Ad:tech San Francisco 2009 was off the hook! With over 12,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, 250 speakers, 63 sessions, ad:tech San Francisco was the place to be for online Marketing professionals of all levels.

If you missed the conference, and want to get an idea of what it was like to be there check  ad:tech’s YOUTUBE PAGE the have a bunch of informative videos that will make you feel like you were there networking along with everyone else.
Read the complete story at the ad:tech blog.

The number of words in the average US search query is on the rise, with longer search queries – averaging five or more words in length – increasing 10% overall in January 2009 vs. January 2008, according to data from Hitwise (via MarketingCharts).

The most notable change was in search queries that were eight or more words. These were up 22%. Over the same time period, shorter search queries, averaging 1 to 4 words in length, have decreased 2%, Hitwise said.

Though Hitwise does not offer any explanation for the increasing length of search strings, the phenomenon could potentially be because internet searchers are growing more sophisticated in their searching habits, or might be attributable to the fact that longer searches may now be necessary to find more specific information amid growing web clutter.

I noticed Ryan Spoon’s blog post (via Techmeme) on PerezHilton.com‘s growth this morning. I have followed the Perez Hilton site (for purely professional reasons) for some time. The website ranked #398 among All Categories of websites last week and #5 among Entertainment – Personalities websites (based on share of US Internet visits).

Searches for “perez hilton” were more than 300 times higher than for the celebrity “paris hilton” last week, confirming what Ryan Spoon suggests in his post that Perez Hilton is a strong brand. But what is perhaps more interesting is that the site’s #1 source of traffic is Facebook, not Google, as of last month. Last week, 8.70% of visits to PerezHilton.com came from Facebook compared to 7.62% from Google. The switch happened the week ending December 27th, 2008.

And this despite insults lobbed at Facebook on the Perez Hilton website and a call to boycott the social network.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — There are two places most of today’s laid-off executives are heading: to job-search sites to see what other opportunities are out there and to networking sites in hopes they can reconnect with — and milk leads from — former colleagues and business contacts. One site, LinkedIn, offers both of those things in one place.

So it should come as no surprise that the site’s traffic is up in the recession. It hit 36 million members last Monday and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, which would make it even with Yahoo HotJobs, the third-largest online job site.

The question is, however, whether LinkedIn — a site closely tied not only to job seekers but also employers — can thrive when unemployment is expected to reach 9% and few are hiring. After all, what’s a bunch of online supply if there’s not sufficient demand for it?

To understand the online supply-and-demand problem, look at Monster Worldwide. While traffic was up 76% year-over-year in January as the unemployed flocked to job boards, its first-quarter revenue is expected to be down 30% over the prior year’s period, thanks to softening in the help-wanted ad market. And it could be unprofitable for the next three quarters, management warned.

LinkedIn, however, is painting a different picture, in part because it’s betting on some different revenue streams, all of which, the company said, are growing. The firm is profitable and has plenty of cash still in the bank — about 80% of the $100 million it has raised, CEO Reid Hoffman told TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington recently.

Well-positioned
Josh Bernoff, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, said he buys LinkedIn’s countercyclical argument. “Any company that benefits from people out of a job and isn’t dependent on advertising for its revenue is going to be doing great right now,” he said. “And not a lot of companies can say that.”

Ads account for about 25% of the site’s revenue, about even with its other revenue streams: job postings, corporate accounts and individual subscriptions. A newer, smaller revenue stream is research. To be sure, it’s not all hunky-dory; in November, LinkedIn laid off 10% of its then 370-person staff, a move meant to help it maintain profitability. But Mr. Hoffman claims the company could go public whenever it wants.

According to LinkedIn’s Director-Advertising Sales Steve Patrizi, advertising revenue has grown during the recession, but because there are fewer ads hawking jobs, he’s got a pitch to get non-endemic advertisers to buy the site: LinkedIn is full of employed professionals, too, and those folks want to make the smart decisions that move their careers forward (or at least ensure a pink slip isn’t in the future). So why not reach them at a time when they need to make those decisions?

He suggested that people want to make the right bet on which computers to buy so they don’t get canned for choosing wrongly. So Dell is advertising to them. LinkedIn’s ad business is “growing much faster” than the market in first quarter, he said in an e-mail to Ad Age, although that statement should be tempered by noting that most projections suggest display ads will be down in the mid-single digits.

LinkedIn’s corporate enterprise business has 900 members which pay for services based on “seats” in a Bloomberg-style business model. And the site has been introducing new features to keep that number from falling off like hiring has. Companies not doing active recruiting, for example, can pay for custom company profiles, all in the name of good branding.

Subscriptions up
And, finally, it also makes money off subscribers — users who pay to introduce themselves and send mail to people outside of their networks. Explained Mr. Patrizi, via e-mail: “Subscriptions are growing since members are seeking to grow and expand their networks in the current economy.”

LinkedIn’s not the only job site reaping the rewards of a down economy. TheLadders, a site for execs looking for $100,000-plus-salary jobs, is also doing well, thanks to its reverse-revenue model in which users pay to be on the site.

One analyst who covers the space said the site should be “on fire” right now — and its CEO told Ad Age that he expects to grow the business by 60% during the next year. “Employer demand for employees is cyclical,” said Marc Cenedella. “Employee demand for jobs is not.”

The idea is to reduce the number of ads, especially the low-performing ones, which should lift a site’s aggregate click-through rates and eliminate some of the excess inventory that wasn’t sold, anyway.

In October, the online arm of personal-finance magazine SmartMoney got rid of display advertising “below the fold” — ads in places farther down a web page. The site noticed that click-through rates had dropped in the past year, and it had lost advertisers as a result. Finance is a category, after all, in which advertisers are focused on performance metrics: How many savings accounts or brokerage customers is a site delivering? Additionally, the financial crisis has caused many of SmartMoney’s endemic advertisers to pull back on the number of publishers from which it buys ads, and SmartMoney wanted to show performance that was good enough to stay on the buy.

“There’s only so much focus that a reader can have on a page,” said Bill Shaw, publisher of SmartMoney and SmartMoney.com. “You have three ad units, but a reader’s only going to click on one.”

SmartMoney’s experiment
So SmartMoney cut the number of units on a page from three to two, eliminating a skyscraper ad that ran toward the bottom along the edge. The result: a 21% increase in aggregate click-through rates. Some advertisers that had quit buying the site have returned, including Scottrade and Options Xpress. And the site was sold out in the fourth quarter, though Mr. Shaw said that trend hasn’t continued in first quarter.

“The fundamental theory of what we’re doing is not only limit supply but make sure the supply we have makes sense,” he said. “I don’t think advertisers care if they’re paying a $15 to $20 CPM as long as they’re getting the right audience and performance.”

After it axed the low-performing skyscraper, leaving two display ads per page; SmartMoney added a second ad to the home page. It still runs Google text ads below the fold and uses some space and buttons to promote its own content and offers. Incidentally, the redesign had another benefit: better user experience, which resulted in people sticking around longer and visiting more pages. The site’s traffic, however, was about 800,000 unique visitors in December, down from more than 1.2 million a year earlier, according to Compete. SmartMoney said it lost, at most, 30% of its ad inventory but probably gained 15% to 18% in page views, ending up down 12% in total impressions.

Augustine Fou, senior VP-digital lead at MRM Worldwide, lauded the strategy. “We’re coming from a world where a site that was attractive had to show it’s getting tens or hundreds of millions of impressions,” he said. “But advertisers are starting to realize simply having hundreds of millions of impressions isn’t that important if they’re getting 0.002% click-through rates.”

Initially, the theory of cutting ad impressions seems to run counter to years and years of attempting to create more ad inventory by goosing page views through juicy, click-inducing headlines and slideshow-based stories and photo pages.

When to serve
Some critics argue that cutting supply only decreases revenue and that publishers should instead focus on finding other ways to monetize low-performing inventory — ways that don’t undermine their own sales efforts, such as turning the ad space over to ad networks.

“If every publisher on the internet collectively decided they were going to cut the number of ads in half, it’s a wonderful idea,” said Frank Addante, CEO of Rubicon Project, which helps publishers manage their inventory and ad-network relationships. That, of course, is hardly likely. But, he said, publishers need to get better at knowing when to serve an ad and when not to, and making sure the quality of the ad doesn’t devalue the site.

Mr. Shaw acknowledged that there are short-term revenue implications but said the underperforming ads were worth so little to advertisers and, when ad-serving fees were factored in, they really were never much of a revenue driver in the first place.

He said he’s also concerned about the bigger, long-term picture. “With magazines, you can cut your rates, but you’re never going to get it back. In TV they’re not giving away prime time at the same cost as late night. But that’s what we’re doing here. We’ve devalued the medium, and we need to get that back.”

Chris Brown, the pop singer recently accused of abusing singer Rihanna, was the most searched-for personality by US Internet users for the week ending February 14, 2009. Unsurprisingly, Rihanna followed Chris Brown as the second most searched-for personality. Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre appearance on David Letterman earned the #5 spot among the Top 20 as searchers looked online for video clips of the interview.

While US Internet users are clearly fascinated by celebrities and scandal, they also remain interested in local news and history. Nadya Suleman, the woman who gave birth to octuplets, was the fourth most searched-for personality outranking major celebrities, including Grammy winner Lil Wayne (#11), Oscar presenter Miley Cyrus (#17) and Oscar Best Actress nominee Angelina Jolie. Abraham’s Lincoln 200th birthday and Charles Darwin’s 200th anniversary being this year also drew many US Internet users to search about them, ranking as the 7th and 8th most searched-for personalities, respectively.

Twenty most searched for personalities in the US, week ending 02/14/09
1 chris brown
2 rihanna
3 jeremy lusk
4 nadya suleman
5 joaquin phoenix
6 robert pattinson
7 charles darwin
8 abraham lincoln
9 eliza dushku
10 rush Limbaugh
11 lil wayne
12 salma hayek
13 carrie underwood
14 harriet tubman
15 hulk hogan
16 oprah
17 miley cyrus
18 jennifer aniston
19 angelina jolie
20 rachel ray

Meanwhile, Skype continues to grow nicely on its own. In the first quarter, the VoIP provider added another 33 million registered users, bringing its total to 309 million worldwide subscribers. Although most use the service for free phone calls over the Internet, the addition of paid services connecting Web callers to analog and cell phone users helped increase revenues to $126 million, up 61 percent from Q1 2007. – Read the whole story…

Paramount recently became the second studio (after Warner Bros.) to pursue video game publisher ambitions. Yesterday in Variety, Sandi Isaacs, Paramount’s senior vice president of interactive and mobile, and Matt Candler, Paramount’s new vice president of interactive development, discussed the company’s move into the interactive entertainment business: “We are entering into deals now where we will be publishing games this year,” Isaacs said. “There’s going to be a slate where in some cases we’re publishing, in some cases we’re co-publishing, or in others we’re funding development and another publisher buys it. It’s important for us to have a flexible model.”

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