Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 30th March 2009
34 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
As you might have noticed The Next Web blog has been growing steadily over the past year.
February 2008 we generated:
49,541 pageviews (25,073 unique visitors)
February 2009 we generated:
272,991 pageviews (175,020 unique visitors)
The increase in visitors and pageviews also means that we are getting more interesting for advertisers. We are seeing more and more interest in our 125×125 button in the sidebar here and are spending more time in finding new advertisers now.
At only €99 a week for 75,000+ pageviews we have a very attractive proposition too.
We are planning a new blog design with more integrated ads after the conference, which will have room for a larger horizontal banner in the header and a skyscraper in the sidebar.
So far so good.
Right now we have an advertiser in the sidebar which you might want to take a look at. It is an ad for a gambling forum. The advertiser asked us if it would be appropriate to advertise on our blog and frankly, we didn’t have an answer.
In today’s economy you would be a fool to turn away money. On the other hand, we don’t want to show inappropriate ads and scare away our audience. The advertiser, NoLuckNeeded, explained to us that they support responsible gambling and good causes like Earth hour. They do not spam and only promote good online casinos.
So, where do we go with this? Do we accept ALL advertisers, no matter what they sell? Should we accept only ‘good’ advertisers that fit our audience? Should we just take the money and run? Who can say?
Your feedback is appreciated, as always…
Written on 8th February 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When online marketing expert David Sadigh from IC Agency asked the LIFT08 audience who used the Internet in 1995, he was surprised by the huge response. “In 1995 it used to be a tool for geeks”. The situation has obviously changed, since the Internet is a mass medium now. “Even dogs are about to go online” Sadigh joked (no response this time). That makes it interesting for sales, he said. But the striking thing about the Internet is that the content is the same for everyone, yet we’re all unique and have our own wishes.
Because the content is not adapted to their needs, 98 percent of the visitors leave commercial sites without buying. Yet business pump in 35.5 billion dollars in online marketing on a yearly basis to attract visitors to their site. “Imagine if you had a store where everybody walks in but nobody is buying anything – you would definitely fire the person whose running the shop. Then why do we accept this on the Internet?”
As you might have guessed, Sadigh had the answer to this shocking question. ‘Internet isn’t really born yet”, he said, it’s a new medium, sort of like a 2 or 3 month old fetus”. So because of its new character, we’re not yet focusing on things like customer experience. Well, actually we just started, since Sadigh confronted us with this phenomenon. He urges companies to decode the visitors’ intentions and personalize content according to the decoding. Just like Amazon already did in the early years with the personalized recommendations. It’s just that Sadigh wants us to take it to another level.
How can we do that? What can we personalize? Some suggestions made by Sadigh:
- Intentional targeting, display a specific product related info related to an engine search on that specific model. When somebody searches for family vacations in Italy, you don’t show just a classic Italian picture but go for the family-eating-at-a-big-table photo.
- Geographic targeting
- Event targeting, like showing product info related to a current TV campaign.
- Behavorial targeting, when people buy something on your site, they’re probably there for the third time. So keep track of their surfing behavior and adjust the product related info to that
To be honest with you, I find the numbers Sadigh mentioned shocking, but his suggestions don’t sound revolutionary to me. Maybe he sees them merely as a way to prepare companies for the REAL personalization, or the techniques needed aren’t available yet. To give it a positive twist at the end: things can just get better.
Written on 6th February 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Looks like Microsoft woke up AOL with their bid on Yahoo. The smaller rival has acquired two companies in two days. On February 4th they turned a long partnership with widget company Goowy Media into an acquisition and yesterday they bought online affiliate marketing network Buy.at. Both acquired companies are Ads-related, so I think we can say AOL is looking for ways to monetize their free services.
Goowy makes it possible for users to create widgets and monitor them. They also have a gallery of widgets for consumers, who can place them on blogs, social network profiles, desktops and personalized start pages. With the acquisition, AOL secures itself of a division that is a strong force in the widget market.
Buy.at is a network in which advertisers pay its web publishing members only when a click on an ad leads to an action, such as buying a product. It used to be domain redirect service that owned domains like stay.at, download.at, play.at and, officiously, buy.at.
Companies like AOL, such as Altavista, fascinate me. They used to be Internet giants who founded services that learned us to use the Internet. Almost everybody started their Internet adventures at one of these two companies. But now, Altavista seems to have vanished in the search marketing division of Yahoo, yet AOL is still alive and kicking with five acquisitions in 12 months. Probably because their mother company Time Warner sees it like an advertise spin-off of their cable company. Yahoo apparently uses Altavista’s knowledge, but isn’t promoting the brand. The last press info was released five years ago.
One of the few survivors, Yahoo, is now likely to be acquired as well. Strange, for such a young medium, Internet arouses a helluva lot nostalgic feelings.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
