« Mobile network optimizers - roll ‘em up, roll ‘em up | Main | Cellphone recycling startups find growth »
February 24, 2006
Google gaining ground, local portals at risk?
Yesterday we wrote about Swisscom’s investment in a new comment tracking service for bloggers and wondered about the strategy. In the meantime, several readers pointed out that the telco does have a consumer portal, Bluwin, and it also offers blogging, a service it calls BlueBlog, which is powered by Kaywa, a Swiss startup blogging platform.
Indpendent of the research we've been doing into coComment and Swisscom, we took a look at Bluwin. Sure enough, Bluwin is indeed consumer oriented and It's a highly trafficked website. We confirmed that with a test of its traffic trend report in Alexa.
But Bluwin is losing ground to Google.ch and Microsoft in Switzerland, MSN.ch site, is faring even worse, as the Alexa chart illustrates.
The Alexa results got us thinking about Google's dominance in the online market. It's a popular theme in the tech trade press and blogosphere. Bluwin uses Google AdSense for contextual search advertising. That means it generates revenues from Google, while helping Google to earn more money via search advertising in the Swiss market.
We've written about this kind of thing occurring as being a market opportunity for startups like Ads-Click. So we turned to Pascal Rossini, CEO of Ads-Click, and asked him if Bluwin has enough traffic to create its own ad network. He said "yes" and that if Swisscom’s Bluwin used his firm’s software, it could effectively cut Google out of the equation, managing the relationship with advertisers under its own brand.
He said that Bluewin has its own sales force at its Yellow Pages unit called Directories.ch, and it also uses PubliGroup, an ad space sales agency for Swiss media and publishers.
So why doesn’t Rossini sell Bluwin on the idea? He told us that the firm did make a pitch when it was was at an early stage, and the response was: get a few more clients and then call us again. With the recent signing of big clients in Europe, Japan, North America and Australia, it might be time for them to get back in touch with Bluewin.
Rossini said that he will and that he thinks that the “independence and survival of the Bluwin portal might be at stake”. It would be interesting to hear from European portal owners and local ad sales agencies to find out if they see things the same way.
Posted on February 24, 2006 01:33 PM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/538
