Bing… Bang… THUD!

So, what does $80-$100 million in marketing buy you?  Well, if you’re Microsoft, that’s enough to bring about twice the amount of traffic to their new Bing search engine than their old, MSN Live search engine.  The good news - that’s enough to take Bing passed Yahoo as the 2nd most popular search engine around!

The bad news - that’s still about 40x less traffic than Google.

The badder news - All that traffic went back to Yahoo after 1 week.

The baddest news - The Bing search engine still sucks.

Microsoft’s entire strategy here is backwards…  training-their-fire at Yahoo makes about as much sense as Apple ignoring Microsoft Windows dominance and marketing Macs to Commodore 64 users…

Yahoo has, about, 5% of the search engine market, Microsoft - about half that at 2.5%…  Google?  87.62% market-share for all search engine traffic.  Yahoo is, essentually, dying…  the days of Yahoo making waves in search are long-gone.  MS would be better off shooting for Google and  just forget about Yahoo.

This just in - MySpace to get pwn3d by Google

A couple of days ago, I made some Fearless Predictions about the future of social networking, including the observation that MySpace was becoming the new AltaVista… and today, we have news that MySpace and Google are negotiating a new deal for how MySpace will display Google advertising.  A few years ago, when MySpace was hot-as-the-sun, Google ended up paying $900m, or about $300m/year.  These days, MySpace is losing users and traffic, at a clip of about 20% per year, and now MySpace needs Google much more than Google needs MySpace…

Sources say that while Google has gotten plenty of advertising impressions (MySpace uses any excuse to put Google search results and Google ads in front of users), those ads don’t convert well. Add to that the dramatic shrinking of MySpace page views and the predictive modeling gets ugly.

Google knows MySpace is shrinking by about 20% a year. And unlike the last time they negotiated with News Corp., they now have nearly three years of actual operating history with the company. They’ve got real data to value the deal.

Unless Microsoft or perhaps Yahoo comes in and bids very aggressively, MySpace is going to get slaughtered in the negotiations.

Like I said, MySpace = AltaVista…  doomed.

The future of Social Networks

To know the future, just look to the past.  Each of the big Social Networking, “Web 2.0″, sites share commonalities with Web 1.0 sites that were popular ‘in their day’…  and this is not necessarily a good thing for the Social Networks.  For example:

Flickr is the new GeoCities…  a very popular place for people to upload their content.  Getting people to upload and view content is one thing, but turning that into a profitable business is another.
Read more