Web 2.0 has been coined to express this trend.

The term Web 2.0 has often been credited to O’Reilly, a media company that publishes both books and websites on different subjects of computer technology. In the beginning the web was nearly a geek’s only environment. If you did not understand what HTML and FTP stood for you were not qualified. The web was characterized by static webpages and content by “expert writers”. If you did not like it, you could as well “Hit the road Jack”.

Today with Web 2.0, users are driving the direction websites take. No longer is it possible to always shove particular content into users’ throats. The term Web 2.0 may sound new to many but there are chances you are already using it. Some of its characteristics include the following;

User Generated Content – This is probably the signature of the next generation of the internet. Websites are now built based on the submissions of the user. The best example of this is the famous video site YuoTube.com. The site is basically a collection of videos submitted by users.

Voting – Which content is popular and which is not is based on a democratic voting by the users. Unlike Web 1.0 where editors would popularize one submission over the others, in Web 2.0 user is really king. They choose what they like. A good example of this is the news submission site Digg.com

Commenting – This is particularly a favorite in blogging. With Web 2.0, you are free to let the world know what you think of a particular content. This is one of the things that make Web 2.0 very sticky. Once you start commenting on different content you never seem to stop.

Blogging – This specific phenomenon sent a chill down the spine of the traditional news media. It has made it possible for anyone to become a news site. Of course some do it better than others. At the very least it lets one share their mind with anyone who cares to listen.

Personalization – The next generation of the internet is allowing one to personalize the kind of content that they get. Unlike Yahoo mail for example where personalization involved selecting between a hand-full of color schemes, Web 2.0 is a complete overhaul. You can determine what you want how you want it when you want it. Even who you get it from and who you can share it with. A good example here is MySpace.com.

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Google’s Second PPC Revolution

Last week we looked at CTR (Click Thought Rate) that introduced competition in bidding beyond money. This was Google’s first of the two revolutions to the PPC concept through Adword, Google’s PPC department.

The second revolution has to do with what is technically referred to as “impressions”. Impressions are the number of times a PPC advert is displayed on a webpage. An impression means that the advert has been served and is available to the surfer to click.

Impressions have a direct impact on the earnings of a PPC company. The more impressions a PPC company can serve to its audience, the more the literal numbers of clicks. The more the number of absolute clicks, the more the PPC company earns. And this is even without an increase in CTR. This results to a positive spiral. The more the clicks, the more the visitors are channeled to the advertisers’ websites. Consequently the advertisers tend to find the particular PPC company effective in driving traffic to their sites.

To achieve this effect, companies looked into ways to increase the number of times surfers see the adverts- impressions.

Before Adword, PPC’s jostled to be displayed in websites of high traffic. Websites like AOL and CNN that have millions of visitors per month were targeted to display PPC adverts for a commission. Small websites with hundreds even thousands of visitors were considered insignificant. Then enter Google; they choose to display their ads in each and every website that carried what they refer to as “quality content”. Quality content is interpreted by most as referring to informative editorial content as opposed to sales letters, infomercials and plain keyword-based gibberish. Such websites were viable for PPC display in a program called Adsense. This was despite the number of visitors.

This had a near sudden drastic change in the effectiveness of PPCs.

Small websites with less than 200 web pages and a few thousand visitors monthly make up most of the internet. As a result Adword’s total impressions increased astronomically beating all its rivals. There was a further positive effect. Often such websites are highly topical and only concern themselves with specific niches like weight loss pills or out-size women’s clothing. Consequently the content sensitive Adwords that display on these websites are so relevant to their visitors that CTR automatically shot skywards.

This strategy of involving the small internet guy of the internet resulted to huge increase in earnings without increasing the cost to the advertisers. But most importantly, Google has positioned itself not only as the leading search engine but also the most preferred PPC due to wide reach and affordability. So successful is Adword that Yahoo is in beta testing of a similar concept, and MSN is rumored of being in process of developing “the mother” of all PPCs.

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