Google indexes both web sites and videos, however with the volume of videos still being relatively low, it is easy to see your productions quickly rank on Google’s Video Search. There’s clearly an opportunity here if you have something to say that can be said with video. Oh, and hosting these videos on Google-owned YouTube most definitely influences their ranking (not that Google will ever admit to it though).

Numerous studies have shown that Web video watchers prefer short over long-form video content. So what do you do if you’ve shot a 30-minute interview? Cutting it into four or five topic-themed segments, from roughly four to five minutes in length, is labor-intensive, but it’s worth your while to do so, because each segment can be titled with a unique topic name, which will boost your rankings. Once you’ve created the clips, you can easily organize them on YouTube using its playlist system, which lets you control the running sequence of each clip.

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As someone involved in online media, I would expect calls complaining every minute until this was fixed from the client.  In this case, is the client also the one serving the media itself?  Who do you call to fix this?

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1. Pointless Babble
2. Conversational
3. Pass-along Value
4. Self-promotion
5. Spam
6. News

Tbig winner was “pointless babble” which is essentially “I am eating a sandwich now” tweet. More than 40% of all tweets monitored fell into this grouping.

Conversational tweets or those part of a dialogue between users or starting with the “@” symbol—made up another 37.55% of tweets. Tweets with pass-along value, also known as “retweets,” were much less prevalent, at 8.7%, and self-promotional messages made up just 5.85% of the total. Spam and news were even rarer.

Tweets with pass-along value, important for marketers hoping to get their messages distributed as far and wide as possible, were highest on Mondays and Wednesdays, when they made up about 10% of the tweets per day.

Skip the pointless babble – follow me on Twitter.

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Original Posting on Aug 8th 2009 10:20PM.

Rupert , you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.

First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:

1. Block aggregation sites that point to your content.

Too many that’s heresy. The conventional wisdom suggests that all traffic is good traffic. Every page view is more money. Why not take it ? Because its limited and you aren’t selling it.

The value of the traffic sent by most sites is minimal at best. Lets look at your best friend Michael Wolf’s site Newser.com. According to Quantcast he gets about 24k unique users every day. If 1 pct of those users went to a Fox Site, say the NY Post, and each looked at 5 pages, that would be a total gain of 1.2k Page Views. If you were able to sell 1oopct of those at $15 CPM, which you can’t. You would make $18 per day. About $ 6.5k per year. Best case.

More likely, in this economy, you are not selling 90pct of the inventory he sends you. Heck, you aren’t selling a big chuck of the inventory that you get on your sites anyway, so the marginal value of the traffic sent by Newser.com might be about zero.

Why would you help a site, that is a direct competitor for minimal incremental revenue ? It’s not worth it. You know what is worth it ? When someone is sent from the site,let them fall on a page that lets them know that you don’t consider Newser.com a valid news or reference site. Newser.com has chosen to front end our content and we don’t appreciate it. As a result, we are blocking access. To get up to the minute news, please go directly to NYPost.com (or whatever site). Of course Newser.com will quickly stop sending you traffic. But the loss will be theirs. There will be stories that you cover better than anyone. Michael will have to find someone else.

The real question of course is whether other major news site copy what you have done ? What if the NY Times and the Washington Post do the same thing ? What if CNN, Tribune Papers and MSNBC join in ? I will tell you what happens. The aggregator sites that try to front end the content you invest a ton of money to create will find themselves all relying on AP, Reuters and individual bloggers.

This is where all the netizens jump in and tell me Im crazy. That news sites won’t ever do this. Thats not the internet way. Which of course is exactly how they respond to every business question involving the net. The major news sites are keeping the aggregators that don’t originate news content alive. From Drudge Report on down. You are crazy to do so. Let the search engines send you traffic. Block the rest. Your revenue impact will be minimal. The competitive impact significant.

2.Other than the WSJ, don’t ever sell content ala carte. It only works for content that impacts company’s and individuals bank accounts in real time. The Wall Street Journal can sell subscriptions because if a businessperson or trader doesn’t have the information the minute its published, they could be in serious financial trouble. The WSJ moves markets. You can charge for it. Page 6 doesn’t move markets. Foxsports doesn’t move markets. People won’t pay for it by story. They won’t pay for a general interest or newspaper, tv or sports website by the day, week or month unless they absolutely have to know what you publish for business reasons. There aren’t enough of those people around to pay the bills per site.

So what should you do to sell your online content ?

The first thing you have to do is realize that internet consumers are only fine with paying for content when the following two criteria are met:

1. It is easy to buy.

2. It is easy for any consumer to assign a “perceived value” to the content and you charge less than that amount.

2a. Remind yourself that just because you assign a specific value, doesn’t mean the consumer will. Case in point are newspaper sites. Consumers might adamantly believe that your writers are better than AP writers. They might believe that your site uncovers news that MSNBC.com doesn’t, Unfortunately for you, because it’s all free to this point, they aren’t saying to themselves “wow, the only way I have EVER been able to get this is news is by paying $2.99 a week and now I can get it from Fox for only $ 2 per month. It’s not going to happen. Instead, it will be “I like the NY Post. I love Page Six. But I’m not going to pay to get what I have always gotten online for free. Not going to happen.

So what Fox, and any media conglomerate has to do is find DIGITAL or INCREDIBLY HIGH MARGIN products that have a perceived value to the consumer, that you can bundle with your online content.

Let me give you an example.

You could offer a “Newsjunkies Subscription” that includes:

a. Access to every Newscorp news website from around the world (excluding the wall street journal). From the NYPost to the UK’s Sunday Times, Sun and more.

b. Your choice of any 2 books from our Harpers Collins collection. That’s right. Pick any 2, from our Best Sellers list, or from the special list we have put together specifically for newsjunkies like you. Its your choice if you want them in hardback, paperback or e-book format.

c. A subscription to our news magazine, The Weekly Standard. The choice is yours whether you would like it delivered to your emailbox, printed and mailed to you or both !

d. A $99 credit at a special edition of The Fox Store that we put together exclusively for our News Junkie Subscribers. You can pick from newly released to DVD movies or from our classics. Its up to you !

So to summarize. In addition to Fox websites from around the world, a $ 79 dollar annual value, you get:

2 books from our Harper Collins collection, with a value of up to $79.

a subscription to the Weekly Standard, worth up to $ 64 (in a deal with its new owner)

a special $99 credit at The Fox Store where you can pick from an amazing selection of movies and tv shows.

For a total value of $ 321.

Because our Fox News Junkie Subscribers are critically important to us, we are offering this special package for a limited time only. This amazing package can be yours for the low low price of only…

$ 9.95 per month with a minimum commitment of 15 months !

Add a subscription to the Wall Street Journal Online for $ 5 more per month, or get both the WSJ online and daily delivery to your home for an additional $9.95 per month.

This example should serve to make the point. Its of course stealing a page from the old record and book clubs. Give the subscriber a significant start up value. The hard cost of all the products involved is probably close to $ 100. With some tweaking and limiting of product selection, it can be pushed dramatically lower. The important take away is that you can acquire subscribers for lower marketing costs and probably generate just as much money in margin dollars in the first year as you would selling subscriptions to the NY Post or UK Sunday Times outright.

Of course you could put together movie and tv lovers packages that you use to sell Rotten Tomatoes. You could put together sports lovers packages that you use to sell foxsports.com and other sports related sites.

Once you have the subscriber, the onus is on Fox to keep them happy. It’s really not that hard. This is where you use digital assets with a minimal marginal cost of delivery. You could let movie lovers, as part of their subscription, have a download to own title from a selection that you make available quarterly. You know which titles aren’t making you money on sell through. So why not use them to increase the value of your subscription ? Or given the number of DVD returns that are repackaged and sold at a discount, why not offer them to subscribers first ? “For subscribers only, first crack at our returned DVDs, pick 1 title a month and pay only for shipping and handling. Or if you are really in the mood to watch some great movies, pick any 10 titles for a one time charge of $19.95, plus S&H.

For sports lovers, you could do the same with sports movies. Free Fantasy Sports and other value adds. You could have chats limited to subscribers. Sponsor get togethers with athletes around the country that are limited to subscribers.

Im sure the people at News Corp are a lot more creative than I am.

I don’t know the culture of News Corp. But i can guess with the best of them. At this point, my guess is that everyone who works there is saying. “Yeah, it all sounds great, but you know what the chances of all these divisions working together are ?. They have their own P&L that they are responsible for. They aren’t going to help the internet group sell subscriptions. “ And there in lies the rub.

The challenge to Rupert and company is not whether or not they can charge for their content and make money. That is actually not the hard part. The hard part, as it always is for big, publicly traded conglomerates is to align all of their business units to a common goal. I know they can sell their content if they package it right. I don’t know if they can take care of corporate politics.

And while Im on the topic of Fox/Newscorp, lets jump over to MySpace. Here is my suggestion for MySpace. You have a strong (although appearing to weaken) position in Music. Take a close look at the economics of music and see how you can leverage them to your advantage. In this day and age, it seems like no one makes money from music. In fact, the “pundits” say no one should make money from music. They all should give it away and make their money touring. Well, its not my money, but I think MySpace should spend some money on music. I would take a page from Walmart. Walmart buys exclusives of CDs from artists that fit their target demo (older and still buying CDs). I think they have a deal with Foreigner coming up for their first CD in more than 10 years. They guaranteed them a minimum number of units with no returns (if its like other deals I have read about ). You will only be able to buy the CD from Walmart.

So why wouldn’t MySpace do the same thing with artists that fit their demo ? i don’t know how much money the artists on the Billboard lists will make in a given year from the sale of their music, but they all have a number. I would find out what that number is, and for the artists that match your demo, see if its economically feasible to buy them out for a one time payment and offer their music exclusively on MySpace. Then you can offer a subscription to their music for some number that seems ridiculously low. Say $1.49 per year for all the music the band releases in the year. Since you paid some finite amount (with some probable volume bonuses only if you make money), your mission is to sell enough subscriptions to cover the cost of to the band/label and then some.

At this point, MySpace’s core competency becomes arbitraging its ability to buy and sell music to its user base. The user base thinks they are getting a great deal, and the bands have a source of revenue that they are paid up front. I dont know if it will work, but it is sure worth exploring !

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The slide also puts some round numbers for the first time on how much Microsoft expects to make (and at first lose) via the deal. Microsoft says it will lose money in the first two years of the agreement ($300 million total) and then “start making decent return ($400m steady state).”

Executives have also emphasized the non-monetary challenges the transition will bring. Qi Lu, the president of the online services division, said that there’s a “lot of tight collaborations needed” so that advertisers keep on spending and so that for Yahoo users the transition will be “seamless.”

(Oh, and Ballmer flat-out denied that the company was still interested in buying Yahoo out-right—in case anybody was still wondering: “Are we interested in a full acquisition? The answer is no.”)

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On Sept. 30, Google plans to open its preview of Wave beyond the 6,000 or so software developers who are currently helping to build the service. About 100,000 users will be able to see what Wave is all about.

Google Wave incorporates ideas from email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis and bulletin boards into a single new method of communicating. But we already have email, IM, wikis and the rest, so why do we need one tool that does all of these things? What is new in Google Wave?

Live editing by multiple users

In their first demo of Wave at the Google I/O conference, the project’s lead engineer, Lars Rasmussen, and project manager Stephanie Hannon demonstrated how a conversation that starts out looking like an email, with replies going back and forth, can turn seamlessly into an instant messaging conversation if more than one person has the wave open at the same time.

Actually, the conversation is even more instant than instant messaging. Each key stroke by every participant in the wave is visible to all the others as it occurs. Rasmussen said this would result in faster communication than IM because you wouldn’t be spending half the conversation waiting for the other person to hit “Enter.”

However, he seemed to recognize that not everyone would want to communicate in this way, and said that a wave’s settings could be changed so that messages are only sent after the user hits “Enter.”

This live communication isn’t limited to IM-type conversations. Anything in a wave can be edited by anyone who’s been invited into it, including the original message. In the demo, colour-coded cursors, labelled with their owners’ names, race around a document, all making changes simultaneously.

Playback

You can add people to a wave at any time, in much the same way you can forward an email. But someone coming into a wave after three other people have discussed and collaborated on a document might not see right away how the conversation went.

To address this, each wave has controls to move back and forth through time to see all the changes to the wave in the order they happened. Every wave stores the history of changes that have been made to it, in same the way a page on Wikipedia has a history, making the playback possible.

Drag-and-drop adding of files

Instead of attaching files as you would in an email, you can drag and drop files directly into a wave conversation. Google Wave’s Stephanie Hannon showed how several people could contribute to a group photo album by dragging and dropping the files from the desktop into a wave. (She pointed out that HTML 5 doesn’t yet support this function, and it required a browser plug-in called Gears to work.)

Dropping Word documents, spreadsheets or slide presentations into a wave could make collaborating on a project simpler than email, where tracking different versions of such documents can be challenging.

Embedding

A wave can be embedded on to a blog post (or any web page) in the same way a Google Map can. Changes made to the wave are immediately seen in the embedded version. In this way, a wave can act like a comments section on a blog post or a web-based chat room. A photo gallery created by you and your friends can be posted on your blog for everyone to see.

A sudoku game being played inside Google Wave. (Courtesy Google)

Extensions and applications

Developers can write their own applications that run inside Google Wave, in the same way that third-party applications run inside Facebook. In the demo, Wave’s developers showed how a chess game would unfold inside a wave, complete with the playback feature to show each move in order.

A Sudoku game inside a wave becomes a competition to see who can fill in the most squares correctly. And because the team behind Wave also built Google Maps, they showed off a Maps gadget that allows two or more people to mark locations on the same map at the same time.

Natural language

Lars Rasmussen demonstrated a different kind of spell checking in the demo of Google Wave, one that uses a natural language algorithm to detect misspellings rather than a dictionary. The spell check found the errors in the sentences: “Could I have some been soup? It has bean too long.” The natural language model was built using the entire web as a template, putting the technology behind Google’s search engine to use.

One of the most impressive Wave features that Rasmussen demonstrated was an application called Rosy, which translated his words to French from English as he typed in a wave. A colleague wrote back in French and his words were translated to English for Rasmussen to read.

Open-source protocol

Google Wave isn’t just a Google product. The Wave team has made Wave an open-source protocol so that anyone will be able to set up a wave server. Every wave server would be able to speak to any other, in the same way that you can send email to anyone whether they’re on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or a corporate email server.

Making the project open-source also invites developers to write their own extensions and applications to work inside Wave, and to improve the service itself.

Wave has generated considerable buzz online since its introduction in May. Some tech blogs have declared that Wave will “change everything,” and have heralded the death of email.

Others in the tech world aren’t as enthusiastic. Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, has called Google wave too complex and “anti-web.”

“It violates one principle that I hold so true right now, which is complexity is the enemy in the ethos of the web,” Ozzie said in June at a discussion on cloud computing in Palo Alto, Calif.

Ozzie praised the Google team for taking on such a complex problem. “I love it when people think big,” he said. “But I think the complexity is an issue, and they had no choice because the problem they took on — the way they defined it — is an inherently complex problem.”

Ozzie is biased, of course. He developed Microsoft Groove, an application for collaborative document creation.

But because so few people have seen Wave for themselves, there are many questions still left unanswered. Waves and emails will presumably co-exist for a long time after Wave is finally released to the public, but it’s unclear from the demos how the two systems will interact.

Privacy is also a concern: How will Wave handle the embedding of a private conversation on a public web page? Will every person involved in a wave have to consent to its publication?

And while the group editing of wikis has made sites like Wikipedia possible, they also introduce unique problems. Would Wave introduce Wikipedia-style edit wars to everyday conversations?

We’ll know more when Google rolls out the next wave of Wave later this year.

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Hardest hit will be traditional media such as newspapers, radio, magazines and TV, each falling by 14% or more.

Even the once-indomitable online ad space is faltering, with MAGNA expecting a 2.2% total spending decrease. Other sources vary.

eMarketer projects digital ad spending will grow by 4.5% in 2009, while PricewaterhouseCoopers and Credit Suisse predicted a 4% decline and flat growth, respectively.

MAGNA estimates that direct online media, which includes search, lead generation and Internet yellow pages, will see a 2.9% increase.

National online ads, which encompass display, classifieds, mobile, e-mail and online video, will fall by 15%. Most of the drop will come from a weakening display ad market.

However, mobile and online video are going the other direction—up.

MAGNA projections show mobile advertising revenues growing 36% to $229 million in 2009, and to $409 million in 2011.

Online video ad spending will increase 32% to $699 million in 2009, and over $1 billion in 2011.

Media growth is held in check due to the downturn, but mobile and online video advertising are exceptions to the rule.

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Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 sites in a week in July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5 percent of the time on average, versus a 0.97 percent clickthrough rate for Google visitors and a 1.24 percent clickthrough rate for Yahoo.

One reading of this data is might be that Bing users are more susceptible to ads, and in fact may have used Bing in the first place because of the Bing ads Microsoft is plastering all over the place. (Kinda makes you wonder what will happen when that ad budget goes away).

But a more likely explanation is that Google represents the vast bulk of the traffic, 83 percent to be exact. Bing only represents 8 percent. There is a law of large numbers at work here. The more traffic that comes from any one source (i.e., Google), the lower the clickthrough rate is likely to trend. If the market share was reversed, Bing would undoubtedly have a lower clickthrough rate.

But that still leaves the question of just who are those people on Bing?

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In all four countries studied, making a mobile phone call at least once a day was the norm, however. Frequency was highest in France, where 57% of users called daily. The US was close behind at 52%. Among UK users, texting was even more popular than talking. Users were more likely to use SMS messaging both weekly and daily than they were to make calls. After voice and text, browsing the Internet was the most common daily activity, with 9% of UK users surfing on their handsets every day. More than one in five used the mobile Internet at least weekly. Users were even more likely (38%) to take photos with their phone at least once per week.

When asked about new phone functions they would like to have, US users were most likely to wish for satellite navigation systems.

Friend and family locators were the second choice of users in the US—and in the UK and France. That technology took a backseat to privacy concerns in Germany. “There is no question that the mobile phone is an important tool for daily life for many of the people we surveyed,” said Lightspeed CEO David Day, “and that many people use the additional phone applications such as photos, video, music and the internet.”

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