Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

Posted: 10 Jun 2008 09:40 AM CDT

I honestly tried to figure out how to take each of today’s Picks and fluff them up, so they could stand as their own blog post. Unfortunately, you’d have noticed.

Instead, in the true spirit of Pilgrim’s Picks, these stories are news, just not newsy enough.

It seems Viacom has finally found an online video home for Comedy Central shows The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Hulu is safe from the Viacom’s IP attorneys.
Kudos to Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable for agreeing to block web sites that disseminate child pornography.
Om Malik’s NewTeeVee web site is getting its own video channel.
Want Google’s official word on when to use relative versus absolute URLs? It depends.
Despite an economic slowdown in the US, online ad spending increased by 23.9% to $7.1 billion in the first quarter.
Google’s UK market share has grown by almost 10% in the past year, nudging the 90% mark! (Compare to the US market share of 68%)
Jason Shellen moved on from his work on Google’s Blogger team. He’s working on Plinky and has secured at least $1.5M in funding. What is Plinky? He’s not telling…yet.
GetFave.com has expanded its local business directory and added video.

US Blog Readership Stands in the Shadow of the UK

Posted: 10 Jun 2008 09:16 AM CDT

Over the last 3 years, UK internet traffic to blogs and personal websites has grown by 208%, according to new data from Hitwise.

The web intelligence company has just released new data on blog readership in the United Kingdom which shows 1.19% of all UK web traffic flowed to a blog. (Not a single blog–that would be a great site to own–but to blogs in general)

This chart shows just how much blog readership in the UK has grown…

How does this compare with US readership? Despite what we may think about the US being on the "cutting edge" of social media, only 0.73% of all US traffic flowed to blog/personal journal sites.

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Google Takes a Run at YourTube

Posted: 10 Jun 2008 08:19 AM CDT

Surely you didn't think Google would stop at YouTube when it comes to organizing for world domination the world's information?

Last week, Google Analytics announced "AdWords TV Ads", an all-digital system that distributes advertisers’ TV ads to participating channels nationwide.

The service allows you to upload your TV ad as a video file to your AdWords account and, with a few clicks, start a campaign by choosing from more than 90 nationwide TV stations to air the ad.

Sound cool? Well, the service doesn't stop there. You can also specify the time of day and week, audience demographic, and type of program you’d like to target. Link your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account and you track your online traffic while a TV spot is running. Metrics include:

• Impressions delivered
• Number of ad plays
• Cost
• CPM

"Well, I don't have a TV Ad", you say? No sweat. You can find and connect with production specialists through Google's Ad Creation Marketplace. In fact, through July 31st they'll even reimburse you up to $2,000 for the creation of your spot as long as you meet the minimum spend requirement of $8K over a month.

Looks to me like a pretty cool service for small to medium businesses, car dealerships and others with small budgets that wouldn't otherwise consider TV ads. You can never have enough of those cheesy TV ads! I wonder if the Google gets an agency fee for placing the spots. Ya think?

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Plurk Joins Twitter and Pownce on Train to Sucksville

Posted: 09 Jun 2008 07:16 PM CDT

Over the weekend, I teased Pownce because it too proved to be as unreliable as Twitter. Well, with all the buzz the upstart Plurk is getting, I felt it only fair to share this with you.

While I, and others, continue to moan about Twitter’s reliability. It’s important to know that the grass is not any greener.

Plurking From The Shadow Of Twitter

Posted: 09 Jun 2008 06:41 PM CDT

The folks over at Plurk must have some really good Karma. How else can you explain the incredible luck associated with rolling out your new micro-messaging (I can't bring myself to call it blogging) platform, at the same time your chief competitor (Twitter), has hit the application scaling wall and is experiencing severe service outages?

Any others getting tired of seeing a bunch of tweety birds lifting a whale? It was cute the first couple of times. Now? Not so much. Next time I see that thing, there's gonna be a harpoon flying through my display!

Adding insult to injury, when Twitter is up and running (yes, it still happens occasionally), it is being consistently used to pimp broadcast and promote Plurk. The irony is striking.

Such are the problems when a company unexpectedly finds itself realizing too much success, too rapidly - as Twitter did. In response to a question on the Twitter blog, developer Alex Payne had this to say,

"My understanding is that Twitter started as a one-day project to explore sharing status via SMS…that Twitter would eventually evolve into a messaging system in its own right wasn't conceptualized from the get-go".

A one day project? Now that's what I call foresight!

The bottom line? Twitter developers did not build this as an enterprise class application, capable of scaling to meet a dramatic increase in demand. Those in the "software know", realize that core architecture problems are not something that can be solved overnight – no matter how many CPU's you throw at the problem.

Conversely, it currently seems by both the robustness of the application (features & function), which far surpass that of Twitter and the relative stability of the application, that the folks at Plurk did have success in mind and they are currently capitalizing on Twitter's failings, as disenchanted users go from a "Just another Twitter clone", to an "I'm loving Plurk" mindset. Based on a quick survey (on Twitter), it seems that most users are still remaining loyal, however frustrations are clearly rising.

The race is on for micro-messaging world domination. Will Twitter developers turn a simple lark into a soaring eagle? Can Plurk hit one out of the plark?

What say you Pilgrims?

You can follow me on Twitter or Plurk. At least for now!

Pilgrim’s Update: Save 34% off Andy’s new book - Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online

Linky Goodness, June 9

Posted: 09 Jun 2008 03:46 PM CDT

Oh, it's linky, and it's good. And it's Monday, so I know you need it. Unless it's Tuesday by the time you read this, I guess.

Scrapers causing you indexing woes? Google Webmaster Central is here to help with a post on Duplicate content due to scrapers.
No surprise: Carl Icahn and Yahoo are still sniping, with Icahn’s latest letter insisting he does have a credible plan for Yahoo’s future, and Google is leaving Yahoo in the dust. Welcome to the industry, Captain Obvious. How does selling to Microsoft, who’s doing even worse in search (and rescinding any protections for employees who might be laid off), actually change that? (Hopefully, Yahoo will be the bigger “person” and say nothing.)
Healthy news bites part 1 of 2: Kaiser Permanente is getting into the personal health records initiative—with Microsoft, not Google. Ouch.
Healthy news bites part 2 of 2: the vertical health search engine Healthline will launch a “Semantic Ad Network.” Sounds like it’ll be pretty specialized.

Now I know we’ve set the tone for your whole week. You know you like it.

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YouTube Letting Content Creators Sell Ads

Posted: 09 Jun 2008 03:35 PM CDT

At the annual shareholder meeting a month ago, Google promised new YouTube ad formats that would be neither pre-roll or post-roll. Turns out “Buzz targeting” wasn’t the only method they’re implementing, at least according to an Ad Age article today:

Professional content producers — those who come equipped with their own ad-sales teams — are now able to sell advertising on their YouTube channels. That includes the click-to-expand overlays that run across the bottoms of YouTube videos [InVideo ads] and display units on the page that hosts the video player. The revenue is split between the content creator and YouTube, just as it would be if YouTube sold the ads.

This is a pretty good move on the part of YouTube—have current content producers do the work of recruiting interested, qualified, related advertisers and then split the profits. I do wonder, though, if content producers get a bigger proportion of ad proceeds from advertisers that they brought in.

Ad Age gives a great prediction of how this could extend further into YouTube’s monetization efforts, using a current content provider & advertiser working in the new ad selling program:

Content creators could not only sell ads that would appear next to their content but also extend the reach of those ads to third-party-created videos on YouTube. One hypothetical: Revision3 sells ads to GoDaddy to run not only on YouTube pages showing “Diggnation” videos but also on other third-party, tech-focused videos. Under such a deal, revenue could be split three ways: among Revision3, YouTube and the producers of the third-party content where the ad ran.

And of course, that’s only if YouTube chooses to share the revenue.

Ad Age also says we can expect to see more advertising efforts from YouTube:

[Product Manager Shiva] Rajaraman said YouTube will conduct a series of brand-effectiveness tests, and it’s not finished experimenting in the ad space.

“We’ll be trying new formats, new ways to engage users,” he said. “No one knows quite how to crack video advertising yet.”

That may be true, but YouTube seems to be getting closer. What do you think: have they done it yet?