The Big Wave Blog

1. The crushing exchange rate: Your inheritance is now lower thanks to the dinner you had with your client after landing.
2. The Nano hotel room: You don’t get a closet, you sleep in a closet.
3. The tap water: Tastes like it has been flavored with liquid bleach and baking soda.
4. The expanded vowels: British English has incorporated new vowels and sounds that others cannot be expected to understand.
5. The omnipresent ethnic food: You can’t find a single restaurant that doesn’t feature kebabs and pasta in the front window.
6. The Oyster Card: You are using it on the subway, not at Red Lobster.
7. Open containers: People on trains and buses are drinking their beer or liquor straight from the bottle, without a paper bag. You might even see a creative bunch mixing drinks on the go!
8. Potatoes have funny names: The chips are crisps and the fries are chips.
9. Smile! You’re on TV! The CCTV cameras are everywhere, and I mean everywhere!
10. You are feeling damp and hungry. “Bad food, worse weather” is no longer a joke!

It’s great to experience life in London. I enjoy seeing the British driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way home, where they sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV!

It’s always fun to laugh at our differences, but I had an awesome time in London last week. Despite the exchange rate and occasional rain shower, it is one of my favorite places to do business and also take in a museum or a show. I can only imagine what a Londoner’s Top 10 US list would look like! Maybe I’ll work on that for next time…

All the social media voting sites such as Digg, Mixx, Delicious, Stumbleupon, etc, are generating buzz by delivering some amazing number of visitors to publishers who manage to make it to their home page. Interestingly, Yahoo recently entered the field of social bookmarking and voting (Feb 25). They have delivered record traffic to several websites that made it to their new BUZZ homepage. Here are some statistics, courtesy of Techcrunch:

• Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million visitors to outside sites in the first two weeks!
• Salon.com had 1 million unique visitors on February 28th after getting on the home page of Buzz. This is a record high for the 12-year-old site.
• US Magazine had their second highest traffic day thanks to Yahoo Buzz, with 32% of visits that day coming from the Yahoo home page.
• Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story.
• Sugar, Inc. sites have had nearly 1.8 million unique visitors sent from five different Buzz stories on the Yahoo home page.

Yahoo has the traffic that puts all social media to shame. They have traditionally fared much better than Google when it comes to launching successful niche websites. No wonder Microsoft is head over heels after them!

Another testament that online advertising is not just a fad. Henry Blodget of Alley Insider reviewed 17 major media businesses (including News Corp, Time Warner Cable, Viacom, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, The New York Times, and CBS Radio). Here are some amazing highlights:

Total US Ad Revenue, 2006 to 2007:

• 9% growth, from $53 billion to $58 billion

Offline Ad Revenue: 

• 3% growth, from $39.5 billion to $40.6 billion.

Online Ad Revenue:

• 28%, from $14 billion to $18 billion

Google captured twice as much revenue as its closest three competitors combined.

• Online ad revenue at Google grew 44%, or $2.7 billion.
• Online ad revenue at Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL grew 15%, or $1.3 billion.

And now ladies and gentlemen…drum roll…..The year-over-year revenue growth for Google.com (US)–approximately $2 billion–was more than twice the growth of ad revenue in all of the offline media companies combined.  

In my consulting engagements, I often have had to fight for increased spending on online advertising, versus continuing to spend on offline, established media powerhouses. The numbers above show me to be part of a media shift revolution. I have a feeling this Google thing is here to stay…what do you think?

I am very excited to share with our readers that one of my favorite websites doubled its traffic over 2007!

The “official” news came a few weeks back. “Craigslist” is now a search term with more search volume than “mapquest” and “youtube”… awesome!

A lot of growth is coming from new cities and states. California is still #1, but other new states are quickly catching up. Here is a great post by Heather Hopkins from Hitwise giving details on the phenomenal growth Craigslist has experienced over the last year.

Craigslist is one of the few freestanding Great Idea web properties. I have always been a big fan of Craig Newmark. It’s a pleasure to see this project attain such rapid growth and success.

Congrats to the Craigslist team!