Kikabink News

Facebook announced last week that users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, have increased from 5 million to 15 million during 2008.

While this number constitutes less than 10 percent of total Facebook users, the growth indicates strong interest in mobile social networking.

Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Facebook Mobile Sees 3X Growth to 15 Million Users This Year”, ReadWriteWeb, November 11, 2008

MediaWhiz has launched a new ad network called InLinks that aims to sell advertisers text links within the content of bloggers’ posts… without being detected as paid-for links by Google.

InLinks will look and behave exactly like words with embedded links. They will not look like - or carry any indication - of being paid for and, since they will not have nofollow tags, they will pass on Google PageRank (the main objective).

Basically, an advertiser will be able to choose the keywords it wants to target and then buy text links for those keywords. Such links will then appear whenever the given keyword appears in the content of the blogs participating in the program. Bloggers will be paid a flat rate per month per text link sold.

Sound good so far?

Think again. Paid links are against Google’s quality guidelines and the search engine will penalize blogs caught selling such links. Not disclosing paid-for links is also a rather dubious practice for bloggers to engage in. In some jurisdictions, such as here in Australia, it may well be illegal.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger advises bloggers to proceed with caution. He recommends against participating in InLinks if you have a highly ranking blog, or if you are concerned about disclosure and transparency with your readers. He suggests that InLinks it could be something to look into if you don’t care about having your blog indexed by Google or aren’t concerned about being transparent with readers. For his part, he doesn’t sell text ads.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch concurs:

“The reality is that accepting money to link to/promote/market for a product without disclosing that fact is a very high-risk behavior, in my opinion.”

Meanwhile, Google’s Matt Cutts has emailed TechCrunch to reiterate that selling links to pass PageRank violates Google’s quality guidelines and that bloggers who fail to disclose that they have been paid to engage in word-of-mouth marketing also potentially violate laws in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.

It will be interesting to see if and how InLinks works… and who participates. Not that anyone is supposed to know!

FYI, here at Kikabink News, we do not sell text links. We openly promote affiliate products, our own products, and sell advertising.

Source: Darren Rowse, “InLinks - TextLinkAds 2.0 Advertising,” ProBlogger, November 20, 2008, Michael Arrington, “Insidious New SEO Ad Product Will Be Hard For Google To Detect (Updated With Google Response)”, TechCrunch, November 19, 2008

Research firm comScore has reported that online spending in the United States in October 2008 grew by only 1 percent over October 2007, the lowest monthly growth rate since comScore began tracking e-commerce in 2001.

comScore attributes the anaemic growth level to lower spending by low-to-middle income earners, with households earning less than $50,000 exhibiting negative spending growth compared to a year ago.

The slowdown comes after 6 consecutive months of slowing growth in e-commerce sales. comScore says that retail e-commerce growth rates have fallen from a height of 28 percent in August 2007 to a growth rate of just 1 percent in October 2008. October represents the sixth consecutive month this year of slowing growth rates.

Source: comScore, “U.S. Retail E-Commerce Growth Slows to 1 Percent in October as Concerns about Inflation, Jobs and the Financial Markets Cause Consumers to Curb Spending”, Press Release, November 18, 2008

The New York Times reports that, in just a few weeks, orders for both business and consumer tech products have collapsed, causing technology companies to lay off workers.

How serious is this? Serious enough that tech executives are comparing the situation with the dot-com crash in 2000, when hundreds of companies disappeared and nearly a fifth of all Silicon Valley jobs were lost.

Source: Ashlee Vance, “Tech Companies, Long Insulated, Now Feel Slump”, The New York Times, November 14, 2008

As quoted in Clickz, research firm Javelin Strategy & Research predicts that nearly 20 percent of all online purchases during the holiday season will be paid for using alternative payment methods.

In its report, “2008 Online Retail Payments Forecast”, the research firm quoted such alternatives as prepaid or gift cards, eBay’s PayPal, and eBillMe, an online banking service, as being major winners over the holiday period.

Evidently, the ‘credit crunch’ will see online shoppers to cut down on their use of bank-issued credit cards, while increasing their use of store-branded credit cards and alternative payment methods.

Of the $42.8 billion expected to be spent online during the holiday season, Javelin estimates that or $7.8 billion or 18 percent will be paid using alternative payment methods. By 2012, this is expected to increase to one-third of all online transactions.

Source: Enid Burns, “Consumers Want to Pay Now for Online Purchases, Not Later”, The ClickZ Network, November 11, 2008