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Seems the folks over at Time Warner have finally realized that the AOL brand does not have any impact in the niched content space. But is AOL mired in the thoughts of web users as that “old internet dialup service” as some of the Time Warner staff believe?

According to the Associated Press, AOL parent Time Warner was more blunt in a regulatory filing:

“If AOL cannot effectively build a portfolio of alternate brands that are appealing to Internet consumers, AOL may have difficulty in increasing the engagement of Internet consumers on its Web products and services. AOL believes that the `AOL’ brand is associated in the minds of consumers with its dial-up Internet access service.”

To overcome this hurdle AOL has started creating separate niched communities - though they may want to hire someone else to name them. Asylum for the young men’s site, Spinner, the indie music site, WalletPop, the personal finance site, StyleList for fashion and AOL Body (which kept the association after tests showed it works) for women’s health.

Should be interesting to see how that works for them. I had not heard of any of them prior to reading the AP report so the new branding has not made much of an impact yet. Though why, as AP stated, have they decided to roll the new sites out quietly?

Branding requires people knowing about the name. Forget replacing the Yahoo board, AOL needs some new minds at the helm - maybe some that are not still thinking like last century.

ValleyWag has had some interesting things to say about Bill Wilson, the head of the AOL rebranding effort.

Bill Wilson: Forget about his mother, will he frag AOL?

Avinash Kaushik is one of the most knowledgeable people in the analytics space, but his newest venture 4Q with iPerceptions may have a problem. One of the pet peeves of Web users is that popups suck.

The idea of a survey to find out what people thought of your site is a good one, especially in a world where site owners are just starting to understand the need for analytics. The survey goes back to the old direct marketing system where restaurants and other brick and mortar services would poll their customers.

But while the information may be invaluable the bad taste exit popups leave in a visitor’s mouth is something iPerceptions may have wanted to survey first. The few people discussing the product on the site’s forum mention this problem and the drop in conversions the popup may be causing.

True, the message is not a pitch for a sale (well not directly), and many large companies still use the feature (log out of any travel booking site and you will see what I am talking about).

The feature itself can be written with a simple javascript and a landing page, so the outsourcing of it may be more for the novice. But it does give some aggregated information to 4Q and I have yet to read through the privacy policy to see how that may be used in the future.

There are a few features to this that make it a little different. You can actually set the percentage that see it - so you are not pushing it to everyone and could test it on say 10% of your exiting traffic.

I am on the fence right now but still remember how effective those exit popups used to be in grabbing email addresses when I used them a few years ago. One warning, don’t put them on any of your pages where you are using AdWords… it is against the T&Cs.

The standards debate may be in full swing in our industry - but the decisions may be soon taken out of our hands if the FTC continues to define allowable advertising practices.

MediPost has a good overview of the developments of behavioral targeting and how they can be used. “Ad industry players are urging the FTC not to impose any new regulations — and also argue that the proposed voluntary guidelines are too restrictive,” they reported.

Where this gets close to our industry comes from the people seeking greater regulations. “Privacy advocates, on the other hand, want to see rules that will require companies to honor Web users’ preferences about whether they wish to be tracked online and to receive targeted ads,” MediaPost notes.

If this occurs then search is on the horizon of these groups. And we better be aware of them if consumer advocacy groups are claiming they “want to see new rules, rather than rely on voluntary compliance with trade groups”.

MediaPost quotes both Google and Microsoft at the end of the article and they have opposing views.

“Google, meanwhile, is especially concerned that the standards could affect search ads. In comments to the FTC, Google said it’s testing personalized search results, and argued that search ads shouldn’t be considered “behavioral” even when the ads displayed to users are based on their search history.

“We are currently experimenting in our Search service with providing ads based on both the current query and the immediately previous search,” Google wrote. “For example, a user who types ‘Italy vacation’ into the Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or affordable flights to Rome. If the user were to subsequently search for ‘weather,’ we might assume that there is a link between ‘Italy vacation’ and ‘weather’ and deliver ads regarding local weather conditions in Italy.”

Google rival Microsoft, on the other hand, said it supports the FTC’s goals and that the proposed guidelines should be extended “to include the full array of online advertising activities.”

Funny about the Microsoft position given I have been in a pitch for increasing our budget where they used competitors advertising information to suggest other terms and ads….. anonymous of course but not hard to reverse engineer.

PDFs are particularly significant in B2B marketing, which makes optimizing them for the web is an important piece of SEO strategy in that sector. Thankfully, Galen de Young of Francis Marketing has a new post on optimizing PDFs on their B2B marketing blog.

Here are the key take away points from Galen’s post:

Other quick tips include:

• Build links into PDFs (and be sure to verify them!)
• Keep links to PDFs closer to the root level of the site’s file structure
• Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to PDFs
• Don’t do anything in a PDF that you wouldn’t do in a web page

PDFs can be forgotten when developing or redesigning a web site and lost in a greater SEM strategy. But when properly optimized they can be a powerful content tool for your business.

Related Reading:
Yahoo to Distribute Contextual Ads on PDFs
Yahoo Adds Support for Page-Level Exclusion Tags for Non-HTML Docs
Search Marketing Works for B2B, Too
Vertical Search: B2B Survey Says … Blazing Hot

Seems the European Union is becoming more sensitive to the workings of the internet. Recent rulings have changed their once strong position about its impact on Europe and its people.

Recent reports tell that they are ready to approve the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google - regardless of what had previously been thought to be a move closer to an online monopoly.

The latest is their decision not to make ISPs give the information of users who have used P2P software for sharing files, a battle that has been fought globally for copyright issues of music and film.

“The European Union’s highest court ruled this week that Internet service providers in the EU do not have to give entertainment companies the names of Web users suspected of illegal file sharing.

Internet service providers only have to disclose the names of suspects in criminal cases, not in civil lawsuits, the EU court upheld.

EU countries generally provide consumers a broad range of privacy protections,” AVN reported today.

It will be worth watching how these new decisions change the internet legal landscape in Europe.

If you bombard people on the Web with ads, you run the risk of alienating them.  But if you try to contact potential customers with mobile advertising, well . . . a survey says you’ll really piss ‘em off.
You can thank Nielsen//NetRatings and WebVisible for this not-too-shocking finding.  According to them (and Tech.co.uk’s Anna [...]

Over 53 million people in Japan use a mobile device to access the Internet, according to comScore.

That is almost equal to the 53.7 million who went online at work or home on a pc.
Mobile Web is a significant opportunity," said Maru Sato, managing director of comScore, Japan. "Advertisers can now reach 53 million consumers online. [...]

Searchles, a social search platform has added to its video indexing to display embeds from video sites Metacafe, Liveleak, Veoh and CollegeHumor.

Users can mashup videos from Metacafe, Liveleak, and CollegeHumor, in addition to the video sites already indexed, into a Searchles TV channel. The video additions are part of Searchles goal to offer users a [...]

Nielsen//NetRatings has announced the leaders in three Web categories. Search, career development and multi-category travel have had high month- over- month visitor retention rates from June to July, but also had audience overlap with other competitors in their categories.

Search providers had the best retention rates, with an average of 71 percent of June visitors at [...]

By grouping Internet users into categories based on their amount of Web usage, comScore thinks it can help advertisers balance out their ad delivery.Time matters most under the revised system comScore plans to use to categorize Web surfers.
The Financial Times said comScore wants to help advertisers reach the broader Internet audience better. The smaller segment [...]