E Marketing analysis

Online business have evolved during the last years, many sites have tried to increase revenues from online advertisements and promotion of products, goods or services.

In this study I will try to make an introspective analysis of six sites regarding the methods they are using for production of profit, according to the modern compensation methods the instructor has pointed that they are using.Three of these sites are corresponding to the domestic Greek market, in. gr, sport. gr and newsbeast and thre are mainly addressing to a more global audience, FT.com, Economist and Google. com.

In. gr Based on the data of alexa. com, in. gr is the second most popular site listed as Greek and the first most popular portal.

It is managed by DOL Digital media S. A. which is a business unit of Lambrakis press group, a well know media related group of companies in Greece. It is designed as a portal of information and gives daily news, stock exchange information, weather forecast, sports news, finance, cars, entertainment, vacation, maritime, technology, health and more.According to alexa’s global rank, in.gr is listed with a score of 2.

515 on the list and in the domestic list is ranked as 12th with a linking of 7403, all this data were accessed on May 20, 2012. If we take a look at the traffic chart (chart 1) it is obvious that there is a decline which is caused from the rise of blogging which has turned a lot of audience to this side of the internet and on the start up of competitor sites or portals. Chart 1 By the search analysis on alexa. com tab, in.

gr has 3. 4% of traffic deriving from search engines.The main keywords are in.gr, mega, and in.

from the search analytics it is clearly shown that in. gr it is used mainly for daily news, weather information and navigational instructions. The audience of in. gr is mainly represented by ages from 25-44 years old, this is happened due to the fact that, the data where are displayed in the site are related mainly for this range of ages. The same goes for the gender distribution as it is represented by more males than females.

Visitors are by 82. 5% residents of Greece, followed by 2. 3% from U.K and 2.

2% from Germany and the same from the US, which is quite reasonable numbers for news site to have more domestic audience. Sites relevant to in. gr are pathfinder. gr, Sport24.

gr, sport-fm. gr, naftemporiki. gr, kathemirini. gr, Jungle. gr and more. Important information is the upstream sites, the main input of visits is most deriving from google.

gr by 15. 3% and followed by facebook. com by 7%, mainly form search engines. Leaving in.

gr visitors are returning back to google. gr or facebook. gr.By far in.

gr is one of the first informational portals in Greece and still has a very good reputation due to the collaboration with well respected printed and TV media. In terms of online advertising the site’s strategy is mainly focusing on display advertising, “Display advertising appears on web pages in many forms, including web banners. These banners can consist of static or animated images, as well as interactive media that may include audio and video elements”, due to the good reputation the site’s main revenue stream is derived from flat fee pricing.There is an online segment of the site which is called “advertisement express”, there you can commit you ad through an easy to follow guide and you can upload your ad within minutes.

Mainly in. gr works with online display advertising through banners, it has two vertical static side banners, one top banner and room for enough smaller banners. The majority of these ads are using Cost per Click (CPC) “Cost per Click known also as pay-per-click (PPC) from the publisher's point of view. In this model the advertiser pays for each click made on a banner impression.Payment depends on the number of clicks solely”.

One of the main disadvantages of CPC is that the advertiser will pay only for the numbers of clicks which will lead to a visit on the advertiser site. As mentioned in the TLV media: “Advantages of CPC are: The advertiser knows exactly how many times his landing page / site will be clicked, and what would be his daily / total costs. The banner will be shown until enough clicks are being generated Common model when looking for exposure with no direct lead or sale goals. CPC is optimized quiet fast by optimizing ad-networks to generate high CTR.Reasonable indicator for banner quality.

Disadvantages are: Weak correlation with Sales or Leads. Dependable on click tracking technology and measurement. Weak performance matrix, vulnerable to click frauds. No indication for campaign quality (only banner quality). Advertiser might receive cheap media instead of effective media. Effective frequency capping is unknown”.

According to TLV Media report, or Cost per Mille (Cost per Thousands impressions) again as stated at TLV’s “Usually reflects the price of 1000 banner impressions in dollar currency.Payment depends on the number of impressions solely”. It is more impression related but no sales related method. Also it depends by the popularity of the site. For the new comers a flat fee pricing is applied also known as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) “The amount of monthly revenue that is highly likely to continue in the future.

This revenue type is predictable and stable, thanks to subscription contracts and historical customer retention rates”, as Vindicia’s guide states. Additionally there is the online stock exchange option where there the subscriptions are applied.Based on Vindicia’s Best practice guide for online business, “subscriptions share the same basic tenets: Companies periodically charge customers for a product or service according to a predefined cost and schedule. The two major variations in the terms are: Duration between charges — the billing frequency affects how digital businesses retain and acquire customers.Type of customer access — this condition more directly affects pricing. For example, digital businesses that adopt a freemium model must balance the features and value between the free and paid versions.

Summarizing in. gr has revenue streams mostly from online advertizing with CPC, CPM and flat fee pricing, through revenue sharing and subscription for the stock exchange section.Revenue sharing is also known as Cost per Acquisition or Cost per Sale, Cost per Lead (CPA, CPS, and CPL). In general is more sales based model and therefore it is preferable option for the advertisers but not preferred from the publishers aspect.

Taken into consideration the long history of the portal and the creditability of the supporting group of companies, in. gr could easily introduce some targeted goods for online shopping.In other ways I strongly believe that in. gr must invest to a new type of revenue stream and is no other than e-commerce as stated at webopedia. com “Often referred to as simply ecommerce (or e-commerce) the phrase is used to describe business that is conducted over the Internet using any of the applications that rely on the Internet, such as e-mail, instant messaging, shopping carts, Web services, UDDI, FTP, and EDI, among others”. Definitely due to the audience should be focused on manhood products, such as car products, electronic gadgets and wellness.

On a longer term it must approach also broader audience with more “generic” products. newsbeast. gr One of the upcoming rivals in the domestic online information business is the www. newsbeast . gr.

it is a twenty four hour news site, with several categories as politics, global news, lifestyle etc. According to Alexa. com has a global traffic rank of 3. 425 and it is the 16th most popular Greek site with reputation score of 2. 737.

Traffic statistics clearly show the growth of the site since late 2010 and a steady overall growth (chart 2).