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I came across an interesting graph the other day when playing around with Google trends.  When you plot the trends for PPC and SEO side by side since 2004 you can see a clear shift in interest.  The market (or so trends suggests) has shifted from being highly PPC biased to the complete opposite.

I put this shift down to a commoditisation of PPC in many areas of the market, alongside Google’s aggressive sales strategy, as well as a demystifying of SEO into something which is now a core part of any online marketing strategy.

It will be interesting for me to see how this progresses over the next year or so as back when I started out in PPC it was very much the mysterious beast that SEO is now, or has been in recent years.  But as it has become less of a mystery, and companies have become to understand it more, many services have become devalued and with agencies having to make sure they are at the cutting edge of the market to make sure they are adding sufficient value to their clients.  As SEO too, becomes a more widely covered topic will it go the same way?  Will the fees clients are willing to pay be driven down and more clients look to take their SEO in house?

If so, what will replace it?  You can see on the bottom of the trend graph Facebook advertising starting to creep into the picture as a trending keyword, maybe some terminology around social advertising is going to be the next boom topic in digital advertising.  It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

There have been many confusing messages in the media about the success or failure of the Times paywall.  Competitor publications have predictably claimed it to be a huge failure; other figures suggest a drop off of two thirds readership from free to paid is a success against the 90% drop off the Times had expected.  Claims that the Times is now “an empty world” seem inconclusive with the publication themselves have declined to comment.

For me, whatever level the user base has dropped to, this is just phase 1 of the paywall process, and it will be the next 6-12 months that dictate the true success of the paywall as it begins to take shape and there are a number of key factors which will determine its true success.

Quality of content

If you are going to charge people for access to news articles and opinion, it’s going to have to be better than other articles available for free elsewhere.  The Times will have to ensure their editorial content is going to have to be of a higher quality than their competition to justify the charge and prove that the money is going to good use.

Advertising revenues

Just because the paywall is in place doesn’t mean the Times has written off advertising as a revenue channel, far from it.  In fact having registered users in a closed network opens up a host of additional options for targeted advertising.  Historically advertising in newspapers and on their online versions has been done based on readership and audience profiles.  The information required to sign up for the paywall will enable the Times to offer targeting options based on an individual user, rather than an aggregated version of the whole group.  This type of targeting general allows for more premium pricing and if they manage to do it intelligently could generate serious income.

Word of mouth

At the moment the Times are the bad guys for charging for content.  A small group have decided to stick with it and if the Times can prove the value to this group, then this group will become key to future growth.  When people find out that somebody pays for the Times content, they are bound to ask “why?”, and “whats it like?”, if the response is positive you have a potential new buyer, if its neutral or negative, then you don’t.  If the response is “awesome, great content, a great read and well worth the money” then word will spread.

The competition

The Times are the first to introduce a paywall in traditional press, but I doubt they will be the last.  Other online publications are going to have to find their own way to make sure revenues generated online cover the overheads of delivering the content.  Whilst the competition can sit back and suggest the paywall is a failure for now, there is going to come a point where they have to decide what the route forward for their own online strategy is.  And if it materialises that other follow down the paywall route, then the Times will be ahead of the game in terms of making it work.

It’s all about building momentum

All of these points will contribute to building momentum (or not).  If you present great editorial to current users, they will spread the word and your user base will grow.  Continue to add even more great content and value, and you build a snowball effect.  Similar with the advertising, if you build a solid advertising model and targeting options you might convince a few media buyers to give it a go, if it’s good, word will spread.  Obviously this requires the Times to get a few things right.  If the content isn’t good, or the advertising model is poor, then momentum won’t build and things might go into meltdown.  There’s a long road ahead, but it definitely can’t be deemed a success or failure just yet.

So, it seems like I was wrong all those months ago when I suggested affiliate marketing might be set to benefit from the recession.  Today DGM announced to the world it was entering into administration proving that despite its “risk proof” benefits for merchants, it was still susceptible to the struggling economy.

Whilst on the same day Affiliate Window formally merged with Zanox, a deal which originated last year but seems set to become something more formal from a public facing perspective.  With Zanox already owning Buy.at they now represent a large portion of the UK affiliate marketing space.  It could be suggested however that the merging of 3 companies in the same space indicates that one, or all, of them was also not in the healthiest of shapes.

Its a shame for DGM who were always the most supportive network for smaller merchants and for me, the most helpful towards agencies.  No doubt somebody is going to start blaming the management of the company, which is natural, but we mustn’t forget the current situation is hitting everyone pretty hard.  In fact, I was surprised how few companies fell during 2009, although what we may be seeing is a delayed impact.  With I-level going under recently and now DGM, two well established companies in their chosen field, could we now be seeing the true impact of the recession as companies can no longer hold on?  Many others may be experiencing similar difficulties and desperately hoping for the market to pick up.

Infographics seem to be becoming a very popular method for displaying information on social media and search engine marketing, as well as a useful link building tool for their producers.  Below are a collection of useful infographics I have come across recently that help explain search engine marketing, SEO and PPC.

Infographic by PPC Blog

Scatter plot graphic by SEOmoz

Pagerank and Linkjuice Infographic by Elliance

After the inclusion of tweets into the search results, and the displaying of fresh news content in relevant SERPs, Google has launched another advancement today which they hope will make their search engine results even more relevant and up to date.  The Google Caffeine update, which has been confirmed as live across their whole network, is not an algorithm change, but a change in the way Google spiders and indexes content.  Search Engine Land summaries the change well, but the bottom line is that it should mean new, fresh content, appears in the Google results a lot sooner than previously.

Each time a breaking news story occurs on the web, there is a flurry of activity as people search to find out the detail, the inside scoop, or the eye witness acount.  Twitter has benefitted from this phenomenon due to its real time nature and community base, and Google wants to do the same.  Whilst people are still using search eninges to find services and goods, theres are a massive amount of search for news and articles, and the more Google can ensure it is providing the freshest, most up to date content, the better the experience for these users.

For content providers this shouldntmean  any change in rankings or traffic, as mentioned above, it isnt an algorithm change, but it should mean that when you add new content, it appears in the SERPs quicker.  It does however strengthen the need for fresh new content.  Google already rewards fresh content in certain areas and with this rollout and more of a focus on “real time” this is bound to become more prominent.