Apple’s iPad commands 1% of all web traffic after just one year
A new report indicates the iPad now holds a 1 percent share of global web browsing, more than 50 times greater than its closest competitor.
What I’m Reading
Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
Learn From Your Competitors’ Google AdSense Mistakes With MixRank
When setting up Google AdWords campaigns, it can pretty difficult to guess which ad copy is going to perform the best. Sometimes even the tiniest, most unexpected changes can have a dramatic impact on ad performance. But how do you know what will be most effective?
A new Y Combinator-backed startup called MixRank wants to help take some of the guesswork out the process. The self-described “spy tool for contextual and display ads” offers businesses a glimpse at AdSense campaigns being run by other companies and shows which ones had the best performance.
Sponsor
MixRank indexes more than 93,000 sites running Google AdSense ads and figures out things like how many publishers ran the ad, when it was last seen, how frequently it’s displayed and what it’s average position in AdSense blocks is. It also breaks down top traffic sources for that site.
In the above example using ads run by Mint.com, you can see that the ad for “Personal Budget Worksheet” vastly outperformed the ad for “Family Budget Spreadsheet.”
For small businesses especially, such a tool can be hugely valuable for better allocating those limited ad dollars and putting energy into the types of ad copy and traffic sources that will yield the highest ROI.
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The US Group Buying Universe [Infographic]
While the debate as to whether group buying as whole is a viable business model rages on post-Groupon S-1, there’s no doubt that these social deal things keep sprouting up — Yesterday someone introduced themselves to me as the CEO of a Groupon for moms (and yes I thought it was a good idea).
We’ve got Groupons for techies, a Groupon for Jews, what will there be a Groupon for next!? Wait, please don’t answer that.
Still it makes sense that people would want a piece of the action, as the size of the market in the US is estimated at $2.7 billion in 2012 (up from $1.1 billion last year). And to give you a sense of some of the players and their relative size, the folks at Flowtown have revised their original infographic to reflect the social buying boom.
What can we tell from the above? Well first of all that space is nascent and so are its physics; First movers aren’t necessarily rewarded. Woot, which was founded in 2004, currently has over 1.4 million unique monthly visits versus dominant player Groupon’s (which was founded in 2008 and pivoted to the model) 29.1 million. Mercata, which isn’t even on the graph, was shut down in 2001.
Current second runner up LivingSocial is around half the size of Groupon, at 14.3 million unique monthly visits, with 301 US cities to Groupon’s 182. Yeah that’s about 5% of the US population visiting the site monthly; Enjoy your teeth whitening guys!
CrunchBase InformationGrouponLivingSocialInformation provided by CrunchBase
How to Make Google+ Look Like Facebook+ [Google+]
Not sure why'd you want to, but if you're so hooked on Facebook you can't imagine getting your social networking on anywhere else—yet can't quite turn down a Google+ invite—there's a way to satisfy your eyes, at least. More »