Adrac comments: TechCrunch ‘will remain independent and flourish’ under AOL

AOL has bought the technology news and analysis website TechCrunch in a deal the boss of the acclaimed five-year-old internet publication describes as “a perfect fit”.

Founder and co-editor Michael Arrington also explained how his team and AOL had both insisted on the continued editorial freedom of TechCrunch, how the writers had incentives to remain for at least three years and one compelling reason why the acquisition happened.

As happens with many empires that rise on the strength of leadership of one or two visionaries, TechCrunch was reaching a bottleneck in its development that Arrington & co had limited resources and energy to continue to push at.

By selling to AOL, he stated quite baldly, “we’d never have to worry about tech issues again.”

“We could focus our engineering resources on higher end things and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.”

 This might go a little way to alleviating the anxieties of the web community that has made TechCrunch what it is. Arrington went on to say in his detailed post:

“TechCrunch is a community. A community of great writers, great employees, and great readers. We also have a few trolls, but it wouldn’t be the same without them! All of us are TechCrunch, and I thank all of you for being a part of something really fun and special.”

While it did feel uncomfortably like an emotional group hug, in fact it an astute comment, very true and it’s good to see that Arrington hasn’t forgotten how he came to be in such a powerful position.

TechCrunch focuses on profiling startups, reviewing new internet products and breaking technology news. It claims to have a unique audience of more than 10 million.

Adwords & Twitter: reputations count – don’t they?

Google is seeking to maintain or improve the reputation of its AdWords campaign. After all, it’s no good trying to get customers to click through if they’re in danger of being fleeced by “rogue” pharmacies, as the search engine’s lawyer Michael Zwibelman described them.

The “don’t be evil” motto might also be behind the move. Google has a keen sense of its own social conscience.

Less about Google, let’s talk about Twitter, before our readers start thinking the dominant search engine is all Adrac thinks about. But we’re not going to examine the pros and cons, effectiveness and ROI of this aspect of social media. Adrac just wants to ask, “why is it so easy to hack?” We’re quite incredulous that a gaping security loophole that had already been identified was duplicated across to the new-look Twitter design, and exploited.

The Guardian technology section has a great “how it happened” description here. Feel your jaw drop, and pick it up again, if you passed over the news the first time around.

Reputations matter. But it says something about human nature that we continue to use services where their reputation re: privacy or security has surely been shattered. Don’t we care?

Adrac on Google Instant: bandwidth issues, search redundancy, errors

Google Instant (also dubbed Google streaming by internet junkies) is the new update for the world’s most popular search engine.

Adrac experimented with the results when it was rolled out in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. It’s available to people who used the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

However, users on domains other than Google.com could only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account.
Our first reaction was “why?” – we believe in improvement and innovation and still, we find it hard to understand the benefits for having this delivery of results.

First: bandwidth. We question the need for results being delivered if not needed. Will this not eat away at bandwidth, in effect costing the user a percentage of their download allocation? When you consider how many people search on Google every day (in fact every nanosecond), how environmentally friendly will this search delivery be?
Google has created a drain on resources for no genuine benefits to the end user.
The best way to represent this here is:
Old way

Load Google> type term> car> press return> search> result delivered

New way

Load Google> type term> c> search initiated> result delivered> a> search> result delivered> r> search> result delivered

For those of us lacking the ability to spell or type, add a whole lot of deletions and mis-searches into the mix and the redundancy increases.

So, again, we ask “why?”

How to counteract the Google Instant effect

It’s a swish idea: save hours from your lifespan with a faster search. What do we do with the 20 seconds we save* per search using Google Instant? Can we save them all up, like Green Shield Stamps or Nectar Points, and trade them in for a treat?

Webmasters, web designers, and SEO, PPC and AdWords experts will be using their saved time to fine-tune clients’ internet marketing campaigns. The way Google Instant works and the results recorded means it is going to become very difficult, very quickly, for inexperienced pay-per-click (PPC) managers to keep abreast of their successes and failures.

This could mean some companies start to experience failure in their PPC campaigns, where they have previously enjoyed some success.

Despite the undeniable value of expertise, companies in a recession have been using their in-house talents. It really is going to become much harder for this to continue, because Google Instants raises the benchmark on what an AdWords manager needs to know much, much higher.

In a way, perhaps the world’s most influential search engine is being cruel to be kind. In fact, the figures prove to Adrac on a daily basis that expert PPC management gives the best return on investment (ROI). Perhaps it’s time to get prepared for the global rollout of Instant and sample some PPC management ahead of the rush.

If you’d like to know more about how Instant will affect your PPC management, or even how PPC can help your firm achieve a rapid ROI, contact an account manager at Adrac on 0845 020 4337.

*Google claims Instant will save up to five seconds on a 25 second search. But former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli reminds me there are “lies, damned lies and statistics“. The way the time-saving has been spun in the media, it appears that using Google Instant might be more beneficial to a longer life than giving up smoking. I’m thinking of the Guardian coverage, that noted accordingly 11 years would be saved wordwide, every search-second. It might even turn us into Timelords – saving more hours than we have in a lifespan. Interesting concept.