Confirmed: Yahoo’s SVP Of Revenue To Quit

Joanne Bradford started at Yahoo about a year and a half ago, assuming the title "Senior Vice President, U.S. Revenue and Market Development."  Now, a fresh report's indicated that the high-ranking exec is on her way out again, ready to take a position at Demand Media.

Kara Swisher wrote earlier, "According to several sources . . . Bradford is planning on leaving the Internet giant to take a new position as Chief Revenue Officer of online content upstart Demand Media."  And Swisher (and her sources) are usually spot-on about these things.

Yahoo's likely being dealt a major blow, then, considering what an important role Bradford plays at the company.  While almost all departures have theoretical financial repercussions - you have to figure everyone contributes to the bottom line in some way - Bradford's position over ad sales means she has a direct influence.

Also, Bradford's resume suggests that she's good at her job, having spent time at Microsoft, Spot Runner, and BusinessWeek before heading to Yahoo.

Still, this development doesn't have to represent a complete disaster for Yahoo.  As you might have guessed after reading the last paragraph, Bradford doesn't always stay in one place for too long - she only spent about seven months at SpotRunner, for example - so her move may not say much about Yahoo's situation.

UPDATE: Yahoo responded to a question sent via email by stating, "Joanne Bradford has decided to leave Yahoo! to pursue a new opportunity. Joanne will be working with the team over the coming weeks to enable a smooth transition."

CNN President “Really Afraid Of” Social Networks

Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers.  Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.

According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein's remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous.  He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I'm really afraid of are social networking sites.  That's an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."

Klein then explained, "The people you're friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . .  Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news.  We don't want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . .  So I'm far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."

That's an interesting take on the power of social networks.  It implies - at the very least - that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on.  An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.

On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks' users can easily - even unwittingly - make or break major corporations.

LinkedIn Can Be One of Your Most Valuable Traffic Sources

LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site's ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.

Is LinkedIn part of your strategy? Comment here.

We asked Howes why he thinks people don't generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. "Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don't see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site," he tells WebProNews.

LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.

"Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site," says Howes. "The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well."

In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

"You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers)," Howes tells us. "That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals."

Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he'd rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. "For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs," he says.

Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:

1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.
10. Add the blog application to your profile.

Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.

Have you considered LinkedIn's potential as a significant traffic source? Do you already get significant traffic from LinkedIn? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

2010: The Year of the Display Ad for Google?

This could be the year of the display ad. That's not to say that display ads aren't prevalent every year, but Google has only been involved with that for a little while, and if analysts' projections are accurate, this will be the year that Google's display ad business tops $1 billion in sales.

Last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that display ads would be Google's next big billion-dollar business. According to BusinessWeek, a Barclays Capital analyst says display ads will account for about 4% of Google's total sales in 2010. This would be a 40% increase from their contribution in 2009. BW's Douglas MacMillan reports:

Sales of video and banner ads on YouTube, the world's most popular video site, are expected by analysts at Barclays to contribute the bulk of Google's display revenue this year, about $700 million. And with DoubleClick, Google acquired a technology that handles the placement of display ads on sites across the Web. "Display is now a key business for us," says Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice-president of product management and one of the company's earliest employees.

Neal Mohan, the executive in charge of Google's display business, says Google will draw on its strength in search-related advertising to expand in display. It became the leader in search by using algorithms to help it know which ads to place where. "Our goal is to bring the science of search to the art of display," Mohan says.

Advertisers will probably not be shy about getting on board with that. "Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone," Rich Kahn, CEO of display ad provider eZanga told WebProNews last year.

Back in November, Google announced its acquisition of Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising". It provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements.

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent's technology.

"Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," Google said. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

Before that announcement, Google launched a tool to measure the impact of display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network called Campaign Insights, which Google says can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest in a particular product or service. Google has also repeatedly added new templates  for advertisers to use when constructing their creative.
 

Have You Read This?

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

> Google Launches New Templates for Display Ads

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