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Posts Tagged ‘traffic’

We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation documents, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting the evidence. Here’s their version:

In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”

Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”

The quote seems to be referring to full-length movies, though viral videos are mentioned (it’s unclear in this context whether they’re saying movies will go viral, or if they’re talking about traditionally more viral video clips). As it turns out, it’s the latter. And they were probably joking about it. Here’s the actual Email thread, in chronological order:

SUBJECT: Re:http://www.filecabi.net/

Jul 29, 2005  1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

steal it!

Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, steal the movies?

Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

haha ya.

or something.

just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.
-s

Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic… but it’s because they are a stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people use video on the internet.

Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type.
i’m not really disagreeing with you but i also think we shouldn’t be so high & mighty and think we’re better than these guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.
-s

Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:

another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do have a community and it’s ALL user generated content.

-s

It’s worth pointing out that the subject of the Email thread was ‘http://www.filecabi.net’, and that big-boys.com is now Break.com — it’s pretty clear that Chen and Hurley are referring to the brief, dumb sort of videos that often go viral as opposed to full length movies. And, based on the ‘haha’ comment (which is ommitted from Viacom’s document), Chen and Hurley may have just been joking about stealing any content at all.

This doesn’t clear YouTube by any means (there are still plenty of other suspect quotes).  But it casts some doubt on the rest of Viacom’s ‘undisputed facts’.

Facing competition from recently acquired AdMob (Google) and Quattro Wireless (Apple), mobile ad network has been steadily working to strengthen their products and offerings. The startup just acquired iPhone app sales analytics software Heartbeat and announced a deal to offer Nielsen’s ad targeting data into its ad exchange to enhance ad targeting. Today, Mobclix is officially launching one of the first SDKs for iPad advertising.

Apple’s new tablet device, which will be delivered to consumers in a few weeks, poses a tremendous opportunity for advertising. The size of the tablet not only allows for larger ad sixes but ads can also be more engaging and media rich, with the possibility of incorporating video and other interactive features. And these means more revenue for advertisers and developers.

Mobclix allows app developers to sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. It also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics.

Mobclix ripped its iPhone SDK apart and completely rebuilt a new SDK for the iPad. The startup says that thew new iPad advertising opportunities means higher eCPMs and more options for ad sizes. Currently Mobclix partners Traffic Marketplace and Valueclick are offering the 300

If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month.

What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.

To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) :

Distribution of shared items
Facebook: 44%
Twitter: 29%
Yahoo:18%
MySpace:9%

It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins.

Here are the stats:

Share of Authentication By Platform:

News sites:
Facebook: 31%
Google: 30%
Yahoo: 25%
Twitter: 11%
AOL: 3%

Entertainment sites:
Facebook: 52%
Google: 17%
Yahoo: 12%
Twitter: 11%
MySpace: 7%
AOL: 1%

Facebook Chat is also a strong option, making up more than half of all live event chats measured by Gigya.

Live Event Chat:
Facebook: 56%
Twitter: 28%
Yahoo: 9%
MySpace: 7%

Good news first: $100 is a pretty good deal for a 4.3-inch GPS with both traffic service and Bluetooth built in. Bad news: the traffic is via MSN Direct, it’s only free for nine months, and the service is completely shutting down on January 1, 2012. But that still gives you almost two wonderful years together (assuming you pay the $50-per-year subscription fee after the free nine months ends)

View post:
CrunchDeals: Garmin nuvi 285W with traffic and Bluetooth for $100

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.

Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. This report comes on the heels of a meeting in Europe where Bing dangled the prospect of premium spots in search results to publishers and outright money for search R&D.

Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news.

Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands. If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, for instance, that would be a big reason to switch for a lot of folks. But it’s not clear how much Bing would have to pay the news companies of the world for them to give up all the traffic Google sends them in return for a fraction of that traffic and some cash.

Even Google couldn’t afford to strike such deals. Says Murdoch, of Google, “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn’t have any profits left.”

In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.

The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. That information will end up on a site that is indexed by Google. Or the same news will be broken by someone else on the Web before the WSJ.com even gets to it.

Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web.

Image via PhotoXpress.

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Once again, News Corp. is threatening to hide itself from the rest of the Web. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch told an Australian interviewer that he might start blocking Google from the WSJ.com and his other news sites, even though Google accounts for about 25 percent of the traffic to the WSJ.com. Now his digital lieutenant Jon Miller is echoing his boss and warning that a move to block Google may come within the next few months. But he qualifies that by saying that News Corp must “lead” other media companies against Google for this to work. In other words, News Corp can’t go it alone.

I’m not sure what other media companies, other than the AP, might be willing to follow. While the WSJ actually does quite a good job getting people to pay subscriptions online, and supplements that with advertising revenue to those paid subscribers, it is not clear how many other media brands can command that kind of loyalty. If Murdoch can get any of his newspaper rivals to once again retreat behind pay walls, it most surely will hurt them more than it will hurt Google.

In fact, Murdoch is such a sly fox, it is hard to say who he is really going after here. By playing on his rival’s fears of Google becoming the new homepage for news, he might convince some of them to deny Google the ability to index their sites. He knows that the WSJ.com at least can survive on its own, and if the ploy doesn’t work out, he can always reverse himself. But you can’t help but suspect that all of this public strategizing is nothing more than a trial balloon to see if any other news companies are willing to come along on a Google boycott.

Any such boycott, which would entail nothing more than requesting that Google stop indexing their news sites and thus become invisible to most people on the Web, will only hasten the demise of most of Murdoch’s rivals. Unless, of course, part of the plan is to turn to Bing instead and sell exclusive indexing rights for gobs of cash. It’s a risky move, however, because the WSJ and Murdoch’s other news sites could get caught in the crossfire as well.

The notion of News Corp leading other media companies in this battle reminds me of the last scene of Gallipoli, the WWI movie set in Australia, when the infantry goes over trench wall, only to get slaughtered by the enemy.

Col. Robinson: Tell Major Barton that the attack must proceed.
Frank Dunne: Sir, I don’t think you’ve got the picture. They are being cut down before they can get five yards.
[hits the phone]
Col. Robinson: Bloody line! Our marker flags were seen in the Turkish trenches. The attack must continue at all costs.
Frank Dunne: But…
Col. Robinson: I repeat, the attack must proceed!

Or perhaps Blackadder is more appropriate here:

Melchett: Field Marshal Haig has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.
Blackadder: Ah. Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy?
Captain Darling: How could you possibly know that, Blackadder? It’s classified information!
Blackadder: It’s the same plan that we used last time and the seventeen times before that.
Melchett: Exactly! And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard! Doing precisely what we’ve done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time! There is, however, one small problem.
Blackadder: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds.

Charge! Hey, where is everybody?

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Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger?, the FAIL Blog and nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2 Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and “FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.

Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of him yesterday that you may not know.

A word first about Huh: People almost always open an interview by asking if he has cats or if he’s always been funny, which misses the point of what he loves about his job. Huh is a businessman. Unlike a lot of media entrepreneurs, he says his job has become more fun the larger the staff, the site, and the operational worries have grown.

People frequently forget that Huh actually acquired I Can Has Cheezburger? and the FAIL Blog—he didn’t start them. (More on that purchase price below…) Since then he’s opened dozens of humor sites, about 50% of which fail, but some grow spectacularly fast, proving that LOLCats wasn’t a fluke and that Huh has an eye for what makes something funny in that specific viral sort of Internet way. Right now, he’s got a spreadsheet of 150 ideas that he’s moving around, honing and assigning to a team of writers who each curate about five blogs each.

Simply put, Huh has built a serious company out of something inherently hard to take seriously. As he frequently says, it shouldn’t work, but it does.

Now, some details I pried out of Huh with the allure of coffee and a breakfast sandwich yesterday:

1. That I Can Has Cheezburger? purchase price was probably lower than the $2 million Time and others (ahem) reported. Huh is unflappably mum on what he spent, but he’s too good a business man to have ponied up that much—even as fast as the profitable site was growing. Plus, regulatory filings show his angel round he raised to buy that blog and build a company around it was just $2.25 million. When I asked why he’d spend almost the entire amount on one acquisition, he didn’t so much nod, answer or agree as make a face that said “Yes, thank you for not assuming I’m a total idiot.” But, yeah, he won’t comment.

2. Huh has really studied what makes humor catch and made an interesting observation: Male sites and female sites grow distinctly differently. Men tend to share by gut instinct, so male oriented sites grow faster but can churn users quickly too. Women are more trust-oriented, says Huh. That means they share links and sites less frequently, but with more credibility. So the sites grow slower but maintain their audiences better.

It’s an interesting observation given how much of the early breakout Web 2.0 were so male dominated, and Huh should know seeing the traffic patterns of Hawtness (slightly NSFW) and LovelyListing. (Guess which one is for men?)

For the record I Can Has Cheezburger? is about 50 male-female, but nearly 100% geeks-who-love-cats, both of which have aided huge and sustained growth. As Huh explains it, dog people go to parks, cat people sit inside on computers.

3. Just how good that traffic is. The Pet Holdings Network boasts 12 million uniques a month and does 1 billion page views every four months. Those numbers are astounding for a 26-person, user generated content company built largely on frivolity.

We all know about Cheezburger, which surpassed 1 billion page views last month. But FAIL blog went from zero to 10 million page views-per-month in just 90 days, and the recently launched ThereIFixedIt.com has matched that pace.

That said, Huh doesn’t hugely care how fast a blog grows, as long as it grows. What gets one of his sites shut down is a huge spike and then a fall.

His newest site, NotVeryTalented.com launches on Friday.

4. Revenues. Huh has done a great job making money in tough industries. While a lot of blogs are sputtering, his have 30% margins, posting CPMs anywhere between 15 cents and $8. The least profitable is clearly Hawtness, which Huh doesn’t even try to sell ads on, given the dodgy inventory. “It just hooks in readers,” he says.

Here’s the shocker: The company also makes 30% margins from book publishing deals, and advances and royalties make up nearly a third of the company’s revenues, which are in the “single digit millions.” More shocking: Huh can’t seem to get a publisher to sign him to a multi-book deal. This despite the fact that the first LOLcats book spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Really, New York publishing houses?

Huh plans on releasing six books next year and – SPOILER ALERT- the third LOLCats book will be all about kittens.

5. Huh has a social network too. Even if you knew all of the above, this one must surprise you because it recently surprised Huh. Pet Holdings has long offered a log-in and profile for contributors who regularly post images and passively given them the ability to friend each other. The result? A niche social network with 1.3 million users. Huh hasn’t quite decided what to do with this revelation, but he’s thinking about it. As comparatively well as he’s done with blog ads and book sales, to really scale the company, he’d like a sexier revenue stream that can grow fast without massively growing content.

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If you weren’t sure about switching to an Android phone in the near future, this might put you over the edge. Google Maps Navigation is an absolutely killer app. And it is only available for Android 2.0 phones.

Today is Droid day, and for the most part Google is taking a backseat and letting their partners get most of the attention. But Droid is the first Android phone to run Android 2.0, and Google Maps Navigation is clearly the early trophy app for those devices.

Google Maps already has 50 million active users across various mobile phones, says Google. But what users have today isn’t even close to the new Navigation product.

First off, it’s connected, which puts it ahead of all but a tiny percentage of in-car navigation systems which have no Internet connectivity (Dash is a notable exception).

The application is also completely free. So all those paid navigation apps (Navigon, TomTom, CoPilot, MapQuest, GoKivo and Sygic Mobile) are at an immediate disadvantage.

But even if Google charged for this app, it would still win hands down. The features include easy search (no need for address), voice search, traffic information (from data sources and crowd sourced from app), and street view close up pictures when you get near your destination. And the car dock mode gives bigger, simpler icons and auto-voice mode (see video):

Search in plain English. No need to know the address. You can type a business name (e.g. “starbucks”) or even a kind of a business (e.g. “thai restaurant”), just like you would on Google.

Search by voice. Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): “Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco”.

Traffic view. An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch on the indicator toggles a traffic view that shows the traffic ahead.

Search along route. Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.

Satellite view. View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google’s high-resolution aerial imagery.

Street View. Visualize turns overlaid on Google’s Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.

Car dock mode. For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm’s length.

Here’s Navigation in the Droid dock, followed by an image gallery for the app:

Video Demo Of Google Maps Navigation

Screenshot Gallery Of Google Maps Navigation

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Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.

Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.”

He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter?

Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.”

Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway):

“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”

Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt snipped, “I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?”

(Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius)

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Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.

Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.”

He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter?

Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.”

Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway):

“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”

Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt snipped, “I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?”

(Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius)

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