Banner Ads Are Back from the Dead: How Google Has Given Banner Ads New Life + MORE

Banner ads are largely seen these days as fossils from the internet’s dinosaur period, back when blinking text was cool and Angelfire sites were all the rage.Such online billboard ads have long been considered deceased, dead, and buried, with few mourners grieving the demise of web banner ads. However, a new breed of banner ad has evolved and is on the rise thanks to Google, and they’re hungry for blood (or clicks…

What turns a popular business or service into a ghost town and how can you avoid it happening to you?
The Internet gives us a powerful insight into how this happens. The online world is littered with websites and services, which were once popular and are now on life-support. Only last week we learned that Alta Vista, once the world’s leading search engine with millions of users, is to be shut down…

Twitter is a cool platform, but it’s got some problems. It’s just so cluttered, you know? There’s so much content, and it’s so text-based, it’s pretty hard to get people excited about scrolling through that hectic Twitter timeline.
But Twitter gets it. And I think that’s why we’ve been seeing so much experimentation on their end over the past several months…

CityGrid is IAC’s main local property (along with HomeAdvisor, the former ServiceMagic). IAC says CityGrid has 1.5 million local advertisers (most through third party partners), 15 million local business profiles and more than 350 web and mobile publisher and ad network partners. The division….

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At MECLABS, we approach marketing as a science, but even scientists can lose sight of testing to find answers and start behaving as if they already have them.
Our Peer Review Sessions are the most notorious moment for this to happen. We all come together in the hope of having an open discussion on the many possibilities of every test and often end up throwing out solutions instead of making sure we’re asking the right questions…

Yesterday, I heard a great story about friends and enemies. The story was about how it’s much more difficult to make a friend than an enemy. An enemy can be made in a matter of moments, but often our friendships took months or years to create. As you look to social media, this also an issue… you or your business can do something as simple as posting a bad tweet and the Internet will erupt in hatred…

Click to open full infographic – Wordstream
Today Google has retired Google Reader joining a long list of other Google products that have been discontinued. See a full list by clicking the Wordstream infographic to the right.
The reason offered by Google: “usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products…

I can count on one hand the number of times I personally have been grocery shopping in the last 10 years. It’s not that I am lazy or think it’s a woman’s job, but that my wife and I are incompatible in grocery stores. She likes to browse, saunter through the aisles, consider every possible coupon and price combination…

If you’re an early Internet denizen, then you probably remember typing your search query into AltaVista. The site went live in 1995. That’s 18 calendar years but 254 in web years.
The site was fast and its fingers could reach into the darkest corners of the Internet – corners we’d never be able to reach before…

I first met Kevin Milani of Mendicant Marketing at a conference that a number of high level AdWords consultants were attending. So when he introduced himself as a “World Class AdWords consultant” my initial thought was “Yeah, okay buddy, we’re all pretty good here!”
But after spending a lot of time with him at the conference, it became quite clear he’s a cut above the rest…

There are countless communications takeaways from the recent celebrity gaffes. Whether it’s Paula Deen dealing with allegations of being a racist and then dropped like a buttered sweet potato by every brand partner, or Jennifer Lopez singing “Happy Birthday” to Turkmenistan’s authoritarian ruler for his 56th birthday last Saturday night, one thing is for sure: […

Our site is hosted on WPEngine and we’re also affiliates because we believe it’s the best WordPress hosting platform on the planet. Because of WordPress’s popularity, it’s become a popular target of hackers. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a secure platform, though, it just means that it’s in every user’s best interest to ensure they maintain the platform, the plugins and keep their sites safe…