Earnings Season Kicked Off By Bill Burnham
Oh my god. . . this is hilarious. . .
Commenting on the results, Bill Burnham, Chief Blogger of Burnham’s Beat explains “This quarter’s results continue to demonstrate that blogging is a complete waste time. While we did not achieve our previously forecasted results of 100 billion page views and ‘Google-style cash, Baby!’, we remain hopeful that people forgot about those projections. There are several reasons for missing our projections including an outage of our hosting provider in late Q4 which cost us a least $1.00, the continued poor quality of the writing on the site, high oil prices, several deals that slipped to next quarter, and uncertainty created by the war in Iraq. ”
On a serious note, reading between the lines (not too hard actually) .. . Yahoo has higher ASP on their keywords (cause they yet to have an full blown ad network to drive down keyword prices like Google), but still need to work on their content/behavioural ad serving algorithm. (BTW, I thought both contract prohibits showing adds from another ad network on the same page?). For Google, the increase in take rate (and corresponding decrease in Traffic Acq. Cost) could mean that Google is struggling to hit revenue targets? (you know, raising prices is the first thing companies do before missing earnings! . . . )
We added an additional search advertising partner in Q4 and were generally disappointed with the results. While revenue per click is higher at this partner, overall click through rates are much lower. In terms of our main advertising ‘partner’ we have seen a clear pattern throughout the year of them reducing the revenue share they pay to their blog-related ‘partners’. Apparently they aren’t making enough money as it is and need to stick it to the little man.”
