Posts by Nate Elliott (bio)

Nate Elliott | April 17, 2008, 01:32 PM
Free Search Marketing Survey Data! (In exchange for a few moments of your time)

I apologize for not being a very active blogger lately -- I've been traveling quite a lot, and most of my blogging impulses have been going towards Twitter the last couple of weeks.

But I did want to take a moment to announce that Jupiter is conducting its annual Search Marketing Executive Survey. If you're a search marketer or search marketing agency based in Europe or the US, and have a few minutes to spare (the survey is approximately 30 questions long), your answers will help us collect great data on the state of the search marketing industry.

You can take the survey by clicking here.

To thank you for your time and participation, we'll send you a free copy of the aggregated survey results, and enter you for a chance to win one of three free iPod Shuffles. Please also note that:
- Individual responses are strictly confidential
- Responses are only used in aggregate and anonymous form

We will be drawing a winner for the iPods at the close of the survey. If possible, we'd like to receive your completed survey by the middle of next week (April 22, 2008). If you have any questions about the survey, or you have any problems using the form, please let me know: nelliott (at) jupiter research *dot* com.

Nate Elliott | March 18, 2008, 11:25 AM
Video-Related Notes from OMMA Hollywood

No, I'm not there. But Corey Kronengold, of Tremor Media and the Online Video Watch blog, is there. Check out some of his good session reports on Buying Video and Looking Smart Doing It, on Pitch your Niche, and on Pat Keane's keynote.

Nate Elliott | March 17, 2008, 10:46 AM
Why Behavioral Targeting is Scary

Behavioral targeting shouldn't be scary to consumers -- because every major behavioral targeting system I've ever seen (outside of spyware) goes to great lengths to protect user privacy. It's all completely anonymous!

But behavioral targeting is incredibly scary to publishers and advertisers and any other company who wants use anonymous user data to effectively target advertising. Because even some very smart people simply don't take the time to understand what's being discussed. I'm sure Sir Berners-Lee is one of the great minds of the digital world -- but either he has never bothered to read up on behavioral targeting, or he doesn't know the meaning of the word 'anonymous,' or he simply doesn't trust his ISP.

It's probably the latter: he doesn't trust his ISP. That's fair; everyone can decide for themselves who to trust. But it's also odd, because he presumably already trusts Google to store all his searches -- including personally identifiable data -- for 18 months. Does Berners-Lee really trust Google more with data about exactly who he is and and what he searched for (which is not just the 'worst-case scenario' he discusses in the BBC story, but the actual fact of his relationship with Google today) more than he trusts BT or Virgin Media with anonymous data? (After all, who stores more sensitive data about you: your search engine, or your ISP? And who has a worse history of leaking users' behavioral profiles: search engines, or ISPs?)

This is why the ISPs who partnered with Phorm just weeks ago have already gone weak in the knees. It seems it's simply not possible to have a fair, informed discussion of behavioral targeting -- not in the face of scary stories from the media, and over-reaching, under-informed comments from the type of digerati who should know better.

Nate Elliott | March 07, 2008, 07:36 PM
Twittering

I've always thought Twitter might be a bit pointless -- it certainly looks that way from the outside -- but everyone tells me that once you start doing it, you can't stop. So I'm about to find out. You can find me at twitter.com/nate_elliott.

Nate Elliott | March 03, 2008, 08:35 PM
The Social Networking World

[Via Greg Verdino] Le Monde printed a cool map a few weeks back covering the social networking world.

The map isn't quite perfect. While there's some data to support the idea that Bebo are the largest network in the UK, there's almost no chance they're bigger than MySpace across all of Europe; our 2007 data has MySpace a clear #1 in Western Europe with Facebook and Bebo fighting it out for #2. Also, Skyblog (listed as #1 in France and #3 in Europe) and LiveJournal (listed as #1 in Russia) aren't social networks, they're blogging sites. (Yes, it's getting harder to tell the difference between those two categories. But even with Skyblog's addition of some networking features last year, these two sites are still, clearly, first and foremost about blogging.) Finally, I'd have thought some of the countries that aren't labeled would've been pretty easy to fill in with a current leader -- among others, it seems clear that StudiVZ is #1 in Germany, and that Facebook is #1 in Sweden.

But despite these flaws, this map is a very useful reminder that social networking is still a relatively fragmented market. English-speaking media types have been completely fixated on Facebook for the last year, forgetting both that MySpace is still bigger globally, and that Facebook until recently had almost no presence outside the English-speaking world. Friendster and Orkut are widely described as also-rans in social networking, despite the fact that they're each the #1 network in a crucial developing market (Asia and Latin America, respectively). And I guarantee that not a single person who looks at that map will have already heard of every network mentioned. (Had you ever heard of Mixi, or Metroflog, or Yonja?)

The point is, it's still early days yet in social networking, and there are still no guaranteed winners and losers. As our Web Globalization analyst Zia just said to me -- I wonder what this map will look like five years from now?

Nate Elliott | March 03, 2008, 03:20 PM
Integrating Images and Video Into Search Results

I've just finished up a report on how Yahoo, MSN, and Ask are competing with Google in Europe. The short answer, of course, is that they're not competing very well: Google is incredibly dominant in all the key European markets. But there are some ways that the other engines can start to claw back some share, and our report -- which should be published in the next few weeks -- talks about some of the strategies that we think will work best.

One of the things I focused on in the report was the integration of specialty search (e.g., image or video search, directory search, shopping search, news search) into standards results pages -- what Google calls Universal Search, and what Ask implemented as part of their 3D search results pages. During my research I found a couple of good blog entries on the topic over at Ramblings About SEO. They did the kind of thing I like to do: they tracked each engines' response to a variety of search queries to see what types of multimedia content they're integrating into their results pages, and how far up the page these multimedia results appear. You can see the results of their image webtrack here, and the results of their video webtrack here.

The bottom line is that it's early days for integrating specialty search into standard search results, and that different engines do well under different conditions. But the results are complex (and interesting), so you should go read through them yourself.

Nate Elliott | March 03, 2008, 03:12 PM
"Inside Facebook" Lists Every Single Way to Market on Facebook

Unfortunately there's not a lot of detail or analysis -- and nothing along the lines of best practices -- but the blog Inside Facebook has posted a useful list of every possible way companies can use Facebook for marketing. It'd make a good read for executives who want to understand the breadth of marketing opportunities on social networks, or anyone brainstorming a Facebook campaign.

Nate Elliott | February 28, 2008, 08:51 PM
Hey CNBC, What's a Widget?

Online Video Watch has a clip of some CNBC presenters trying to figure out what a widget is. I'd make fun of them, except... have you ever tried to define 'widget'? It's not that easy a concept to summarize. (But it's definitely not, as one of the hosts suggests, a virus.)

Anyway, even if the hosts can't figure out what a widget is, their tech guys made a cracking one. If you care about the US stock market -- or about good widgets -- head over to Online Video Watch and have a look.

Nate Elliott | February 25, 2008, 06:21 PM
Search Clicks Worth Twice as Much as Contextual Clicks

Efficient Frontier is reporting its clients' average cost per click on paid search and contextual advertising across a range of categories. The category splits are interesting (note that EF's auto clients pay more for contextual clicks than for search clicks), but more interesting to me is the fact there's still a huge difference between search and contextual prices. So while we've heard reports that contextual ads are performing better now than they have in the past, keep in mind that search clicks -- to Efficient Frontier's clients, at least -- are on average still worth twice as much as clicks from contextual ads.

Nate Elliott | February 14, 2008, 01:02 PM
Valentine's Day Fun

I've handed off leadership of our online dating research this year -- you can see David Card's analysis of the market, and our newest online dating forecasts, in Monday's press release -- but since it's Valentine's Day I couldn't help posting a link to The Onion's brutally funny take on online dating. Enjoy.

(The Onion is a pretty good example of online video advertising best practices, by the way -- a 4-second pre-roll ad, accompanied by an IAB standard companion banner, and then a 30-second post-roll ad after the content ends. While they only have one advertiser right now -- Toyota -- they do rotate through several different 30-second spots. But as with so many other sites, The Onion overwhelms its users with too much frequency, putting a pre-roll and a post-roll on every single piece of content.)

Nate Elliott | February 14, 2008, 11:14 AM
Special Guest Blogger: Dorothee Vogel on Tchibo's Efforts to Explore New Markets Online

I want to offer congratulations to my colleague Dorothee Vogel, who a month ago gave birth to her first child, a son. Reports are that mother and child are both doing well -- and as if to prove it, Dorothee's already back tracking the online commerce space. Here's her take on how German retailer Tchibo keeps exploring new tactics in e-commerce:

Many German retailers still lag far behind their UK counterparts in terms of exploring the online channel. However tchibo.de, who lead the German market in so many ways, continues to set trends.

First, tchibo.de recently introduced its first weekly 'wardrobe' (a themed section of featured products) targeted to targeted to older users (follow the link and then click on the box that says "Unter einem Dach"), containing cleaning kits for false teeth, supportive underwear, heating pads and incontinency bed covers. Although older users are a relatively small part of the online population today, they're growing increasingly important and influential online -- and by 2012, more than 40 percent of European Internet users will be age 45 and over.

Second, Tchibo is also going green. While many airlines have begun to offer carbon offsetting schemes in the last year (mainly in the US and the UK), this year we could see more general online retailers adopting the model. Tchibo.de adds an opt-in "gogreen" box (see below) to the shopping basket during check out, where the customer is asked to donate 10 cents to an environmental project to offset the impact of their delivery. It will be interesting to see whether Germany will in 2008 catch the Green trend that was so apparent in the UK in 2007.

For more of Dorothee's take on selling to green consumers online, check out her report European Green Consumers: Identifying and Seizing the Opportunity Online.

Nate Elliott | February 13, 2008, 10:54 AM
Why 2008 Won't Be The Breakthrough Year for Mobile Advertising

Apparently Nokia mobile ad bigwig Jeremy Wright cracked a joke last week about 2008 being the seventh year in a row that mobile advertising is supposed to break through. He's right: for nearly a decade, mobile has been promoted as the next big thing in advertising. And the sector looks like it's finally gaining some real momentum. We've heard news from Barcelona this week that O2 has signed a deal with 4th Screen Advertising to run mobile pre-roll ads, that Yahoo and T-Mobile are partnering for mobile search and other mobile content, and that the big UK mobile operators are teaming up to set standards for mobile ad measurement.

But unfortunately for Nokia, Yahoo, T-Mobile, O2, 4th Screen, and everyone else in the mobile ad game, 2008 is not going to be a breakthrough year in mobile advertising in Europe, and we're all going to be telling these same jokes in 2009.

As I discuss in my report Mobile Marketing in Europe: Lack of Scale, Standards, and Systems Inhibit Near-Term Growth, European advertisers currently point to five key inhibitors to their use of mobile advertising:

1. Difficulty finding budget for mobile advertising
   
2. Difficulty finding inventory for mobile advertising
   
3. The high cost of mobile ad inventory
   
4. Difficulty deciding on mobile advertising tactics (e.g., inexperience with the platform)
   
5. Difficulty measuring mobile advertising

This week's announcements will start to chip away at these inhibitors: the Yahoo/T-Mobile and O2/4th Screen deals will increase available inventory and should over time bring down prices, while the operator working group should make measurement more effective. But nothing we've heard about offers a quick fix: it'll take time for T-Mobile and O2 to generate significant user traffic (and therefore significant ad inventory) from their new offerings, and setting industry standards can take anywhere from months to years. So if any of the initiatives announced this week have an impact in 2008, it probably won't be until the second half of the year -- and there's a good chance they won't have a meaningful impact until 2009.

Meanwhile, we're still faced with the largest problem for mobile advertising: advertisers simply can't find much money to buy mobile ads. In our most recent mobile marketing survey, almost three-quarters of European mobile advertisers and agencies said they planned to spend less than ₤25,000 (around €35,000) on mobile marketing in the next year.

With mobile advertisers planning to spend that little in 2008 -- and with inventory, prices, tactics and measurement all still unsolved problems -- we simply don't believe that 2008 will be the breakthrough year for mobile advertising in Europe. Things will definitely get more interesting in 2009 -- but we think the real breakthrough for European mobile advertising will come in 2010.

Nate Elliott | February 13, 2008, 10:22 AM
BusinessWeek Hammers MySpace on Ad Effectiveness

Catherine Holahan, a young reporter at BusinessWeek, has been venting her spleen on MySpace and other social networks over the past week. First she wrote an article called MySpace Users Build Up Ad Immunity (key quote from former MySpace advertiser: "Users [have become] more or less desensitized to the advertising") and then she contributed to Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up (key quote from current MySpace advertiser: "It's really hard to make money on that anemic click-through rate").

Our data -- about to be published -- shows that European users may in fact be cooling to the idea of advertising within social networks. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: with billions of ad impressions up for grabs on MySpace and Facebook and Bebo (often at very low prices), and with ad targeting getting better all the time, it's ludicrous to claim that advertisers can't find cost-effective inventory on the social networks. The real problem isn't that users aren't responsive to banners on social networks, but rather that advertisers and their agencies (and, apparently, even Google) just aren't targeting those ads well enough. The advertisers need to realize that although run-of-site inventory is cheap, it's not always cost-effective -- and that targeted inventory, while more expensive, usually brings a better ROI. Meanwhile, the social networks need to offer better behavioral targeting and ad optimization solutions to help advertisers target the right users. Once (if?) that happens, I'm sure everyone will be happy again.

Nate Elliott | February 01, 2008, 06:44 PM
My First Take: Can Microsoft + Yahoo Challenge Google in Search?

There's no shortage of comment around the blogosphere today about a possible combination of MSN and Yahoo, and its potential to threaten Google's dominance. But while it's useful to keep in mind what impact this will have on music, messaging, or other verticals, I'm going to stick with talking about search -- because that's the only advertising-related market in which a combined MSN/Yahoo would directly compete with Google (while AdSense is improving, that's just repurposed search -- and Google is almost a complete non-entity in graphical advertising), and more importantly because that's where the real money is.

So could a combined MSN/Yahoo search engine compete with Google in Europe? Well, no and yes.

First the no: we're finishing up a report right now on how European search engines can compete with Google, but the reality is that no one's going to get near Google's search share over the next few years. While Google looks pretty dominant in the US -- they claimed 58 percent of all US searches in December 2007, said Comscore -- it appers that a combined MSN/Yahoo search engine would claim around 33 percent of all US searches. That's real, viable competition. But unfortunately, even if MSN and Yahoo combine, there will be no such strong challenge in Europe. As I've previously discussed, Google has between 80 and 90 percent of search share in the key European markets. So whether this deal happens or not, it'll be incredibly difficult for anyone to compete with Google for European search share.

On the other hand, perhaps yes: a combination of MSN and Yahoo would definitely be better-positioned to compete with Google for paid search revenues than each company is now. I've heard a surprising number of Euroean search marketers say that because MSN and Yahoo each command only a few percentage points of search share in Europe, they don't even bother advertising on any engine but Google. This proposed combination wouldn't entirely solve that problem, of course -- the combined search entity would still have less than 10 percent search share in the big European markets, according to numbers I've seen from various traffic firms -- but it would at least give marketers a reason to run trials beyond Google. And that's a start in the right direction.

I'll probably have more to say on this as more details emerge and as it becomes clearer whether or not this deal will really happen -- but in the meantime if you're a client or press and want to discuss this further, drop a line to presseurope@jupiterresearch.com and we can have a chat.

Nate Elliott | January 28, 2008, 12:37 PM
AdSense Seems to be Working Better for Advertisers

Since Google's AdSense program (which places advertisers' search ads into content pages) was first launched almost five years ago, many search marketers have questioned its effectiveness. I remember seeing a room full of angry advertisers rip into Google at a Search Engine Strategies panel back in 2003 for the low quality and high prices of the clicks the program generated, and for Google's then-refusal to let advertisers separate their bids on AdSense clicks from their bids on search clicks. When we surveyed European search marketers in 2006, only 6 percent said that contextual ads had a positive impact on their search marketing efforts. We heard so many advertisers complain about the performance of Google contextual ads that I even once called AdSense a 'house of cards.'

But to their credit, once Google got the message that key advertisers weren't happy, they started working to improve the program, and over the years have given advertisers many of they features they've demanded: the ability to bid on contextual ads separately from search ads, the ability to run a variety of creative formats within contextual ads, and even the ability to choose which sites they want to target with their contextual ads. As a result, I've heard rumblings that the performance of AdSense ads has improved quite a bit lately; a notion backed up by a recent post on the PPC Discussions blog.

The post talks about 10 reasons why quality has improved, and all of them make sense -- but the two biggest have to be Google's purge of low-performing sites, and advertisers' ability to target (or exclude) specific sites when managing their campaigns.

Contextual ads are still a very different beast to paid search, and advertisers have to manage these campaigns separately to keep their ROI up. The PPC Discussions post points readers to a couple of guides on how to best manage your AdSense campaigns, which I'd advise marketers to read. But AdSense may finally have become what Google always wanted and needed it to be: a cost-effective way for advertisers to increase their reach (and therefore their spending) on Google.

Nate Elliott | January 28, 2008, 11:28 AM
Speaking at I-COM 08, Barcelona, 5-8 Feb

I'm going to be participating in a great event next week called I-COM, the International Conference on Online Media Measurement. I-COM is designed to bring together thought leaders from around the industry to take on the following topics:

Despite various efforts, in many domains and particularly amongst the emerging media, unified measurement standards are not yet in place that would allow media owners to present themselves to advertisers in a directly comparable, solidly measurable fashion across all of these disparate platforms, technologies and systems.

Everyone needs to understand what is currently being measured and examine how we tackle online measurement in the future. How should we measure online activity in this era of widgets, feeds, ajax and mobile interactions? How can we know what users’ intentions and engagement are? What are the right measurements to evaluate this? Users, time spent, interactions, clicks, retention, market share, activity reports, brand perceptions, brand recall?

It looks like quite a few of our clients and colleagues will be there -- but if you're not yet registered, I know there's still time to get involved.

And if anyone wants to schedule some time to catch up in Barcelona, just drop me a line: nelliott -at- jupiter research *dot* com

Nate Elliott | January 23, 2008, 11:13 AM
My Latest RSS Feed: Online Video Watch

I recently reconnected with Corey Kronengold, who I've known for years, since he was at Eyeblaster. Corey now handles marketing for video ad network Tremor Media, and blogs at Online Video Watch. It's an entertaining and useful blog -- if you're interested in the online video space, you should go check it out.

As you'd imagine of someone working at Tremor, Corey is a staunch defender of in-stream advertising. So I enjoyed seeing him rampage against some new research on whether consumers like in-stream ads. To put it clearly: users don't like *any* kind of advertising. If advertisers abandoned every format that consumers said they didn't like, there'd be no advertising left. While that sounds great to the 'go-social-or-go-home' dreamers of the world, it would eliminate free media -- and we know that, while consumers say they don't like advertising, consumers would much rather let advertising pay for content than cough up their own money. (We've just finished yet another survey proving this point, this time asking specifically about willingness to accept advertising in exchange for free online video content, and will be publishing those results shortly.) So the key is to find formats that are effective for advertisers and acceptable for consumers; and implemented correctly, in-stream ads offer one such format.

Jupiter clients can see our European Online Video Advertising Best Practices Guide report for more research and ideas on how to make sure in-stream ads work for both consumers and advertisers.

Nate Elliott | January 22, 2008, 01:52 PM
NewTeeVee on Five Ways to Save Joost

Video-focused blog NewTeeVee offers its "Five Ways to Save Joost." The first idea (integrate Hulu) involves getting more content onto the platform; but all the rest are about making the platform available to more users (through podcasting, with a web-based client, with a Firefox plug-in, and by putting it on the Wii). Lack of broad accessibility is a fair criticism. After all, the biggest driver of online video consumption hasn't been broadband access, but rather the increasing availability of high-quality content. In Joost's case, they have some pretty good content, but it's not readily available as content from other online video providers; you have to download a client in order to watch. And with so much good content available elsewhere online without that hassle, I agree that they either need to find some seriously premium content, or make the content they have more readily accessible. (Or both.)

By the way, don't get me wrong: broadband is a key driver of -- in fact, a prerequisite for -- mainstream online video consumption. And of course the media companies probably wouldn't be posting so much video content if broadband was still in its infancy. But the fact remains that we've been at critical mass for broadband for several years now, while it's only in the last year that a wealth of high-quality content has come online. So content, not broadband, is the biggest reason the number of Europeans watching online video has more than doubled in the last year.

It's also interesting that people are thinking about how to "save" Joost. Back in May and June I ran into Joost's Eric Clemenceau at Ad:tech Germany and in Cannes and at about five other advertising industry events. He kept joking about how he had the easiest job in the world, promoting a service that all the media were already talking about and that all the advertisers already wanted to use. And he was right. So it's amazing to look back and see how much momentum Joost lost in the past six months. I disagree that they need to be "saved," but they certainly need to reclaim some of that lost momentum in order to compete successfully with all the other online video options consumers (and advertisers) now have.

Nate Elliott | January 22, 2008, 09:34 AM
Facebooking at Work?

According to Nielsen, people use Facebook more at work than at home: Facebook was the 10th most-visited site in the UK in December 2007 based on Nielsen's Home & Work panel, but it's not in the top 10 if you look at just their Home panel. News Corp (including MySpace) ranks #9 in both panels.

No wonder some companies are blocking access.

Nate Elliott | January 16, 2008, 12:26 PM
JupiterResearch Forecasts European Mobile Ad Spending Will Reach €1.3 Billion in 2012

We've just released a new report that forecasts the European mobile advertising market (which includes mobile display advertising and mobile search marketing, but NOT mobile messaging ads like SMS and MMS ads) will reach €1.3 billion in 2012. The biggest driver for the growth of the market will be consumers' increasing use of mobile browsing: we're forecasting that by 2012, 40 percent of Europeans will browse the mobile Internet on a regular basis.

The good news is, as consumer use of mobile browsing grows, many marketers are ready to spend: finding enough mobile ad inventory is one of mobile marketers' biggest concerns. Of course, it's not merely an inventory problem right now -- there are plenty of other problems that need to be solved as well. The mobile marketers we surveyed told us that finding more money for mobile ads was their biggest problem, many said mobile advertising CPMs were too high, and a huge number complained about the lack of mobile ad measurement as well. But we believe the growth of mobile browsing will solve the problems around low inventory and high prices, and measurement should also improve significantly as online adserving and measurement vendors continue to push into the mobile space.

The bottom line is, there's huge potential in this market -- but the industry needs to overcome quite a few obstacles before that potential can be realized. We think most of those problems will get ironed out over the next five years, and that the market will really start to grow towards the end of that period.

Jupiter clients can read my colleague Thomas Husson's full Mobile Advertising in Europe report here, or my shorter Mobile Marketing in Europe report here. Non-clients can get further details in the press release here.

Nate Elliott | January 16, 2008, 12:02 PM
Why the US is Ahead of Europe in Online Video Advertising

An old friend of mine, Rachel Barnhart, is a local TV reporter and anchor at Rochester station 13-WHAM. When I visited her station's site this morning, I was surprised to see how well they do pre-roll video ads. They follow many of the rules we lay out in our Online Video Advertising Best Practices Guide. The site keeps the ads short (all are under 15 seconds), they rotate through advertisers so users don't see the same ad several times in a row, and they run companion banners for each pre-roll advertiser. They even help their advertisers design custom video ads for use online (in one pre-roll ad, the spokesperson points to the companion banner and says "click here" -- corny, but probably effective). The only thing they don't do well is limit frequency: there's a pre-roll ad in front of every single clip.

It stands to reason that TV broadcasters should be good at deploying in-stream ads. After all, video advertising is their business. But not all of them are, especially in Europe: last time I visited Virgin Media's video portal, I was subjected to the same exact pre-roll ad 12 times in a row, with no companion banner. Recently Finland's MTV3 was showing users both a 15-second pre-roll ad and a 30-second post-roll ad on its video clips, which completely overwhelms users. Meanwhile, many other large European broadcasters still don't offer in-stream advertising at all.

When you compare major European broadcasters' relatively poor execution of online video ads with the nearly perfect execution at 13-WHAM, a local affiliate in a small city (Rochester is only the 78th largest TV market in the US), you can see one indication of why the US video ad market is so far ahead of the European market.

We've just published our new European online ad forecast (Jupiter clients can read the report and download the forecast model here), and for the first time ever it includes forecasts for spending on creative formats like online video ads and rich media ads. We'll be releasing some extensive data from that forecast shortly, but for now I can tell you that US advertisers spent more than twice as much on online video ads last year as European advertisers. And while European video ad spending will grow quickly over the next few years, the video sites need to do a better job implementing these ads in order for that growth to occur.

Nate Elliott | December 20, 2007, 10:40 AM
Great New Yahoo Maps Feature... But Again, It's US-Only

As reported by the Kelsey Group, Yahoo Maps has introduced a great new drag-and-drop route planning feature in the US version of Yahoo Maps. Based on Yahoo's past timeline for rolling out their US local-and-map features internationally, we can expect to see drag-and-drop route planning in Europe in... perhaps two to five years?

It continues to be hugely frustrating comparing Yahoo's US local-and-map offerings to their European versions. Yes, the US is a large market with a single language. But there's no reason to ignore the potential of the European market as blatantly as the US search engines have. Getting these features rolled out in key European markets (UK, Germany, France) should be a priority. Sadly, as we found in our European Local Search report, and as we continue to see, it's clearly not. No wonder Europeans don't use local search.

Nate Elliott | December 19, 2007, 03:44 PM
Special Guest Blogger: Dorothee Vogel on Green Travel

Dorothee Vogel, Jupiter's European online commerce analyst and champion of green products and green marketing, is back with another guest blog:

While some travel suppliers are still heatedly discussing the relevance of carbon-offsetting schemes, lastminute.com’s involvement in the Carbonwise offsetting scheme stands as a unique success story. Lastminute.com said that after just six months offering carbon-offsetting to their online flight bookers, 10 percent of bookers were opting in to pay for an offset. Now after a full year, 15 percent are opting in. While there are certain short-haul routes which attract more than 20 percent opt-ins, long-haul routes which require higher contributions convert considerably fewer bookers.

Green attitudes of travel bookers have certainly found their way onto the marketing agenda of travel providers during the course of 2007. How to communicate and offer green travel alternatives however is still very much debated as hotel suppliers, tour operators and airlines revealed recently in London at the “Create a Travel Company that will grow in an era of climate change” conference.

"Stopping people traveling is certainly not the solution," said Jayne Austin-Price from Madinat Jumeirah luxury hotels. She knows she has to be sensible and careful when communicating with her up-market audience about sustainability – confrontation and guilt won’t sway these consumers. At the same time Jane Ashton from First Choice reported that their World Care Fund -- a voluntary opt-out contribution of 1.50 GBP per person matched by First Choice -- finds a 35 percent conversion rate. Interestingly, she also revealed that their older customer segment in higher income groups were most likely to opt out.

These observations confirm JupiterResearch’s findings in our recent Green Travel report about the UK’s unique status in terms of green publicity and product offerings amongst travel suppliers, and the importance placing such schemes within the purchase cycle. Furthermore, it highlights that there is an important attitudinal difference amongst online retail and travel buyers and even specific travel product buyers in their green attitudes and actions. This last point was driven home by Dan Jonasson from Sweden’s NaturesBest who said, that even though Scandinavians’ environmental awareness is very high their green attitudes don’t translate when it comes to travel and are largely ignored by suppliers.

JupiterResearch clients can read the full Green Online Travel Buyers report. Also don't forget to check out our recently-released data on the state of Green Shopping in Europe.

Nate Elliott | December 11, 2007, 03:29 PM
New Research: Over One Quarter of European Internet Users are Green Shoppers

My colleague Dorothee Vogel just published an interesting report about green shopping in Europe. Amongst the surprises: no matter how much noise the UK press make on environmental issues (and by God they make a lot of noise), they just can't convince UK consumers to do anything about it. Now the Danes, they care: more than half of Danish online users say they're willing to pay higher prices in order to buy environmentally-friendly products.

From the press release:

JupiterResearch Reveals that Over One Quarter of European Internet Users are Green Shoppers

Introducing Green Product Offerings, Promoting Green Corporate Policies Can Help Retailers Attract a High-Spending Demographic

(London, UK – 11 December, 2007) Environmental considerations are impacting European online purchase decisions but trends vary strongly by country according to a new report from JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business. The report, European Green Consumers: Identifying and Seizing the Opportunity Online finds that over one-quarter of European online users either decide what to buy based on retailers’ green policies or are willing to pay higher prices for green products.

Danish and Dutch consumers are the greenest European consumers with strongest willingness to pay for green products and the strongest interest in companies green policies whilst consumers in the UK and Germany display weakest green attitudes and behavior. Internet users in Denmark are more than three times as likely as are those in the UK to be willing to pay more for green products.

You can read the complete press release here, and Jupiter clients can read the complete report here.