Brand Love Hate

Yahoo Brand Universes

Beginning with the Nintendo Wii, Yahoo is developing mini-portals for 100 "passion brands" with large fan bases. The sites will combine content from different Yahoo properties, including Flickr, del.icio.us, MyWeb, Yahoo Answers, Video and Shopping. I really like the concept because the sites have the potential to be really fun, with future portals to be focused on Harry Potter, Lost, The Office and Transformers. The brand-focused sites should also provide great opportunities for advertisers to reach targeted, captive audiences.

Recruitment Video: Yahoo!

They call it a facility tour but it's a darn good recruitment video.

AdSense and Overture for Domains - Evil?

Google says, "You can make money without doing evil," but when I look at AdSense for Domains, I'm not so sure.  The same goes for Yahoo's Search Marketing service, previously known as Overture.  Both Google and Yahoo do great things on the Web, but they also quietly do things that seem a little questionable, such as encouraging domain squatting by offering advertising kits to bulk domain name buyers.  Neither company actively promotes or links to those offerings (AdSense for Domains is separate from the main AdSense site), but if you look closely at the text-based ads on so-called "holding pages," "landing pages" or "parked domains," they are driven by AdSense and Overture.

I'm finding this to be a problem for a couple reasons.  One, in researching domain name purchases for myself and for clients, I'm consistently running into those "parked" domains that have no real content or value themselves.  Google and Yahoo are helping those domain squatters make money when there are others out there eager to use those domain names for good.  The counter-argument I'm sure is something like, "First-come, first-serve," or "We're not doing anything illegal."  True, but they're not really making the Web a better place, either.  When I started working on the Web, I thought the domain name squatting problem would improve.  Google and Yahoo are actually making it worse, and are also making the squatters rich in the process.

Second, Web users who go to sites like cellphones.com thinking it's a great resource for mobile phones are being misled.  Yes, they might not be savvy enough to find Engadget on their own, but companies like Google and Yahoo should be helping, not aiding domain squatters looking to make money off those users' confusion.  Domain names have become real estate almost solely because of these programs, which makes me wonder - do the advertisers know their messages are appearing on such holding pages?

I'm not really good at reading annual reports, but looking at Google's financial data says to me that about 99 percent of its revenue in 2004 came from its ad network.  I wonder, is anyone looking at what percentage comes from landing pages, squatted and misspelled domain names?  Maybe Eliot Spitzer?  Oops, maybe not.  Again, Google and Yahoo are doing really great things for the Web, but their support for such efforts - and the quiet approach they take in positioning them - both worries and bothers me.