MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 28, 2005--Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users' experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.
Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.
"We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users' experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. "This technology will be a valuable addition to Google's suite of advertising and publishing products."
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.
With Internet Explorer 7 entering its beta stage it is time to poinmt you to the Official Internet Explorer 7 weblog. Software developers and webmasters can prepare themselves through the frequentnotices.
Adsense comes with new additions... More ways of making (and spending) advertising $$$.
Increasing monetization through new forms of advertising
As part of our goal to improve the monetization of your sites, Google has introduced a number of new features for advertisers, which will directly impact you as an AdSense publisher.
We anticipate that these features will introduce new advertising dollars into the content network by giving advertisers additional ways to reach their objectives.
We're currently testing these new features with a select group of advertisers, and expect to make the features more widely available in the near future.
Site targeting: focusing on the audience
The keyword-targeted ads that you're used to seeing on your pages will now be joined by a new type of site-targeted advertisement. Site-targeted ads allow advertisers to select the specific sites they feel are most appropriate to their campaign, and to run their ads only on those sites.
We believe that advertisers will leverage both our traditional keyword-targeted advertising which runs across the entire AdSense network, and our new site-targeted advertising, bringing more ad dollars to publishers.
CPM bidding: a new way to generate revenue
With site-targeted advertising, advertisers set a maximum CPM bid - that is, the price they are willing to pay for every thousand impressions – and pay on a per-impression basis. This means that, unlike pay-per-click ads, you'll earn revenue each time a CPM ad is displayed on your site.
For every eligible impression, both pay-per-impression ads and pay-per-click ads compete in the same auction. Our technology will automatically display the highest performing ads on your pages.
Expanded text ads: testing new formats
We are also running a test with text ads that expand to fill the entire ad unit, so that only a single ad will appear in that unit. At this time, this test will only apply to text ads in a site-targeted campaign and to ad formats banner-sized or larger. The expanded pay-per-impression text ad will have to beat out all of the competing ads before it can appear, so publishers can be assured that any expanded text ad is a highly competitive ad. These ads will be served to any text-enabled ad unit and will abide by your text ad color settings.
More image ads
Because of these new features available for advertisers, the number of image ads in the Google advertising network will grow. To take advantage of these ads, and the increased earnings potential that they offer, we encourage you to review your image ads preference in your AdSense Account Settings page.
You can also choose your image ads preference on a format-by-format basis when generating your ad code. For publishers who want to fully leverage image ads, we now provide an image ads only selection.
Your image ad inventory will also include a small number of Flash ads from a test group of advertisers. These new ads will adhere to the 50KB size limit for image ads, and will be reviewed according to our content guidelines.
Finally, we've added the wide skyscraper (160x600) format to make a total of 5 ad formats supporting image ads. If you're opted in to image ads, be sure to use one of these formats so that we can send image ads to your pages.
April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Adobe Systems Inc., maker of Acrobat and Photoshop software, agreed to buy Macromedia Inc. for about $3.4 billion, adding programs that display images and sounds on Web pages.
Investors will receive 0.69 share, worth $41.86 at the close of trading April 15, for each Macromedia share, San Jose, California-based Adobe said in a statement today. That values San Francisco-based Macromedia at a 25 percent premium.
The Macromedia purchase, Adobe's biggest ever, gives Chief Executive Bruce Chizen a broader set of programs to fend off expected competition from Microsoft Corp., which may include more document features in the next version of its Windows software. Macromedia's Flash, used in 98 percent of desktop computers, also reduces Adobe's reliance on Acrobat software that forms PDF files.
``It makes a lot of sense,'' said Stuart O'Gorman, who helps manage $700 million of technology stocks including shares in Adobe and Macromedia at Henderson Global Investors in London. ``It gives them a very broad-based suite of products.''
Adobe shares fell $4.66, or 7.7 percent, to $56 at 9:30 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. Macromedia gained $4.13, or 12 percent, to $37.58.
Microsoft's Longhorn
Adobe said it expects second-quarter profit to be at the high end of its forecasts after ``strong demand'' for Acrobat, which lets users create, view and print documents. Macromedia said fiscal fourth-quarter sales beat its own estimates.
``Macromedia and Adobe have been focused on the mission of helping communities and organizations work better,'' Chizen said today on a conference call. ``That's not been a strong suit for Microsoft.''
Microsoft's next Windows, codenamed Longhorn, is due in late 2006. Chizen, 49, who will remain chief executive officer of the combined company, said the program will have similar features to those offered by Macromedia and Adobe.
``Macromedia's Flash is a powerful combination,'' said Sasa Zorovic, an Oppenheimer & Co. analyst in Boston who rates Adobe and Macromedia ``neutral.'' ``Photos are becoming digital. Video is becoming digital. Newspaper and magazines are publishing on the Web. All these media, they are interwoven.''
Adobe is paying 43.8 times operating profit and 7.5 times sales for Macromedia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Macromedia stock peaked at $120.875 in July 2000 and fell as low as $5.80 in August 2002. In the past five years, the shares dropped 63 percent, compared with a 21 percent increase for Adobe.