Chris Lake's Blog

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat, and Jeff Bezos has once again improved on Amazon’s free delivery offer.

This year Amazon has lowered the threshold for free deliverability eligibility to a mere £5, down from £15. It means that about 90% of orders placed through Amazon will qualify for free delivery.

Google is set to reintroduce gambling ads to Adwords, something that will quickly generate many millions in additional revenue for the search giant.

Licensed gaming operators will from tomorrow be able to buy paid search ads. Google previously allowed free games to be promoted via Adwords, but a blanket ban (of sorts, as we shall discover) came into effect in summer 2007.

I spotted a good post by PR Squared’s Todd Defren on the value of retaining a PR agency during an economic downturn.

Based on the principle that it is a wise move to invest in marketing activities during a recession, and picking up on some advice in Sequoia’s recent ‘RIP Good Times’ event, the post contains five key reasons why you need to be aggressive when it comes to your PR strategy.

eMarketer has published a timely post on the endurance limits of web users in relation to one of the lamest online ad formats know to man, aka the floating overlay.

By looking at data provided by Dynamic Logic, the firm found that the average person can tolerate two sucky ads per hour, before doing an Assault on Precinct 13 in the comfort of their own office. Doing a Rambo might be more appropriate...

MySpace has unveiled ‘MyAds’ to the world, an advertising platform aimed at small businesses with small budgets. Display ads can be bought on a cost-per-click basis.

The company wants to increase revenues during the economic downturn / correction / recession, but is this the magic bullet?

As I see it, there are five problems areas for MySpace to overcome (aside from the minor complaints that the site requires the latest version of Flash to work, and doesn’t work in Google Chrome).

E-consultancy is opening up an office in New York and we’re on the lookout for an amazing editor, to help produce some brilliant US-flavoured content.

It seems fair to say that we can now start using the term ‘recession’ openly, without being called pessimists. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

To find out, you only need to figure out whether you are going to be an ostrich, or an owl.

You’ve probably already guessed where I’m going with this one…

Kudos to Rand Fishkin and the team at SEOmoz following the announcement that they have spent a year building an index of some 30 billion web pages.

The ambitious year-long experiment should help the team provide more insight into how search engines make sense of the web. It looks pretty interesting from where we’re sitting, and we’re looking forward to playing with it.

It always staggers me when I receive a badly-written press release or PR pitch, simply because there’s so much advice out there on how to do it right.

But if there’s one thing that I just can’t understand, it is when PR people ask you to do their job for them.

You can tell a PR has strayed out of their traditional comfort zone when you see this kind of demand in a press release: “Please contact me if you place any of the following information on your site.”

Here’s a secret: journalists often look for one of three links when they visit a website. Can you guess what they are?

The key thing for a writer is to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. If they cannot find the answers online then they’ll need to quickly find some media contacts to call, or email.

As such, journalists typically scan the page for one of the following links…