The web and ways to market on web continue to evolve at warp speed – we see some positive and negative changes occurring - our observations du jour: 1)Publishers are finally starting to charge for branded content. It's still difficult to do, but we are seeing many newsletter publishers charging from $30-100 per subscribe per annum. And, most importantly, many people are finally starting to accept need to pay for quality content.
2)Contrary to popular opinion web's epicenter is not San Francisco, Tokyo, Washington D.C./northern VA, Seattle, London or Austin – there is no epicenter, its everywhere. We now have over 407M (estimated according to Nua) people using web and its become a global medium/marketing venue/information highway.
3)More good news for ecommerce enabled business models, recent published reports (Boston Consulting Group & eShop) indicate customer acquisition costs have dropped from $45. per individual customer in Q- 4 of 2000 to $18. in Q-1 in 2001.
4)Adobe continues to push PDF format as a web standard, over 32% of corporate web sites today have Acrobat PDF-enabling their web sites. Why we will never know (?), as it isn't an HTML standard but was originally developed to facilitate printing of documents. And, it doesn't work well on many web sites, especially for those coming in with slow connections or when you are trying to view more than a couple of pages.
5)Surprise, surprise splash pages are still increasing in popularity, with an estimated 18% of web sites today incorporating them. Let's be clear, we think they are really lame to use a technical marketing term – they slow down user experience and cause many people to click away from a web site in annoyance, no bookmark and no return visit.
6)Opt-in e-mail continues to grow in popularity and to reflect web's ability to handle rich media content – HTML format is rapidly becoming standard in many e-mail campaigns and we are starting to see streaming audio and video plug in components (running in background) and even integrated voice mail, as just announced last month by YesMail. But, watch those conversion rates fall, opt-in e-mail is in danger of becoming this year's banner advertising.