Big changes are brewing in the SEO/SEM space. My last article was focused on M&A activity in the SEO space - the Microsoft acquisition of facebook.com. Google has acquired YouTube.com and Yahoo! has launched the beta version of it’s own Digg-like social networking website and has already acquired Flickr and del.icio.us.

We have a lot of M&A activity around social networking websites. Why? Internet users are again experiencing ad-blindness with respect to PPC text advertisements. Cost per click is going up and click through rates are going down. Yahoo!, Google and MSN are all getting ready for the next big thing.

So, what is the next big thing. A glance at Google’s Universal Search indicates the extent of the impact that social networking and USG (user-generated content) has had on the Internet. Universal Search essentially adds blog, news, image, video and press release content into SERPs. Essentially, this blows things wide open in the search market and underscores the importance of content creation and distribution with respect to generating targeted search engine traffic.

Yahoo! acquired KenetWorks, another online community, with a twist. KenetWorks has the capability of distributing UGC to mobile and PDA hand sets in real-time… thus expanding Yahoo!’s reach outside the confines of the home or office. That means, in the very near future, Yahoo! will be able to extend their advertising platform to users, regardless of their location - in airports, in the car, while noshing on hotdog at the ballpark… everywhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under E-Business, Search Optimization, Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.