Twitter to Unveil Advertising Platform Today?
Today, Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab will interview Twitter CEO Evan Williams at SxSW. TechCrunch is poised to report—especially since they expect Twitter to unveil its advertising platform in the interview.
That’s not for certain, of course, but TC points to Twitter head of monetization Anamitra Banerji’s comment on Feb 27 that they’d have the platform ready “in a month or so.” (Two and a half weeks is apparently close enough.) They’ve put 2 and 2 together with GigaOM’s Matthew Ingram’s (Feb 23) report that Twitter is lining up major partners for a launch.
Twitter has long been excited over its coming ad offering. Back in November, founder Biz Stone insisted that “Everyone is going to love” their new advertising system. “It’s going to be amazing.”
A digital advertising format everyone will love? I’d certainly love to see that. Of course, I’m sure the guy who stands to make money off the ads thinks “everyone” will agree with him, since he loves the idea 
. On the other hand, however, Business Week speculated back in December that 2009 might have actually seen a profit for Twitter, with its deals with Bing and Google—so maybe Twitter will focus on getting this right instead of just getting the next buck (I’m looking at you, Facebook).
What do you think? Will Twitter unveil its long-awaited ad platform today? And if so, what will it look like?
Yelp Sued for Extortion—Again
A year ago, we first covered the extortion rumblings against local review site Yelp. Business owners claimed that Yelp offered to remove negative reviews—for a price. Yelp disputed the allegations, but did add a feature for business owners to respond to negative reviews last April.
But apparently the other practices haven’t ceased, according to two suits recently filed against Yelp. Last week, a class action suit was filed in a Los Angeles federal court, and this week another suit alleging extortion by the site was filed in California as well.
The first suit,Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., alleges “the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.” The second suit, D’Ames Day Spa v. Yelp, makes a similar accusation, stating that Yelp removed 13 of 14 positive reviews because the spa wouldn’t buy advertising on the site.
Yelp has responded to the allegations in a blog post, “Different Day, Different Lawyer, Same Meritless Claim: A Classic Race to the Courthouse.” Yelp points to a paragraph from the suit where the spa owner says she encouraged customers to leave reviews on the site. Said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman:
As we have explained in the past, solicited reviews, more so than naturally occurring ones, are more likely to be detected by Yelp’s review filter, which we employ to protect consumers from shill reviews and businesses from malicious reviews from competitors.
Stoppelman says they’re taking both cases seriously—but they’re both without merit and Yelp is confident they’ll prevail.
What do you think? Is Yelp extorting SMBs, or is it the other way around?
Yahoo Founders To Sell Up To 5 Million Shares
paidContent.org reports Yahoo’s founders will be selling up to 5 million shares of Yahoo stock. The SEC filing shows that Jerry Yang, the former CEO, will be selling 3 million shares and David Filo will sell up to 2 million shares.
Overall, in the scheme of how many shares both own, 5 million shares of [...]
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This is No TOY STORY, Twitter’s Prospects on the Way UP with Pixar CFO Hire
<Somewhere in Twitter HQ>
“So, Ev, if I understand you correctly, there isn’t actually any revenue to count at the moment?”
“No, Ali, we hired you because we were hoping you’d bring your collection of Pixar dvds in for us to watch when the Fail Whale appears.”
If it’s not Ali Rowghani’s movie collection that Twitter wanted, it must be that the microblogging service has hired the Pixar executive because–gasp–Twitter’s primed to make some actual profits!
“Ali will be an important member of a growing team focused on creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it,” Twitter CEO Evan Williams said in a release. Rowghani had been at Pixar for nearly a decade. “His thoughtfulness on retaining a great culture to work and staying consistent with our principles will also be a significant contribution.”
To infinity and beyond! 
Google May Be Sued By Russia’s Quintura Over Wonder Wheel
paidContent.org reports Quintura, the Russian search engine, may be filing a lawsuit against Google over Google’s Wonder Wheel “visual search engine interface.” Quintura hold 8 patents on the technology and Google may be infringing the company’s patents.
Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov told paidContent:
The strategy is to make all those search engines and tools that utilize [...]
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AOL’s Q4: When Failure = Success
And not in the positive “I now know 999 ways not to make a light bulb” way.
AOL’s Q4—their first earnings report since spinning off from Time Warner—numbers have all kinds of red ink and negative signs in front of them: display advertising revenue down 3% total YOY, international display down 22%, search and contextual down 19%, total ad revenue down 8%, subscription revenue down 28%, Other revenue down 5%. The only gain YOY was in US display advertising: a whopping 1%. And despite total revenues being down 17%, AOL still handily beat Wall Street expectations.
Yes, failure = success when people expect almost nothing of you. Says All Things D:
After factoring out one-time charges, AOL posted earnings of 71 cents per share on revenues of $801 million. Wall Street expected earnings of either 62 cents or 66 cents per share, depending on who you ask, on revenue of around $766 million.
And that earnings per share is way higher than, say, Yahoo (22¢).
Of course, the reason the expectations are so low is that none of this is a surprise. Time Warner ditched AOL for just this reason. (Boggles the mind to think that AOL originally bought TW. Crazy, isn’t it?) AOL has long been on the decline. Although CEO (and former Googler) Tim Armstrong is striving to retool sales in both personnel and strategy, their long slog might just mire them deeper in the red ink.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Time Warner got his expected raise.
What do you think? Can AOL survive?
SEOmoz Leaves The Consulting Business To Focus On Software
seomoz, the well-known, Seattle-based seo agency, is getting out of the agency business. In a blog post today, CEO Rand Fishkin says the company will focus instead on seo-related software and tools. seomoz recently launched Open Site Explorer and has offered a variety of seo tools for several years now.
seomoz also says it’s strengthening the [...]
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Report: Google To Bring More “Transparency” To AdSense Revenue Sharing
BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis was part of a “private meeting” in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum with Google CEO Eric Shmidt and a handful of other top Google execs. Jarvis reports that Google sales boss Nikesh Arora said that Google “would consider giving more transparency about revenue splits in Adsense” (this is likely a [...]
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Armstrong: Google Gets “First Dibs” At AOL Search Deal
AOL’s CEO: Google To Get 1st Shot At New Search Deal from the Wall Street Journal reports AOL’s CEO, Tim Armstrong saying that Google will get “first dibs” at a search deal.
Armstrong said this at Citi’s annual entertainment, media and telecommunications conference today. This was prompted by a question about possibly using Microsoft Bing [...]
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IBM CEO’s Take On Google’s World Domination: “No.”
Sam Palmissano has transformed IBM over the past decade or so that he’s been in top positions in the company. IBM isn’t just a mainframe hardware company any more—it’s involved in a wide range of businesses, throughout the world, and unlike many tech companies is still growing—and some of the best seos in the world [...]
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