Chris Lake's Blog

Thomson Financial believes Google will generate an astonishing $21.31 billion in mobile advertising revenues in 2009. I don’t. Moreover, I think Google is going to have a hard time migrating Adwords to mobile.

Mobile advertising is going to be big. Really big. Or at least that’s what the analysts are clamouring to tell us, with a succession of bullish forecasts having been released since the dawn of time. And they keep on coming.

Over at WebmasterWorld there is some talk about a relatively new ranking factor that determines Google’s Quality Score on Adwords, with ‘load time’ now taken into account.

After a short measurement period Google will make a judgement call and if your pages are deemed too slow then your Quality Score will take a hit, meaning that you'll need to spend more to maintain or improve upon your ad positions.

So Yahoo has binned 1,000 employees amid talk of "game-changing" action that it hopes will rekindle its fortunes. The game, in Yahoo’s case, is online advertising.

The thing is, Yahoo doesn’t need to change the game, only to play it properly. Or to at least speed up its moves. Because if you want to see a killer example of tardy gameplay, look no further than its lame – and ongoing – failure to roll out the long-awaited Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) internationally.

We're expanding the blogging team here at E-consultancy to bring you more quality articles from people working at the sharp end of the internet industry.

One of the most common - and most infuriating - mistakes made by PRs is the overuse of the dreaded term ‘feel free’, especially when pitching to bloggers.

Feel free to add this to your blog! Feel free to post this video! Feel free to promote our viral!

Oh yeah? How about ‘feel free to take a running jump’? Or ‘feel free to pay us a ton of money and then we’ll talk’.

Microsoft’s Xbox Live may have surpassed the 10m user milestone but this is no time for ebullient press releases from the Redmond-based giant. Since Christmas, playing Xbox Live online has been nothing short of a nightmare.

Microsoft has totally failed to manage user expectations, to accommodate new Xbox users, and to cater for the spikes that were bound to appear over the holiday period. It’s a pity, since the Xbox Live experience, when it works, is nothing short of sensational, and should get better and better.

Internet startup fever looks all set to turn into something of an epidemic in 2008, judging by the number of experienced people we know who are looking to get in on the action.

At the foot of this article I’ve compiled a UK-focused list of resources, to help you find startups, wannabe entrepreneurs and investors. But before we get there you need to figure out what kind of startup you want to get involved with.

Customer reviews are known to help engender trust among consumers, and can increase conversion rates for retailers. But what are the challenges? What kind of benefits can they deliver to e-commerce companies?

We spoke to Brett Hurt to find out more. He is the founder and CEO of customer reviews specialist Bazaarvoice. Some of you may remember him from our What's New In Online Marketing event earlier this year. He has some pretty interesting observations...

I spotted an interesting article in the Washington Post, which looks at online auction giant eBay and its plans to improve the user experience in 2008.

The story focuses on eBay’s proposed introduction of a shipping fees ratings scheme, to clamp down on sellers who charge bargain basement prices but make profits on exorbitant delivery ‘costs’.

All good, but what about the improvements that eBay’s website has been in need of for a considerable time? Adding functionality and tweaking its ranking algorithms are one thing, but what I think it needs is some proper usability testing and a bit of a makeover.