Friday, Sept. 12, 2008
by Greg Gackle, Principal
© GAH, Inc.
Rarely a week goes by that our office doesn't receive a phone call or two from software development companies in India. Can we help you with a web site development project?
At one point, we sent them a project to quote to find out what they would charge. The number of hours came in about the same as it would take us to develop, but the hourly cost was one fourth what we charge. Their message to us was: "charge the client your prices and send us our 25 percent."
Outsourcing software development to India and other offshore locations isn't new among the Fortune 500 companies. Even Deere & Company has built a software development office in India.
But outsourcing of web site development to India by smaller "local" web firms is a different matter, particularly if the client paying the bill doesn't know about the offshoring of their site/work.
Zillow, newspaper consortium extend real estate ad deal
The newspaper consortium (which includes Lee Enterprises ) has agreed to extend its relationship with real estate site Zillow for reciprocal online ad sales.
Under the new terms, the consortium of nearly 300 newspaper sites (including the QC Times site) will be able to sell local ads on Zillow's site and Zillow will be able to sell display ads to appear on the newspapers' sites.
The newspapers' can target ads on Zillow to searches for real estate in particular communities or neighborhoods, while Zillow's ads on the newspaper sites may appear not only in the real estate section but throughout the site.
Zillow is hoping to attract national advertisers by boosting the reach of its online site, with 5.4 million unique visitors, to a combined newspaper online/Zillow reach of more than 63 million unique visitors per month. By targeting users who are likely to have purchased a new home, Zillow hopes to interest national advertisers offering products which new homeowners are likely to need/want.
And, by partnering with Zillow, the newspaper sites hope to simplify online ad buys for large national advertisers while increasing the prices they can charge for their online ad inventory.
'Average' web user views more than 1,500 pages per month
According to Nielsen Online, the average web users viewed 1,527 pages and spent 32.5 hours online during the month of July.
The number of web sites (domains) visited per month, however, remained unchanged from the previous month at 69. For more details view the Nielsen Global Index Chart.
