Kikabink News

United States President-elect Barack Obama spent $7.97 million on online advertising before November. The Obama campaign managers spent it on search engine marketing, ad networks, social networks, local TV sites, newspaper sites and even NBA.com.

Think that’s a lot of money? Well, let’s put it into perspective. Obama spent over half that budget, i.e. $4 million, on one 30 minute television commercial in October.

Google got nearly half of Obama’s online budget, with nearly $3.5 million going into Google search. Yahoo search got just $673,000 in October.

Source: Nicholas Carlson, “Obama’s Online Spend: Actually Tiny,” Silicon Alley Insider, November 6, 2008

Writing in Silicon Alley Insider, Henry Blodget makes the point that if Google and Yahoo go forward with their search partnership, they’ll have to sign a consent decree.

Among other things, this means Google will need to let government officials inspect its books and business practices. Apparently, the idea of revealing how it really does business is enough to cause Google to nix the deal!

Source: Henry Blodget, “Google Threatens To Stick Fork In Yahoo Deal”, Silicon Alley Insider, October 30, 2008

According to tech journalist Kara Swisher, some members of Yahoo’s board of directors have renewed discussions with Microsoft about a possible sale of the company to Microsoft.

Such talks appear to be the result of the AOL-Yahoo merger talks making little progress, and fears that the Justice Department will block Yahoo’s proposed advertising deal with Google.

Source: Kara Swisher, “The Deal Dance: AOL and Yahoo (and Even Google and Microsoft) Continue to Waltz”, All Things Digital, October 28, 2008

TechCrunch has started a ‘layoff tracker’ to track employee layoffs in the tech sector.

As at October 24, 2008, 19,683 tech layoffs have been announced since mid-September, not counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who will be retrenched as a result of its merger with EDS.

Five large companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and Qimonda (3,000). The remaining 33 companies on the Layoff Tracker are generally startups, accounting for 1,683 layoffs. Removing three large companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) from the list, and TechCrunch estimates the number of layoffs at tech startups to be 573.

Looking down the list, some of these layoffs constitute a substantial part of the relevant companies’ workforces. For example, the 20 people to leave Imeem constitute a quarter of its workforce.

Sources: Erick Schonfeld, “19,683 Tech Layoffs And Counting”, TechCrunch, October 24, 2008, TechCrunch Layoff Tracker

Yahoo has released a new zip code targeting feature for Panama search advertisers that allows them to direct ads to searchers based on their zip codes.

The service comes with an interactive mapping interface that allows advertisers to specify cities and zip codes and is more precise that the geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords which is only city-specific.

Yahoo’s service - like Google’s geo-targeting feature in Google Adwords - is based on identifying a searcher’s IP address, as well as some other factors. As such, it’s not fool-proof and Yahoo notes that the accuracy of its geo-targeting is not guaranteed.

Currently, the service supports cities and zip codes in approximately 3,500 municipalities in the U.S and Canada.

Source: Zachary Rodgers, “Yahoo Adds Granularity to Local Search Ads”, The ClickZ Network, October 20, 2008