Good move for Flickr—and parent Yahoo—towards taking a niche that YouTube hasn’t captured.
YouTube has a lot of video. But it isn’t as a place for serious amateur moviemakers to share their work. But Flickr, a community with many serious amateur photographers, is in a good position to grab a parallel position in the amateur director community.
I’m optimistic.
New research from Marketing Sherpa/Eyetools:
25% of visitors pay heed to below-the-fold display ads on publisher sites.
75% of users don’t notice them.
Contextual search ads typically have poor response rates (compared to search engine ads). Standard explanation: push marketing isn’t as good as pull. But contextual search often shows up below-the-fold. So is poor placement to blame (at least in part) for the poor response rates?
The scenario: Censorship as punishment
Congress awarded the Dalai Lama, and China retaliated by redirecting Google searches in China to Chinese search engine Baidu.
The irony
In January 2006, Google capitulated to Chinese requests that the company censor its own search results on Google.cn. Rights groups berated Google for the move.
Why Google may have been right
At the time, Google argued that it was doing the right thing. China wouldn’t let Google into the country without self-censorship; and, Google claimed, the freedom that Google-provided information would ultimately foster could more than justify a modicum of self-censorship
Sirgey and Larry may have been on to something. Flash-forward to 2007: Chinese Googlers, re-routed to Baidu, will see their country’s censorship machine in action.
Had Google not played by the rules on self-censorship in ’05, Chinese searchers never would have seen their freedom of search yanked from their desktops (or at least not in this way). That’s hardly Tiananmen Square fodder. But it is bound to make an impression—if only subliminally, and if only in aggregate with other freedoms Chinese people lose every day—on the part of the Chinese population who’s educated enough to search to begin with.
