yahoo versus msn. searching for love

MSN has tied up with domestically tiny match.com for dating, while Yahoo!Xtra has nobody. So let’s try searching for love…..

Searching Yahoo!xtra for ‘dating’ gives biggest local site NZDating as the first response, but second biggest FindSomeone is the 7th response. ‘online dating’ puts FindSomeone 4th and NZDating 6th. Some work to do here Yahoo!
Searching msn for ‘dating’ gives NZDating as the 7th and FindSomeone is, staggeringly, on the 3rd page (28th). Pathetic.

Searching Google NZ for Dating gives NZDating #1 and FindSomeone #2. That’s correct.

This should not be hard: NZDating is the 2nd biggest site in NZ by page views – after Trade Me. That’s right – it is even bigger than xtramsn was. To put NZDating anywhere but top in domestic search results is a bad sign (msn).
Meanwhile FindSomeone is the 6th largest site in NZ by page views, between Stuff and NZHerald. To place FindSomeone anywhere but second is again a bad sign. (msn + Yahoo!)

Google manages to get this right – so why will anybody wish to switch from google to either of these players for search?

(all data is from Jan 2007, NetNielsen, excludes international sites like Yahoo and Google)

Round 5 to.. Google.

xtrayahoo vs msn.co.nz rounds 3+4

nz.yahoo.com (why call it yahooxtra when that’s the site url) is now up, and substantially better than the msn offering.

Meanwhile msn.co.nz fails to deliver the main news photo in Safari, and much of the content does not work. Firefox shows a much better site for msn.co.nz.

Round 3 to Yahoo!

but wait – the url nz.yahoo.com does not actually render – you have to type in yahooxtra.co.nz or xtramsn.co.nz and click the right hand link.

(I’m in Australia at the moment, so maybe this is different in NZ.. )

Round 4 to msn.

msn.co.nz – round 2

so the seek search links don’t work, the weather search (for wellington) doesn’t work, the advertising link isn’t a link…. well – maybe I’ll just let msn.co.nz keep working on things and have another look tomorrow. Meanwhile it’s is pretty pathetic.

so round 2 to yahooXtra – they at least have not launched something that does not work.

Interesting that the msn news is “brought to you by 3 News and RadioLIVE”

msn.co.nz launch – the players…

Telecom has ditched Microsoft for Yahoo. What do Microsoft do? Launch msn.co.nz of course. (and note, YES, there was no redundant ‘www’ in the press release)

Without even seeing the site Telecom should be afraid – very afraid. As should Fairfax and APN.

Microsoft are linking up with PBL – that’s Packer Broadcasting Limited, who are owners of nineMSN in Australia, which is a pretty successful site.

from the press release….

“msn.co.nz is backed by Microsoft New Zealand, ACP Media and ninemsn, Australia’s leading online media company, and will replace the now defunct xtramsn service. Both ACP Media and ninemsn are part of Australia’s leading media company, PBL Media.”

Expect the advertising budgets to be large, the sales force to be a lot more professional and the expectations high. Well – Microsoft NZ is apparently the local expertise, so time will tel whether the media savvy of PBL in both content and ad sales will permeate the local market. If so it will be god for everybody – online advertising is, despite strong growth, still pretty basic.

Hotmail users will be redirected to msn.co.nz when they logout, so there will be a good sized audience ready made.

Local partners TV3, New Zealand’s number one online job portal SEEK, online sports site Sportal and content from ACP magazines such as Metro, Cleo, NetGuide and Taste will provide a new way to experience the web through msn.co.nz.

Interesting combination, but the question is how effectively TV3 and msn.co.nz will combine. Given the site is not tv3msn.co.nz we can hazard a guess that it won’t be as great as with ninemsn. Part PBL owned Seek will provide some traffic, but, more importantly for Seek, msn.co.nz will provide ‘free’ traffic to allow it to continue to slow the inevitable encroachment of Trade Me Jobs. Should be an interesting battle played out in the traffic statistics ad jobs listings.

findit in Aussie…

findit.com.au is not bad and is in beta right now. The gap in the Australian classified market is there as eBay has missed the Craigslist market and is late to the motors/property/jobs. They have a long road to haul, and some pretty serious competitors, but the site seems professional and reading between the lines they appear to be well backed. They are doing most things right, but even so I’d only give them a 10% chance of beating the incumbents.

The blog makes good reading  – you’ll find that they recently signed 20 car dealers, are targeting google ads at certain categories, and they have a fun campaign aimed at university students:

findit campaign

.bank.nz

dumb idea – why do I want to type 2 more letters for some dubious security benefit? Phishers can get by this pretty easily using their existing techniques, while meanwhile everyone would have to change their links, and the .nz domain would be doing something that is non-standard.

Once we get .bank.co.nz we may as well go ahead and get .retail.nz, airline.nz, .post.nz, .bookshop.nz, .stripclubs.nz, .pubs.nz, .blogs.nz, .news.nz, .quasibanks.nz, .tourism.nz ….

This sounds like a PHB idea – sounds great until you consider the details.

$15m gets broadband for Wellington

Sign me up – metro area Broadband is a savvy Wellington City Council’s response to lackluster telcos. Please just do it.

We all know the Telecom debacle, but I’m frustrated at how lame Citylink is after what was such a promising and early start. I thought they would have owned the Wellington region by now.

I’m suffering here. Orcon over Xtra lines at 23:45 on a Tuesday, and I am NOT connected to the information superhighway – more like the information garden path.

myHome

A new property site for the Aussies – a JV between PBL and Microsoft and with “the support of members of the Australian real estate industry”.

Shame about how it renders on Safari:

The site is for Real Estate agency listings only, and the service seems clunky – changes to listings are made by phone or email only, and there is no mention of how listings are loaded.

The closest NZ site is realestate.co.nz, and but myhome will need to get pretty much all agents signed up before they have a compelling reason to exist. (I’ve yet to find a single property on the site, but perhaps that’s because the site is poor)

Meanwhile myhome.co.nz diverts to a dodgy domain parking site, so I’m not expecting an imminent launch over here.

eBay search ads work…

Looks like Yahoo! ads on eBay are working in the USA – so eBay will now start testing Google ads on international eBay sites. For these ads to work it must mean that the sell through rate did not change, and that the click through rates are high enough for advertisers.

This is good use of the internet – traditionally ‘destination’ sites like eBay do not want people clicking away from the site. By putting Yahoo!/Google ads on the site eBay is allowing people to click away, so they have (finally) realised that clickers are going to come back (or opened the new page in a tab), and perhaps were never serious buyers in the first place.

The impact on eBay’s revenue and profit could be startling – these advertisements are big business.

The downside is that this is yet another facet of an already overly complicated website. The incremental changes may make sense, but eBay lacks the elegant simplicity of Trade Me or the Apple store.

Aussie newspaper ad spend…

A couple of Aussie groups are predicting increases in Australian Newspaper advertising spend this year. The Newspaper Works is predicting a 2.2% lift, while Fusion Strategy are predicting a suspiciously precise 1.48% lift.

Umm – from the same article newspaper advertising revenue FELL last year in Australia by 6.3%. Sure there may be a slight dead cat bounce, but we all know which way newspaper ad revenues are heading these days, and to predict otherwise is either brave or foolhardy.