PayPerPost was good while it lasted

 

 

A few weeks Google penalized PayPerPost bloggers by reducing the PageRank for the blogs using PayPerPost to zero.

Despite PayPerPost putting on a brave face, renaming and using a new service called RealRank, the PayPerPost have been hit hard.

Without a decent PageRank many of the advertisers have lost interest. Partly because a review from a website with a decent PageRank helps with the advertiser's search engine listings.

The PayPerPost forum has some posts from some very upset bloggers:

"Poor PPP, 'twas good while it lasted. It's really sad that they only started RealRank AFTER everyone got screwed. Oh well, maybe it'll get better soon."

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"Oh. My. God. Oh my god! I can't believe this is happening. I NEED to earn money with my blogs, I'm going to have to take every single opp I qualify for every day in order to keep up with expenses. When I looked at the 21 qualified, $5.00 opps, I actually had tears spring into my eyes. I don't know what to do."

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Same here, I even have a ticket submitted on an op and now it's not even available to me. I went from having 39 available (mostly $5 ops) to have like 9. This sucks.

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AdBrite raises $23 million

 

 

AdBrite has raised $23 million from Sequoia Capital and Artis Management.

AdBrite was started by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise in 2002. They were looking for an easy way to sell advertising on their websites and blogs, and decided to place a small "Your Ad Here" link on each site to connect advertisers to an order form. AdBrite's simplicity spread through word-of-mouth, and within the first two years, more than 1,000 sites were using AdBrite to sell ads.

The duo officially incorporated the company in 2004 and teamed up with Sequoia Capital, who’d previously funded companies including Google, Yahoo, and Apple. Since then, thousands more advertisers and publishers have joined AdBrite.

AdBrite has previously raised $12 million in two different rounds of financing.

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Amazon launches its awful Q & A website

 

 

Amazon.com has launched Askville.com, an information-sharing Web site where users can ask questions and answer queries from others.

The site, open to all of its customers, has been in beta testing since December 2006 and has already been open to a few users.

The site looks like it has been created in India over the weekend, the design is weak and the logo looks it was created in word.

Given similar services are offered by Yahoo Inc's Answers and other Web sites such as AnswerBank the obvious question is why has Amazon bothered. Amazon must feel they will be able to use the site as a means to extend its audience.

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THE FROSTFIRE BUZZ TEST

1. Is this a unique product? 6/10

2. Is this business/product difficult to replicate? 6/10

3. Is this something that can appeal to a large global audience? 7/10

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Julian Lennon invests in MyStore

 

 

Julian Lennon, son of Beatles icon John Lennon, is among the group of private
investors behind yourStore, LLC. The company owns and operates Mystore.com, an online marketplace.

In addition to his monetary investment, Julian has contributed some ideas to the options MyStore.com offers to musicians and artists who want to resell or self
distribute their music and art online.

As an independent artist himself, Mr. Lennon was an early user of MyStore.com, setting up his own MyStore and linking it to several places he has a presence online including his MySpace page.

MyStore.com is owned by YourStore which is a virtual real estate company and application service provider offering individuals and businesses with free online "retail" space and software usage in the form of personalized web stores located within the company's marketplace.

MyStore is not an alternative but rather an additional sales channel that can be
either a stand-alone store or integrated as part of other websites like eBay, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Amazon or Yahoo.

 

 

As the graph above shows MyStore has taken some time to get going and is still struggling to reach some decent traffic figures in the US. 

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Fotolog sells for $90 million

 

 

French Internet company Hi-Media,operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog.

The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month.

Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr. CEO John Borthwick is moving on to his incubator/investment fund Betaworks.

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See the people behind your search results at PeekYou

 

 

PeekYou.com, the “people search” engine, today announced a new way to search Google. This application improves Google’s results by displaying the people who own the websites or those who are referenced within them. The service is available at http://google.peekyou.com/

For example, a Google search via PeekYou for “tech blog” not only displays standard Google results (techeblog.com, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc) but also includes the owners of those blogs (Steve Sun, Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton).

Included in the results are their home cities and photographs. A search for “General Motors” not only displays a link to GM.com, but also a photo of CEO Rick Wagoner.

A Google search for “George Washington” yields results including a Wikipedia article on America’s first president as well as biographies and a link to The George Washington University. Performing the same search via PeekYou displays the president’s home – Mount Vernon - as well as his photograph and the names of his various biographers. PeekYou also identifies the current president of George Washington University, Steven Knapp.

The search results are generated via Google’s Custom Search Engine and cross-referenced against PeekYou’s database of people. The end product outputs the same exact results (and advertising) you would expect from any Google search with the added bonus of discovering the people behind the links.

 

 

This is an exciting development from PeekYou, but is it enough to turn around the lack of site growth experienced in the last few months.

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Google Experimenting with Digg style search

 

Google Experimental is currently running an experiment that allows some selected users to “influence [the] search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.”

On a result page, you can choose move a search result to the top by clicking on the up-arrow corresponding result, which will be marked by an orange asterisk next time you search for the same keywords.

Similarly, if you don’t like the page, you can hide it in future searches for the same keywords by clicking on the X button next to the title of the result, as shown in the above screenshot.

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