Adobe buys Omniture for $1.8bn

Whoa, you got that right.  Holy Cow was how one twitter post put it.  The whole Omniture hashtag on Twitter went mental over it.  I wonder if it will hit a trending topic.  Obviously the timing for us here in the UK is a bit crappy, because it is 10 in the evening and I've just finished writing a blog post (how inconsiderate - if they'd announced this a couple of hours earlier then I could have written about that instead of having to write two in one night).  Obviously with the whole scent thing that is going on, I've had to write a second one in one night.  Which is a bit much for me.

Maybe some back story might make a bit more sense here - back in November 2007 (less than two years ago) Omniture bought out Visual Sciences in a deal that was reported at almost $400m.  That seemed like a lot of money at the time (and of course Webtrends were furious because they thought that Omniture were going to buy them).  Did we wonder at the time why they were doing it - was it a land grab of clients so that they could build up a base and sell out as soon as possible?  It was certainly seen like that in some quarters - CNET reports that they only take about $300m in revenue in any particular year and I'm fairly sure their overheads mean that little of that is profit.

To include the rest of the back story - whilst HBX was consumed by Omniture, it still exists in many places and so it will be interesting to see what happens with the tool.  Microsoft Analytics arrived at a similar time to the HBX take over, but has since completely disappeared.  Added to that fact that Google has a long running free tool that many bloggers, including this one, use.  It adds value to itself by integrating into adwords in an attempt to get users to spend more money on adwords (it'd be interesting to know if anyone at Google had ever worked out if they did).  And then finally Yahoo! got in on the action by buying and then releasing for free to a those who could get it Index Tools.

But what about the current deal?  Where does it fit in?  It all looks a little odd to me.  Whilst Omniture has many different products, none of them really fit into what Adobe do.  I know Adobe does have options on web design and rich internet applications, but Omniture has consistently sold itself on its Marketing capabilities, rather than on its ability to link into web design processes and internet applications.  Plus, do Adobe really make any money out of Flash?  I don't think so - if it is simply to come up with options to encourage people to design in it so that they can measure more effectively, then it's not going to make them any more money.

Where does Adobe fit in here?

So does this lead us onto the same thought as Omniture had almost two years ago?  Lets make a big product, get as many clients as possible and then sell it on to some other mug for a massive profit who think having many clients equals long term profit?  It doesn't appear to have worked so far.  According to Seeking Alpha there was a Net Loss last year (2008) of $44.8m, admittedly based on a $297m revenue.  But that is still a big loss.  The only way you could ever make money on this kind of deal is hope that you can double revenues (probably doubling Net Loss in the same process) and then sell the company on for more money than you bough it for.

Maybe what has actually gone on here is that Adobe has made the age old error of mistaking web analytics software for something that gives you insight into what the users do, when actually the web analysts using the software are the ones that give that insight.  Linking this in with any Design software tools won't work unless you have have the appropriate people there who are able to translate numbers into recommendations that the designers can take on.

What I'm going to be doing in the next couple of weeks is keeping an eye on what the blogs are saying about Omniture - I am sure there are a load of insiders that know more about this than I do.

How Publishers Could Do Micropayments

I've been thinking recently about how Publishers should set up their paid for model (given that News International have said they are going to do it).  Last time I wrote about it I was trying to work out if he would go for fully behind a pay wall or the freemium model.  But suddenly Google have done something strange.  They've come up with something in Googlelabs called fastflip.

What is fastflip?  Well it is something that Google have just put into Beta which is going to allow you to flip through news articles on the web.  You can add in bits of information to filter your content to allow just certain topics to appear.  It's a bit like Google news, but with a shot of the page to allow you to see what it looks like (but not clear enough to actually read it).

What has been said so far about it?  The Guardian says that Publishers are very happy with it (even if not very many of them are on the beta as yet).  ComputerWorld is excited about the possibilities in terms of sharing content with other users and being able to filter content.  Predictably the times talks about how this is another attempt by Google to make money out of publishers for content they didn't create (which I suppose I am too by linking to the article).

But they seem to have missed a point:  Yes Google may put advertising around the pictures and make money out of something they didn't create, but they do that anyway with adwords and everyone bar the Publishing industry thinks that is good (especially those that actually sell something on their websites); Yes it is exciting in terms of sharing content around to your friends in a different way;  Yes it is just a pretty version of Google News.

But think about it this way - if you are going to hide your content behind a pay wall you will probably lose money because Google won't index your content and people won't find your content to be able to buy it (unless, bizarrely you use adwords to get users to pay Google for content that they didn't create - can you see where I am going with this one) - so you'll be limited to solely people who already know about you.

How could you get around this - if you could persuade Google to keep your content indexed, but tell the users that they will have to pay to get onto the site for content.  This is the micropayments model whereby you pay per bit of content that you look at.  The real trouble with micropayments is that you won't do it if it is difficult and you don't really know the site.  How could you make it easier?  You could do it through Google, but then you'd have to pay Google some money.

Is this where the fastflip comes in?  Google still indexes the content in fastflip for those that want to use it.  You get to see a picture of the page to lure you in to want to see it.  Google tells you that you have to pay £0.10, but you can do it through your Google account really easily just by saying 'Yes - do it' when it prompts you.  Google then gives seven pence to the publisher, to thank them for persuading a user to sign through.  This gives the publishers a really good micropayments methodology that they still get 70% of the cash for, they still get indexed in Google and get traffic and Google is happy because they are making profit out of you hiding your content behind a pay wall.

Will it work?  It's debatable - because you're reliant on all sites doing it.  Anyone who sticks with the current model will inevitably win this one because they'll have fewer competitors and so they'll get more people from search.  They'll also pick up those that just plain object to paying for something that they could get for free.  But it could just add that extra bit of impetus to those publishers who are keen on going down the route of making the consumers pay for the content.

The real question is - if you are going to use Google as you option for setting up a micropayments system, where does that leave Microsoft and Yahoo!  They could badly miss out on this one.  In this country (the UK) Google already have 90% of the search traffic, imagine if they created a micropayments system - who would bother using Bing or Yahoo!?  Only people who didn't actually realise they were.  If Microsoft are going to get through this one they need to think about what they are going to do and they need to think about it fast.

And this is what they are doing - they have introduced Visual search.  As Techradar says - you have to pretend you are in the US for the moment, but that is also true of flipfast.  Unusually for Microsoft, they appear to have decided to do something without really thinking about how they can make money off it.  I think they should be thinking of using this technology in a similar way to Google to help users look at news pages that are hidden behind a pay wall.  I suppose the real question is - can someone come up with a quick an easy way of doing the micropayments and sign up the publishers quickly.  For me there is enough animosity between New International and Google, for Microsoft to come in and make this relationship work.  How will they get market share for Bing - this could possibly be the model.

Some SEO basics

Every time I write about SEO it amazes me that I've written so little about it in the past.  Don't believe me?  When I talked about how to measure your seo effort back in March I said it then.  Admittedly I didn't say it last time I blogged about Bing doing Yahoo!'s search, but that is beside the point.  In fact, whilst I'm on it - I always call it Yahoo! - but should it have the exclamation mark on the end or is that me just going over the top on the brand?  Who knows.  Anyway, I've been doing some explaining today about SEO to a group of people, so I thought I'd post what I was talking about on here.  Really this is SEO basics - what you should do to make your site more search engine friendly.


This is a simplistic model of how search engines work.  The search engine has a set of 'spiders', which spider around the web.  If you'll excuse the pun.  Essentially all it is a robot that looks at webpages, it scans the text on the website and the links (along with their anchor text - that's the text of the link).  It then takes the links on the page and scans those pages too.  Anything that the first page was about that the second page is also about will cause the search engine to say that the second page has had a vote of confidence from the first page and it will put it in its search engine results page (SERPS) for the particular subject A was about.

Now extend that across the entire web for every single search phrase, every single link and every single page.  Yep that's a behemoth.

1. The Technical stuff on your page


So what does that mean we have to do?  Firstly we need to tell the search engines what our pages are about.  That way when someone else links to us from a page of similar subject, the search engines knows it is about the same subject.  Take the diagram about - we have to tell the search engines our page is about A otherwise the search engines won't know that those votes from other websites about A are relevant to our page.

We do this in a couple of ways.  Firstly we have a Title of our page which has a couple of things in it.  Mine looks a bit like this:

When can I stop?: Some SEO Basics - a blog by Alec Cochrane

This tells Google that this page is about SEO and it also tells it about the blog itself (although this is really because I have a generic title across all my pages, really you should have a bit more of a bespoke one for individual pages or blog posts in my case).  This title appears in a couple of places - it's up there in the little blue bar.  It also appears as your link in your SERPs - so you should make sure that it is very descriptive and encourages people to click on the link.

The next thing to think about are your meta keywords.  These are things that you can put in your page to describe what the page is about.  They never appear on the page itself, you can't see it, but when Google's spiders come along they'll see it and they'll let it know what the pages are about.  My page doesn't have any, but if you right click on a page normally and view the source of a page, you should see something at the top that says meta name="keyword" and then the content of the tag.

The next thing to think about is the meta description.  This is the bit that appears in SERPS underneath your link.  It should describe your site and encourage people to click on the link above.  It doesn't have to appear on your site either, but it should be in there.

Header tags are the next thing to think about and these come in more than one option.  The first thing you should think about is your H1 tag.  This is something physically on your page.  It tells your users that this is the title of your page.  You can also have H2 and H3 tags for hierarchical importance of text on the page.

2. The Technical stuff off your page


The next thing you should think about doing is making sure the search engines know about you. Usually this is simple - you get some links in and the spiders follow the links and find your pages.  But it isn't as simple as that.  You may have a bunch of pages on your site that don't have any links from outside sources, so you should make sure that they have links from within your site.


The easiest way of doing this is to create sitemaps.  You'll see links to them on the home page of most sites - usually in the left hand navigation.  You just need a link on the page to a section with links to all the pages in it.  It gives the search engines an easy way of finding all your content.  For blogs we get around this problem by setting up tags on the pages - like those ones on the left hand side of my page.


The next thing you have to think about is that your links that are pointing towards page.  But pages can quite frequently have many url.  Search engines tend to think in urls and not in pages.  Whilst they can sometimes tell that two urls are the same page, this isn't always the case.  This means you either need to do one of two things:

1. Make sure that each page only has one url
2. Any times when you can't make sure that each page only has one url, make sure that your pages have identical content

If you do end up with more than one url for the same page the search engines will generally try and group the urls into one.  If however the search engine thinks they are significantly enough different, then it may list them as two pages.  This means that if you have a 3 links into one url and 2 links into another url both for the same page, then the search engines may list your two pages in the SERPs lower than another websites url that has say 4 links coming into it.  This is the so called 'duplicate content penalty'.

3.  Inbound links

Well I've already pointed this out before.  It was that nice diagram at the top of the page.  Every link into you're site from another one is a vote for your page.  But it is all the subject of the page linking to your page and the anchor text that it links to you with.

How do you affect other people's sites?  Not very easily, but there is no reason why you can't aim to try.  This revolves around press releases, commenting on blog posts, etc, etc.  Think of reasons why you'd link from your site to someone elses.  Then try and do that in reverse.

There - that was easy wasn't it.  Now if you just knew which phrases you wanted to be ranking for in the first place this whole thing would be easy.