Have you heard about the cool Christmas presents Google sent out to big spenders and earners on Adwords and Adsense? Reportedly they are getting christmas present packages with USB sticks, headphones, wireless mice and more. An anonymous source sent me a picture of what the really big Google spenders and earners are getting via FedEx:

special note for journalistic integrity: this is a joke

Aparently Alexa’s Web Search Platform was released on the 13th — just a few days ago. I just happened to run into it by accident while doing some research. Its not free, but it is powerful. Apparently its the same platform that they use to power Archive.org’s Wayback Machine.

I’m not a programmer. Sometimes I wish I was. Here is what “rca66″ on Slashdot had to say about this –

1. You have access to more than just the index - you have access to the crawled data, which is about 300 Terabyte(s). So, if you want to do something with the pages, you don’t have to download them, you don’t have to rely, that they are there - you can use the crawled data to do whatever you want.

This is good stuff.

This is in response to Andrew Neitlich’s blog post on 2006.

My prediction, upward price pressure from an increase of online advertising budgets will squeeze businesses to seek out information to maximize their conversion rates.

In 2005 I learned everything I could about ROI and conversions. In 2006 I’m working on maximizing my online audience in a very big way.

I’m working on a CSS layout today. As I was testing out some code I noticed what looks like a Chinese Adsense ad. I might be wrong, but I’m positive its not Korean, and I don’t think its Japanese. Talk about a highly untargetted ad!

How much have you heard about online banking? I’m going to guess it involved something about identify theft, spyware, and stolen passwords. Despite security concerns by users online banking is alive and very well. ING Direct has found a niche and is bringing in the money.

In just five years, the Wilmington, DE-based subsidiary of Dutch financial services conglomerate ING Groep NV has gone from nothing to three million customers, $51 billion in assets and $37 billion in deposits. It’s now the nation’s largest standalone Internet bank-and bigger than such established names as M&I Corp. and Huntington Bancshares. Pretax profits in 2004 were $159 million, far more than its founders envisioned at this stage, while return on equity was nine percent.

ING Direct is paying attention to security too. A recent article on Wired.com highlighted just that.

The BBC reports that PriceGrabber.com was purchased for $485 million by UK retail company GUS. Why PriceGrabber? Because PriceGrabber had higher profit margins than other similar sites such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com

Pricegrabber was used by 17 million unique visitors in November and forecasts sales of $60m in 2005.

It seems that $500 million range is a magic number for internet buyouts in 2005. Myspace.com and IGN also were purchased for close to half a billion dollars this year. For a shopping website that doesn’t actually sell anything $485 million is a nice price.

Scary stuff. The EU is planning new rules which would control television programming both online and offline. No word on how this would effect a company in a non-EU country serving video in the EU.

“In the proposals, the definition of television is ditched in favour of “moving image”, with or without sound and distributed by electronic networks, so that moving images over the Internet are also covered.”

Another one from Paidcontent — this a statement Bill Gates made in India — “”When you use a search engine, if somebody is making lot of money from advertisers they ought to share it with you,” Gates said in an interview on the business news channel NDTV Profit.
Gates said Microsoft’s search products may eventually give users software programs or even cash after they click on an ad. ”

And you think Google has a problem with fraudulent clicks? This statement may reveal why Microsoft is getting left in the dust by Google and Firefox.

.. so what does this have to do with website publishing? From the Times Online — “Following the attacks on the volunteer lifeguards, a mobile telephone text campaign started, backed up by frenzied discussions on weblogs, calling on Cronulla locals to rally to protect their beach.” The Times article specifically cites RealSurf.com.

The fact is mass digital communication is playing a big role in the way the world works, for better or for worse.

As reported on DNJournal, MyBlog.com sold for $400,000, Sofa.com sold for $200,000 and spanish domain Viajando.com sold for $90,000. Oddities include VoodooDolls.com for $16,250 and BakingPan.com for $2,706.