Stocks | Affiliate Marketing Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson

Google Paid Search on the Decline

If you follow the stock market at all, you are probably aware that Google’s stock has been on quite a decline lately. From it’s high of $747.24 a share in November to only $444.08 this week, there is reason for concern. Google’s February search traffic fell 4.6% below the January level and paid clicks fell 3% that same period. The latest comScore numbers are indicating that paid clicks are on track to be down more than 12% for the quarter.

While these numbers are extremely important for stock analysts and Google stock owners, a better question is “How is this affecting Adwords and Adsense users?“. We are part of the industry that spends and earns big off Google. Is the recession of the market and economy effecting your ppc campaigns or Google Adsense earnings? With the loss of ppc advertisers on Google, will it make it easier on the survivors of search and the ones who can flourish with continual paid search listings?

The recent news of Google’s continued loss in search traffic pushed the stock down another 3% for Wednesday’s pricing. The chart to the right shows the lifespan of Google’s stock since going live in late 2005, and peaking in November 2007. With the stock already down nearly a third this year, how much lower will Google stock tank?

27 March, 2008 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Make Money, Marketing, Stocks

Microsoft to Buy Yahoo for $45 Billion

In earth shaking news this morning “Software giant makes cash and stock offer of $31 a share, a 62% premium from Yahoo’s closing price on Thursday.“, reports CNNMoney.com. Microsoft made an offer for nearly $45 BILLION cash and stock to acquire Yahoo. The deal would pays Yahoo a premium of 62% per share, bringing the price to $31 a share. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, called the move the “next major milestone” for the software giant.

In the war against Google, I always thought this was the best move… and have been waiting forever for it to happen. With Yahoo’s stock and earnings numbers struggling so much, now was the time for Microsoft to make the move. How you think this will effect affiliate marketing or search engine promotions of offers? Will the team up of Microsoft and Yahoo be enough to hurt Google in the search engine wars?

01 February, 2008 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Stocks

ComScore Ranks HandHeld Entertainment #1

I last talked about HandHeld Entertainment when they announced that they were acquiring eBaumsWorld.com for $17.5 million. I also went into great detail on all the other site acquisitions they had over the past year and how their plummeting stock was a disaster!

In addition to keeping an eye on this stock and knowing pretty much all of the sites they have scooped up, I’ve also been holding stock in this company for a long time now. I first purchased right after they picked up Dorks.com back in November 2006… and have been buying on the dips, all the way down to $1.50! (52wk Range: 1.00 – 7.78)

Today I was looking over my portfolio and saw my numbers were up pretty high. I noticed ZVUE (HandHeld Entertainment’s Stock Symbol) was up over +50%! For the first time, comScore is now measuring all of HandHeld’s Web sites as a single entity. This is a big change over and mainly because of HandHeld’s formal launch of ZVUE Networks, its online video advertising network. With the new ranking in place, HHE was ranked #1, at the top of the ‘Top 10 Gaining Properties by Percentage Change in Unique Visitors” for August 2007. HandHeld had the largest increase in unique visitors (U.S.) by 327% month-over-month from July 2007 to August 2007.

In addition to the big spike on news today, ZVUE also made news saying they will buy back over a million shares of their own stock over the next 6 months. With all the news on this stock and a company buyback in place, is it now time to buy into ZVUE? Time will tell, and I’m sure they will have more business acquisitions on the way.

21 September, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Contests, Stocks

Buying on the Cheap

We are down another -300 points today in the market… quick… "SELL! SELL! SELL!"… (as Jim Cramer would say). That’s the reaction of a good majority of people in the stock market right now. As for Cramer and myself… we’ve been more of a "BUY! BUY! BUY!". As you may know, I’m a member of Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts, which tells me every time Jim is about to Buy or Sell a stock for his charitable fund. Over the past week, Jim has been doing a lot of buying. Today I picked up a decent amount of shares as well, from a variety of companies. Don’t get me wrong, this market plain sucks… but it’s likely to come back.

In my last post on Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts and my portfolio of his recommended stocks, I talked about how my portfolio was up nearly $5,000 (8.55%)! This was pretty good and I was extremely happy with the performance. Since I have started posting on my JCAA performance, I have been getting allot of emails asking for updates. Unfortunately I didn’t post again recently before the recent crash, as it was up a bit higher.

From the chart above, you can see it pretty much took a complete spin. After being up 8%, now its down 8%. It may seem bad, but it really isn’t when you compare it to what else is really going on. My other personal trading accounts are getting hurt a lot more than my Cramer portfolio. Many hedge funds are also down 40-60% right now. This market is just killing everything right now and I will continue to buy as Jim Cramer does. He was here through the last several bull markets, and will guide us through this one as well.

If you take a look at just some of the stocks in our internet marketing area, you will see them at nearly half they price they were a few months ago. ValueClick, Google and Yahoo have all been hit hard as of lately. Below are their stock charts for the past three months.

VCLK – ValueClick : 52wk Range: $16.03 – $36.70

GOOG – Google : 52wk Range: $372.26 – $558.58

YHOO – Yahoo : 52wk Range: $22.44 – $33.61

16 August, 2007 Posted by: Zac Johnson Filed Under: Make Money, Stocks

eBaumsWorld.com Acquired for $17.5 million!

HandHeld Entertainment has acquired eBaumsWorld.com for $17.5 million! eBaumsworld.com is one known as being on of the first and largest entertainment sites online. At it’s prime the entertainment site ranked within the Top 500 sites, based on Alexa ranking. Due to mass competition in the video and entertainment space, eBaumsworld.com has lost a lot of it’s traffic due to new 2.0 sites like break.com, metacafe.com and youtube. Below is an Alexa traffic chart for ebaumsworld.com over the past few years.

EbaumsWorld.com’s page views have steadily decreased as more 2.0 sites go live.

According to Wikipedia, ebaumsworld.com is: eBaum’s World (subtitled “Media for the masses”) is a popular website based in Rochester, New York featuring media such as videos, Flash cartoons and web games. It is highly controversial for many reasons, primarily due to the fact that content on the website is taken from other sources without permission and rebranded with the eBaum’s World logo. The site, which is owned by Eric “eBaum” Bauman, a native of Rochester, New York, ranks in the top 2000 sites on the Internet according to the website Alexa. It is co-owned by Eric’s secretary and father, Neil Bauman.

The purchase of eBaumsWorld.com is just one of many from Handheld Entertainment. Let’s take a look at some of their previous acquisitions:

November 14, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires Dorks.com, a Fast-Growing Web Site Full of Hilarious Videos Attracting Up To 1 Million Unique Visitors per Month. $1.5 Million.

December 1, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Increases Position in the User-Generated Humorous Videos Marketplace by Acquiring FunMansion.com for $1.1 Million

December 18, 2006
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires YourDailyMedia.com for $1.06 Million; HandHeld’s Network of Web Sites Now Attracts as Many as 5 Million Unique Visitors Per Month

February 6, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Acquires Putfile.com and Increases Audience to More Than 13.7 Million Unique Visitors and 83 Million Page Views. $7.1 Million

March 27, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Expands European Presence with Acquisition of UnOriginal.co.uk. $500,000

April 24, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment Continues to Expand its European Presence with the Acquisition of Holylemon.com. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

August 2, 2007
- HandHeld Entertainment to Acquire eBaum’s World, a Premier Online Entertainment Site. $17.5 Million

As you can see from Handheld Entertainment’s acquisitions, they are quite serious… buying up almost all sites that rank on the first page of Google for “funny videos“. Now let’s take a look at Handheld Entertainment’s stock situation. (Symbol: ZVUE).

The chart below represents ZVUE stock over the past year. The huge jump in the stock price during November was a direct result of the news of their first purchase of Dorks.com… since then the stock has been absolutely horrendous. I was unlucky enough to jump in and follow this stock at the time of it’s rocketing from $1 to $7 per share… and now almost back to where it originally started. I have been buying on the dips, which seem to be continuous. However, with their recent purchases, they are always a possible buyout target and have a very powerful network of entertainment sites at the moment. What is even more interesting is that nearly all of Handheld Entertainment’s acquisitions were a cash and stock bundle package. With such fluctuations in their stock price, these multi-million dollar deals have potentially changed from being worth millions to much smaller figure deals in the long run. (Vice versa if we should see this stock rocket once again.)

Is ZVUE now a deal at these super low prices, or still a crappy stock with no legs?

HandHeld Entertainment’s network of Web sites (eBaumsWorld.com™, Putfile.com™, Holylemon.com™, UnOriginal.co.uk™, YourDailyMedia.com™, Dorks.com™, FunMansion.com™ and ZVUE.com™) now houses more than 850,000 user-generated and commercial videos available for purchase or free viewing, as well as millions of free user-submitted photos and other media, and is expected to deliver nearly one billion page views/video streams in 2007. Keep an eye on ZVUE stock and all future mergers on this company, as they may soon become a big player or potential take over target.