WebProNews

Online Retailers See Strong Cyber Monday Sales

U.S. online retailers reported strong holiday sales results on Cyber Monday (Nov.30) 2009 compared to the same period last year, according to a new report from Coremetrics. Cyber Monday sales were up 24.1 percent compared to Black Friday 2009.  Consumers spent more per online order ($180.03 versus $170.19 for an increase of 5.8 %) compared to Black Friday.

YouTube May Expand Into TV Show Biz

It's no secret that YouTube's trying to catch up to Hulu in terms of offering premium content; the site's administrators often make a big deal out of movie and TV show additions.  What is under wraps - or at least hasn't been publicized in press releases and blog posts - is that YouTube might also be interested in charging for access.

Google Changes How it Handles Paid Content

Google has made a change to the way it treats its "first click free" option for publishers. The option was designed for legitimate publishers to get around Google's cloaking policies, which discourage the showing of one web page to a crawler while the user sees something different.

What Would You Change About Google Search?

Google's Matt Cutts, as you may know, frequently appears in videos for Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. In these videos he answers questions submitted by Google users. One of the latest ones features a different kind of (and perhaps more fun) question:

NY AG Works With Facebook And MySpace To Remove Sex Offenders

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today that more than 3,500 registered state sex offenders have been removed for social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. Under New York's e-STOP law, which was written by Cuomo, Facebook was able to identify and disable accounts linked to 2,782 registered New York sex offenders, and MySpace was able to identify and shutdown accounts linked to 1,796 sex offenders.

Is Retargeting the Most Under-Utilized Marketing Strategy?

Advertise.com and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) have shared some interesting findings from a survey about online ad technology. The two organizations found that there is a lot of untapped opportunity for retargeting in online advertising.

YouTube Most Popular Video Site In France

France saw widespread growth in online video viewing during the past year, as audience size and video engagement both increased significantly, according to a new report from comScore. The number of online video viewers in France increased 36 percent to 34.6 million, while the number videos viewed grew 141 percent to 5.4 billion. The average time spent viewing videos online nearly doubled to 11.7 hours per viewer in September.

The Definitions That People Didn't Know in 2009

It's that time of year when all of the search engines are releasing their lists of top searches. Dictionary.com may not get the traffic of a Google, or even an Ask, which is owned by the same company, but its list provides a different perspective to the picture of what people are searching for.

Google Year-End Zeitgeist Published

Although 2009's still one month short of being over, Google followed Bing and Yahoo this morning by identifying the year's major search trends.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, "Michael Jackson" was one of the most common terms, and interest in the 2008 Olympics waned.

Yahoo Releases Top Searches Of 2009

Yahoo has released its top 10 overall searches for 2009, based on billions of queries over the past year. Michael Jackson garnered the most searches of 2009, after his death in June of a drug overdose. Jackson bumped Britney Spears from the top position where she had dominated for the past four years.  Spears still made it into the top 10 landing in the fifth spot on the year.