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YouTube: Not So Stupid?

Written on October 19, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

This year, we’ve seen a lot of pessimistic estimates of YouTube’s operating losses. While the site does bring in some advertising revenue, they haven’t quite covered that $1.65B price tag yet. And based on bandwidth costs, various analysts have estimated annual operating losses of anywhere from $470M to $175M.

Note that the more conservative estimate here still includes a bandwidth bill of nearly $50M. But new reports are estimating that cost as even lower. After Arbor Networks’ recent analysis of 256 exabytes of Internet traffic, it seems YouTube may be paying nothing for their bandwidth.

As we mentioned before, Arbor Networks found that 6% of all Internet traffic worldwide was going to Google. With that much traffic (we’re talking almost 17 quadrillion megabytes), it seems Google would have to have some serious pipage to support their popularity.

According to Wired,

The cost of bandwidth has fallen and so too have the profit margins for moving bits, even as traffic grows at an estimated 40 percent a year.

With the growth of Google’s network and Content Delivery Networks, the economics of who pays whom to connect grows more complicated than the early days of the net when money flowed upwards — little ISPs paid regional ISPs who paid major ISPs who paid backbone operators.

Now if you are Google, you might even begin asking Comcast to pay up to connect its Google Tubes straight to their local cable ISP networks. That way, YouTube videos and Google search results would show up faster, letting the ISP brag that YouTube doesn’t stutter on their network, a potential commercial advantage over its DSL competitors.

Unfortunately, Wired says, the true nature of the Internet infrastructure is guarded by NDAs, so we may never know who owns the pipeline.

What do you think? Is YouTube operating for pennies because Google owns so much pipe?

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YouTube: Not So Stupid?

Google #1 Site Worldwide with 6% Global Traffic

Written on October 13, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

What do you get when you analyze nearly 300 quadrillion megabytes of Internet traffic? Aside from really tired, I mean. Well, if you’re Arbor Networks, you get the largest study of global Internet traffic since the beginning of the commercial Internet in the ’90s. And ten guesses who came out on top. (No fair cheating, reading the headline!)

Yep, Google received 6% of all traffic worldwide. Meanwhile, 29 other giants, including Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, rounded out the top 30% of traffic—meaning that these days, a few big sites are getting a lot of the Internet’s traffic.

Considering that only 52% of Internet traffic is web-based, this is even more significant. (The other 48% is made up of email and private networks. And did you know that P2P constitutes 18% of Internet traffic? That’s down from 40% two years ago.)

The study shows a few interesting Internet traffic shifts in recent years, and not just in P2P data (though Read Write Web says the shift away from P2P is probably due to the growing popularity of streaming from YouTube, Hulu and Netflix, with up to 20% of web traffic coming from video). As we see so often, the big sites are acquiring more and more of the little sites, amassing a greater and greater percentage of web traffic—and consolidating traffic more and more into the hands a few companies.

Who makes up the rest of the oligarchy?

The other companies making the list of Internet giants include names like Akamai, Limelight, BitGravity, Highwinds, and Gravity – hardly household names, and certainly not big telco providers. Instead, these content delivery networks (CDNs), are the new Internet backbone that help move large amounts of data across the web.

Arbor Networks Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz says that “as content is getting faster and better quality it will change the face of the internet.” What do you think? Is content the next wave of Internet revolution?

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Google #1 Site Worldwide with 6% Global Traffic

Do You Have Malware or Just Crappy Code? Google Will Tell You

Written on October 13, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Nothing will scare a web site marketer more than either of these two situations:

1. Google flagging your site: “This site may harm your computer”

2. Seeing exactly how your site looks to Google’s spider

Well, Google has announced two new Webmaster Tools Labs features that help with either of these scenarios. First, Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of your pages that it considers to be malicious. You no longer have to scour your entire site, looking for the malicious code.

It looks like this:

The second feature allows you to “see” your site as Googlebot sees it. To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed with this new tool. OK, so it does show you the HTML code that was fetched by Googlebot, but unless you’re looking for session IDs or cache info, it returns no more than you’d see if you simply “viewed source” in your browser.

I much prefer my way of checking how Google sees a web page. Simply pull up the cache of your page:

Then view the “Text-only version.” You’ll then see how Googlebot sees your site–completely stripped of any CSS, images, Flash, etc.

For me, this visual display tells me much more than looking at a hundred lines of code. Then again, I’m not a web developer, so maybe what Googlebot sees is more sexier to those that live inside a text-editor.

See the rest here:
Do You Have Malware or Just Crappy Code? Google Will Tell You

Yahoo Settles Class Action Lawsuit; Attorneys Walk Away with $4.3 Million!

Written on October 13, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

If there’s one solid truth about class action lawsuits, it’s this: only the attorneys win.

That truth has held out over and over again, especially when it comes to any kind of class action against a search engine. Adding to the list, Yahoo has settled a 2006 lawsuit that claimed it allowed advertisers’ ads to be displayed on a whole host of undesirable web sites:

…Yahoo! breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

You can argue that without this lawsuit, Yahoo would not have changed its ways–it has agreed to offer a new ad option that restricts ads to Yahoo sites and “premium” distribution partners–but, does anyone really feel like a winner here?

Yahoo simply settled because this was a PITA and it didn’t need this hanging over its head as it moves forward with assimilation by the Borg Microsoft.

What do advertisers get here? Well, you get the promise of better ad targeting on Yahoo Sponsored Search and…well, that’s about it. Unless you are already out of business, then you get $20. That’s not a misprint–you get twenty dollars.

So, who’s the real winner here? The attorneys. Buried at the bottom of the announcement, we find this:

Class Counsel will apply for attorneys’ fees of $4,170,000, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000, and for service awards to the three Class Representatives of $10,000 each. Yahoo! has agreed to pay those fees, expenses and service awards, in the total amount of $4.3 million,

You get $20 (at best) the attorneys walk away with $4.3 million!

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great attorneys out there–heck I used to work as a paralegal back in England–but this is craziness. Something needs to be done to prevent attorneys from cashing out on such a large scale. It’s not like these class actions suits end up going to trial. They nearly always get settled–usually with the attorneys being the only real winners.

It’s a sad fact that these class action lawsuits will continue because both sides know that it’s cheaper to settle, than fight this all the way. Even sadder, the spoils tend to go to the one who passed the bar exam.

Read the rest here:
Yahoo Settles Class Action Lawsuit; Attorneys Walk Away with $4.3 Million!

SES SJ: Charlene Li Keynote – Preparing For The Future Of Search

Written on August 13, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

Charlene Li is co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and gave the keynote on day 3 of SES San Jose.  She spoke on the intersection of search and social and discussed how to prepare for the future of search.  Read on for the highlights of her presentation:

How far have we come since 2001?  In just 8 years, we’ve gone from simple text links in search results to pictures, video and a rich user experience.

Imagine what will happen going forward into the future.  The engines are only going to keep innovating – and one of the trends is the integration of social and real-time into search results.

Social is out there and it’s being picked up by engines like Google, meaning you need to rethink the way you look at search.  People need to be at the center of your search strategy, not keywords.

An easy way to think about this is that relevancy is the goal, which sits between content meaning and user intent.

It is hard for search engines to make sense of social sites because the information is full of hyperlinks and also behind a paywall.  The engines need to discover a new type of relevance – engagement

This will become more important as social networks in the future will be “like air” (in other words, invisible).  We will look back at the idea of Twitter and Facebook and think it was “quaint” that we had to log in to share content and interact with our social graph.  We’re moving to a world where our social graphs are seamlessly integrated with our physical world presence.

In the future, our networks will be with us all the time:  when we’re shopping, when we’re traveling and when we are searching.  Reviews will be put through the filter of people you know and your search results will become more and more social.

For marketers, this means new ways of targeting:

• Demographic
• Geographic
• Psychological
• Behavioral
• Social-graphic

In the future agencies will be tapping more and more into user data to create hyper-targeted profiles.  Social-graphic targeting will only become more integrated and seamless.

How will social CRM work with search?

Search results > Facebook Community, blog page, etc. > Engagement (A/B testing) > Search ads tailored to customers > going full circle back to search results

How to succeed?

• Focus on people, not keywords – build relationships
• Focus on those relationships – not technologies themselves

1)  Learn from your audience and from your customers

They will be the most truthful with you and tell you what they want.  By learning from them you will learn how to engage with them in a way that will resonate.

2)  Develop a dialog

Start at the bottom of the “engagement pyramid.  Focus on the lower level:  the watchers and sharers before the higher-ups on the pyramid (commenters, producers, or curators).  Watchers and sharers are actually the most important, without them, commenters/producers/curators will not rally behind you.

3)  Help them and support them

Support people through the buying cycle and build relationships with them.  Help them out and nurture the process to not lose leads.  Act as a guide.

4)  Innovate

Integrate social into your site by tapping networks that already exist.  Partner with existing networks to leverage people’s social graph instantly.

Conclusion:

• Social networks will be like air
• People must be at the center of your search strategy
• Deepen relationships with social technologies
• Be ready to give up control