AOL to buy Bebo for $850 million

13 Mar 2008 by Andrew Banks in General, WebsitesNo Comments »

Various websites are reporting that AOL has come through as the buyer of Bebo for the small sum of $850 million.

The BBC is reporting “Rumours that the social network Bebo would be swallowed up by someone have been swirling around for at least a year. Google, Yahoo, MySpace and Viacom have all been names as potential suitors. Now the truth is out – and it’s AOL which has picked up the prize for $850m”

Time Warner have now confirmed this with a statement on their website and have also confirmed that this is a purely cash deal.

“AOL announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo (http://www.bebo.com),a leading global social media network. Together with its AIM and ICQ personal communications network, the acquisition will give AOL a premier position in the fast growing world of social media with a network of approximately 80 million unique users.”

I strongly suspect that the ongoing saga with Microsoft trying to by Yahoo is going to force a period of consolidation between the larger players in social marketing and search as they try to strengthen their position in the market place. It’s started with Bebo and I predict we will see a lot more of this in the coming months as organisation try to strengthen their position and protect themselves from being bought out.
So who do you expect to be next and are we seeing another major dot com boom era? Should we expect the same as last time and prepare for the bust to follow?

Dear BBC - I am not blind

27 Feb 2008 by Andrew Banks in Websites4 Comments »

Well it’s a sad day for the BBC Website in my opinion.

They’ve finally gone live with the new BBC homepage and I really don’t see why it needed to change. As I’ve blogged about previously, the BBC have often lead the way with their homepage but this time I think they’ve hit rock bottom.

Some excellent features have made there way into the new homepage but overall I’m just not convinced.

What I like:

• The ability to specify my own content
• Allowing me to re-organise the homepage based on how I like the page to be laid out
• Strangely, the clock. But only from a geeky technical perspective
• The fact it works just as well (or at least degrades gracefully) without JavaScript - well done to the technical team responsible for this

What I dislike:

• That 25% of my screen is dominated by the main image
• That the whole colour scheme changes dependant on which main image/feature I view - very off putting
• The size! Man, the BBC must have some research that shows the majority of their website audience are visually impaired because the sheer scale of every screen element is huge. I myself, like the majority of web user, have good vision so please don’t give me a website that is so large by default
• Web 2.0 overkill - the whole page just looks like the design team looked for every Web 2.0 cliché and put it into one page

Hopefully this will develop like all previous BBC home pages and some of these niggles I have will be removed over time.

Tracking Paid Search in Google Analytics from Microsoft and Yahoo - and other campaigns

22 Feb 2008 by Andrew Banks in Google AnalyticsNo Comments »

Just a quick post today to highlight an excellent article that has been published on the Official Google Analytics Blog.

Many of the websites I have inherited come with Google Analytics running on them and all too often these are just set up with basic stats tracking and maybe a bit of e-commerce and funnel stuff going on. Obviously AdWords campaigns are also tracked if auto tagging has been enabled in the customers AdWords account.

What many people don’t realise is the ease in which you can track Microsoft AdCenter PPC campaigns, Yahoo PPC ads and pretty much any other online marketing campaign you have running.

I won’t go into the details here as the article on the Official Google Analytics Blog covers all this. It’s definitely worth taking the time to read as being able to measure your traffic and conversion rates from each and every online source is essential if you want to make sure you are spending your online marketing budget in the right place.