Global Marketing News – 8th July 2015
PayPal to enter international money transfer market
The online payments company PayPal has announced that it is going to buy Xoom for 890 million US dollars.
Xoom is a leading international online money transfer company which allows users to send up to 3,000 US dollars at a time to friends and family around the world.
The international online money transfer market is worth an estimated 600 billion US dollars. PayPal’s acquisition of Xoom will make it a serious player in this market, which is currently dominated by Western Union.
Xoom currently has 1.3 million users from 37 countries. Around 7 billion US dollars was transferred using Xoom last year.
The acquisition will mean that PayPal will be able to offer Xoom’s international money transfer services to its significant customer-base, with 68 million people using PayPal in the US alone.
Yahoo and Google in experimental search partnership
Yahoo is currently testing using Google’s search technology in its search results.
The partnership is currently just experimental, but if it is a success it is possible that Google and Yahoo may enter into a more long-term deal.
Under the current test, Google is supplying some organic and paid search results to Yahoo.
Yahoo is currently in a partnership with Bing, but the Yahoo-Bing contract allows Yahoo to try out partnerships with other search engines if they are not happy with Bing’s results, so long as at least 51% of search results are still powered by Bing.
Both Yahoo and Google remain tight lipped over whether a more permanent deal is in the pipeline, with Yahoo saying: “From time to time, we run small tests with a variety of partners, including search providers. There is nothing further to share at this time.”
Google also commented, adding: “Yahoo is currently testing search results and ads from a number of partners, including Google as one of their options.”
Yahoo’s search engine currently has a 9.6% global share, trailing far behind Google which has a 71% global share of the search engine market.
Facebook to start paying video creators
Facebook has said that it will start paying certain video creators for putting their videos on the social networking site.
Facebook is to launch a feed called “Suggested Videos”, which will contain a string of different video clips with adverts in between them.
Video uploaders will be paid a share of 55% of the ad revenue generated from ads played before their videos.
Facebook is becoming one of the leading video sites in the world. With a staggering 4 billion video views taking place on Facebook every day, it overtook YouTube in terms of video views at the end of last year.
An analyst from the consultancy firm IHS has said that “we could see a monetisation battle between Facebook and YouTube, to entice creators onto the platform”.
Facebook is predicted to have a 25% share of online video advertising revenue in Europe within the next 3 years, with an even greater share in the US.
Doctors’ social network Sermo launches in Canada
Sermo, the social network for doctors, has expanded into Canada.
Previously, Sermo, which allows doctors to communicate with one another to reach clinical decisions, had only been available to US and UK doctors.
The social network also wants to expand to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, France, Germany, Spain and Italy later this year.
It hopes that its expansion into these new countries will facilitate medical communication on a more global scale, and will also help pharmaceutical companies to reach these doctors.
Alibaba and Target now using Criteo ad retargeting cookies
And finally, the online ad retargeting company Criteo has added the retail giants Alibaba and Target as customers.
49% of the top 100 US travel and retail companies now use Criteo cookies on their websites, which help to target ads to people who have already been on a company’s website.
This is compared to 76% of top 100 sites that use Google cookies.
Criteo’s stock prices increased following the news, going up by 4.8% to 49.97 US dollars.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
Immanuel Simonsen
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