YouTube Monetization: Let Users Sell Ads

Partner Program not working out? NewTeeVee reports that YouTube will begin allowing content creators to sell their own ads, with the Google-owned video property taking a cut. The YouTube Partner Program, which gives top producers on the site a slice of ad revenue, opened to all last December. Now, at least one major content creator — Revision3 — is already handling some of their own ad inventory on YouTube, according to Advertising Age, and the plan is apparently to extend that option to other top producers.

In April, Google CEO Eric Schmidt promised new ways to monetize YouTube. “We believe the best products are coming out this year,” he said. “And they’re new products. They’re not announced. They’re not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying.” Is letting users sell their own ad inventory the first of those new advertising products?

Monetizing YouTube, which dominates the online video space more completely than Google dominates search, has become a main priority for Google this year. Estimates on YouTube’s revenues for 2008 range from $70 million to $200 million. Even on the high end that’s just 1% of Google’s yearly revenue.

Earlier this year, Google launched a free viewer analytics program for YouTube content creators, which should be helpful in selling their own inventory.

When Google launched video ads last August, we predicted that “AdSense for Video” was inevitable. “Google can offer two things to advertisers: a huge pre-built distribution network (via YouTube), and sophisticated bidding and campaign tracking tools (via AdSense),” we wrote. “For publishers, Google can offer a sophisticated monetization strategy, and they can also offer hosting (though they need to offer a non-gallery option — i.e., videos that are hosted by YouTube, but not displayed on YouTube.com).”

The Partner Program was halfway there, and letting content creators sell their own ad inventory is one step closer. The next step would be letting producers manage their own Google handled inventory.

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out

Earlier today we covered a mobile social network called Buzzd, which will be featured at the music festival Bonnaroo. In this post we outline 10 mobile social networks to keep your eye on. It’s a developing field - and there are issues such as hardware compatibility to overcome - but we expect some of these services to make a big impact in the next year or two. Because, as Sarah Perez recently noted, with 975 million Mobile Web users expected by 2012, this is a potentially very lucrative market.

Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We’ve written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go…

If you enjoy this post, please digg it by clicking here

Dada

hspace="5" vspace="5" width="154" height="46" />Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal
blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other
local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used
on both PC and mobile and dada.net is its portal
destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life
(personal space and social networking), and Mobile
Entertainment.

See: Dada Leads Mobile Social Networking Charge

Strands

align="right" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="120" height="227" />Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers,
bars, clubs and DJs). Strands’ mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.

See: MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds

Itsmy

The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be
MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and
E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users
with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently,
itsmy announced they’ve now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one
for each of its top 10% of content uploading customers.

See: itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting

Frengo

In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company’s social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

See: Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit

Twango

hspace="5" vspace="5" width="137" height="45" />In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January ‘07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.

See: Nokia Acquires Media Sharing Startup Twango

Shozu

Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc…"

The final 4 services are from Corvida’s post on ReadWriteWeb entitled: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Brightkite

We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.

Zyb

Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts only more mobile.

Groovr

Groovr is your mobile network’s night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr’s got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can’t we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city’s Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here’s a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:

Fon11

Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we’ve been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.

We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.

See also: Mobile Web Trends & Products, March ‘08 Update

Bonnaroo Mobile: Buzzd Brings Mobile Social Networking to Music Festival

Back in February we reported that Buzzd, a Mobile Web social networking service used at bars, clubs and restaurants, had won a bunch of awards at the MobileMonday Peer Awards. We noted that Buzzd is a great example of how location-based services will be the killer app for the Mobile Web. Today Buzzd announced that their service is being white labeled for the music and arts festival Bonnaroo, in a feature labeled ‘Bonnaroo Mobile’.

Festival goers with mobile phones will be able to keep in touch with their friends, sign up for alerts, access performance schedules for specific artists, ‘buzz’ people with showtimes, give real time reviews of the music, and report on what is happening across the venue.

Buzzd is one of an emerging breed of mobile apps, that basically enables real-time social networking using phones. Apart from powering Bonnaroo Mobile, Buzzd allows people to use their mobile phones to find an event near where they are, then buzz their friends to meet them there. It operates under the catchphrase: "Your city, in real time".

80,000 people are expected at Bonnaroo, and the festival features some awesome music artists - such as The Raconteurs, Kanye West, Pearl Jam, Jack Johnson and many more. According to Buzzd CEO Nihal Mehta, Buzzd at Bonnaroo will bring "user-generated real-time updates" to music festivals for the first time. Bonnaroo Mobile will be accessible through the Mobile Web browser of consumers’ handsets, as well as SMS. It is a free service at Bonnaroo and the company says it will work "across all cellular carriers".

The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is described on its website as "a four-day, multi-stage camping festival", being held on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, on 12-15 June.

Other than Buzzd, there are a number of interesting Web-media things happening at Bonnaroo. Some examples: Bonnaroo Radio channel is a radio station for the festival, powered by Microsoft’s Flash-like technology Silverlight; Nokia and film-maker Spike Lee are creating a "massively collaborative film", which will have a presence at Bonnaroo; FM Publishing (which provides adverts for ReadWriteWeb and other blogs), has created a "collective, crowdsourced media campfire of sorts" called CrowdFire.

Update: Social Media platform KickApps sent us a note to say that they are powering the online community and media management system for Bonnaroo.com.

Are any RWW readers going to Bonnaroo? If so please leave a comment telling us what you’re looking forward to experiencing - especially if it’s Web-based!

See also: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Watch, Listen & Read Live Coverage of WWDC08

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference will be a attracting a lot of buzz tomorrow. Anticipation will be high and even Twitter is preparing for a lot of traffic. For those that can’t make it, scrambling from site to site and refreshing Google Reader 20 times a minute isn’t the best way to keep up with the news. So here’s a list of sites and services where you can find live coverage of the keynote tomorrow.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed has 3 room so far that will participating in live coverage of the WWDC keynote tomorrow:

• The ‘Official’ WWDC room
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) room
• VentureBeat WWDC Livestream

Twitter

If Twitter manages to stay afloat throughout the Keynote you can use this summize keyword search for WWDC or follow these Twitter users for coverage:

• http://twitter.com/macrumors Live keynote updates (10-20 updates per Keynote)
• http://twitter.com/arnoldkim
• http://twitter.com/appletell
• http://twitter.com/AppleLive
• http://twitter.com/wwdc2008
• http://twitter.com/iPhoneAlley

Sites

There will be plenty of sites hosting live coverage of the WWDC keynote. Here are a few recommended sites:

• MacRumorsLive
• TWiT Live
• Appletell
• AppleLive
• iPhone Alley
• Techmeme

Will You Be Covering Live?

So far, this is a nice list of sites and services where you can find a multitude of WWDC keynote coverage. Did we miss anyone? If you know of a site, FriendFeed room, or twitter user that’s not on the list, just leave us a note in the comments section.

iSofa.tv - Next Generation TV or Youtube Alternative?

Online video sites are cropping up all over the web. Yet the majority seem to be Youtube copycats in one way or another. Innovation is low and the space is becoming crowded. iSofa.tv is a new online video service that has a great concept and visual interface. Here’s a better look at the service to see whether it has what it takes or if it’s just another Youtube clone.

The Good

The Portuguese online video service lets you watch internet videos the same way you’d watch TV. Upon visiting the site, an introduction video will immediately play. The video introduces the service and provides you with information on how to navigate. While you’d normally “surf” for something to watch on TV, iSofa.tv relies on search. Simply enter a keyword or the title of a movie and iSofa.tv will show all the results in a small navigation bar. The navigation menu features basic controls for moving between videos, adjusting the volume, playing and pausing, and a few other miscellaneous controls. You can scroll through video thumbnails and clicking a video will allow you to see it. Videos are played at maximum browser resolution, though there is an option to view in fullscreen mode. Each video contains a small pop-up description and you can email or bookmark videos.

The Bad

While the site concept is great, there are numerous quirks I experienced with the service. If you have a wide-screen monitor, the full browser viewing experience is noticeably bad. The videos were blurry but not choppy. The stretching of the pixels to accommodate my wide-screen monitor only made the viewing experience worse. Personally, the videos weren’t much better than your average Youtube video. Also, much of the site is in Portuguese and while the service is still in beta, there were features available that didn’t work.

Suggested Improvements

So far, the site has a very slick and simple UI design. The navigation menu was fully functional and my search results were accurate for the keywords that I used. Beyond this, iSofa.tv has a lot of work to do. Video quality needs to be much better if they’re expecting this to replace my TV. Also, the majority of the videos I watched were clips and trailers. If they could make some deals and incorporate a catalog of movies it could help the service stand out more. For now, it’s just another alternative to Youtube.

What’s the Biggest Rails App? It Doesn’t Matter

Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, “But are there any big applications built on Rails?” The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year, there’s no doubt that if there is a poster child for Rails, it is now Twitter. With such notorious bouts of downtime, a worse poster child Rails could not possibly hope for. But is Twitter even the largest application out there running on Rails? Does it even matter?

“Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter [to explain downtime],” wrote Nik Cubrilovic in a recent post on TechCrunch calling out Rails as a poor choice for large scale app development. The debates over what causes Twitter’s frequent outages (we think it’s a database issue) and whether Rails is good for large apps aside, Twitter might not actually be the biggest Rails-based app out there anymore.

Some back of the napkin math by noted rails developer Evan Weaver (who recently went to work for Twitter), finds that while Twitter might be huge in terms of monthly pageviews, the Facebook app Friends for Sale, may still be bigger. And Yellopages and Scribd are similarly massive.

Ignoring the oddities in Weaver’s computation (like, for example, that even though he works at Twitter he only guesses how much traffic the API is fielding), which he admits result in “wildly inaccurate values,” he makes one very good final point: It doesn’t matter!

“It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is. It doesn’t even make sense to say ‘Rails site’ or ‘PHP site,’” says Weaver. “Livejournal uses Perl, Memcached, and MySQL, among other things. Does that make it a Perl site, a MySQL site, or a C site? I don’t know what Scribd uses, but it’s pretty likely that their document pre-renderer is Java or C, not Ruby. Friends for Sale uses Nginx, Rails, Memcached, MySQL, and Linux. Ruby is really just a little piece of the pie.”

When User-Generated Content Goes Bad

Viral marketing, user-generated content, online buzz: over the past few years, these terms have been representative of a new way of marketing to consumers that takes advantage of the current popularity of the social web. This new technique involves companies encouraging its customers to create content of their own in order to generate interest in the company’s brand. Unfortunately, one of the potential side effects of this strategy is the potential for negative buzz. Despite this fact, a surprisingly low percentage of marketers are monitoring for negative responses.

Users Make UGC, But Few Marketers Monitor It

A Jupiter Research report on this subject analyzes the risks of negative buzz. The report is entitled "When Good Social Marketing Goes Bad," but it should be noted that most people use the term "social marketing" to apply to campaigns that mean to bring about social change. The Jupiter report, however, uses the term more casually to mean any marketing campaign that relies on user-generated content of a viral nature.

What they discovered was that although marketers have been quick to embrace this new trend - 35% allow for user-generated content (UGC) on their own web site and 21% have a profile on a social network - they have not been as quick to monitor and combat the negative buzz that some of their consumers will create.

In fact, only 29% of marketers using these techniques are monitoring the online discussions about their products on an ongoing basis and a shocking 17% don’t monitor online discussions at all. Also, despite the availability of professional "buzz monitoring" services like Nielsen BuzzMetrics or MotiveQuest, only 8% of marketers used these services in 2007.

Who’s Talking Trash?

The Jupiter report was also able to build a profile of the typical creator of negative user-generated content. This person is usually a heavy user of social networks, predominantly male (60% are male) and into technology (40% are influential in this area and 23% are considered "early adopters"). They are also a potential valuable audience for marketers as 49% tend to act as brand advocates - which means they tend to be vocal influencers who spread the word online.

How to Fight the Negative Buzz

Before trying to combat the negative buzz, the first thought needs to be whether or not it’s worth the effort. Often, marketers will attempt to offer these negative UGC creators special treatment or invite them to be beta testers in order to keep the feedback private and productive. However, these tactics are not always practical and they don’t always work, either.

A marketer must be aware of how far and fast their company will go to fix a legitimate complaint and also how likely the complainer is to adjust their response. Keeping in mind that research shows that only 12% of online adults think UGC like those posted on social networks or message boards is "trustworthy," going to great lengths to quiet the naysayers is not always worth the effort.

Of course, sometimes it is worth the effort, which is why the most important thing for a marketer to determine is whether or not the negative content is created by someone who just wants to take a cheap shot at the company, or whether it actually offers genuine insight into a product or service’s failure. If so, then addressing those persons that created the negative UGC makes sense. Then, it can actually be helpful to engage those people openly in the public forum to show the company is listening to valid complaints and responding. That is a difficult choice to make for a company, as it only takes one loud negative voice to affect an influence on the larger group of the company’s customers. However, when done well, this type of response can be a benefit to all.

Conclusion

Lately we’ve seen a lot of companies attempting to combat negative online buzz in new ways - Comcast has been monitoring blogs and social networks for mentions of their company, Digg is now holding online townhalls, and many other companies are offering customer service via Twitter. We’ve also seen the potential volatile situation that can occur when one disgruntled customer’s voice can attract the attention of the whole crowd, as in the situation with Ariel Waldman’s complaint against Twitter. Even she admits on her blog that she never meant "…to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter’s door," yet that is the power of even one complaint.

An old adage in advertising and marketing is that "a satisfied customer will, on average, tell five people, but a dissatisfied customer will tell everyone they know." For a company to be successful, especially now when the tools for communication are being intentionally placed in the customers’ hands, it is more important than ever to know how to analyze, monitor, and respond to negative online buzz.

Photo Credits: Angry Latte by ChrisB in SEA;
Attack of The Amancay by Amanky

Why Google is Wooing Web Developers

Google I/O is the first event for web developers that Google has run. It happens later this week on 28/29 May and Google is expecting 2,500 people to attend. The I/O stands for “Innovation/Open” (i/o is also a programmer term input/output).

Recently I spoke with Tom Stocky, a Director of Product Management at Google, to discuss Google’s sudden interest in web developers.

Google and the Browser

Stocky told me that we’re at an “inflection point for web app development” and that Google is all about “driving usage of the Internet”. He said that the Web is now the defacto platform for application development.

To follow up on that, I asked whether the browser is still the key platform for Google. He replied that the main client for web open standards such as HTML, CSS, Javascript etc is the browser - therefore Google continues to support the browser.

But more than that, Google intends to make that client (the browser) more powerful. They also want to make the cloud (the Internet) more accessible.

Furthermore, Stocky sees the browser as being a key part of the Mobile Web going forward.

Google and RIAs

I asked what Google thinks of RIA (rich internet applications) that are run outside the browser. In particular I mentioned that Microsoft and Adobe are both pushing apps outside the browser, using their RIA platforms. Stocky replied that typically companies sell the underlying proprietary platform and then try to get developers to build on top of that (he didn’t specifically mention them, but he’s obviously referring to MS and Adobe). However, he said, Google’s mission is to build on top of the open web platform.

Stocky said that Google not only aims to build on the open Web platform, but actively improve it. He referred to recent Google releases like Google App Engine (a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure) and Google Gears (a browser plug-in which enables people to use web apps while offline).

Why the Sudden Interest in Developers?

I asked Stocky why has Google decided that now is the right time to get web developers behind them? I didn’t mention it, but I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Google’s outreach to developers has happened at about the same time that tech blogs like ReadWriteWeb have gotten access to Google PR and product teams. In other words, up till this year developers and bloggers alike have been subject to a Steve Jobs-like veil of secrecy over the inner workings of Google.

Stocky told me that it’s been an evolutionary thing. 2-3 years ago, he said, Google had just a couple of APIs. So there wasn’t much to engage developers with at that time. Now in 2008 they have 40+ APIs and Google has “realised the benefits of investing in the open web platform”. He also admitted that one of those benefits is that it enhances Google’s revenue.

So web developers (and bloggers) are getting a more open, remixable Google in 2008. That’s great to see - and we can only wish that a certain Cupertino-based company follows that precedent!

Web Developers, Web Developers, Web Developers!

I did my best to entice a Steve Ballmer-like chant of “Web Developers, Web Developers, Web Developers” out of Tom Stocky, but the best he would give me was: “Google is native to the Web”

What do you think of the new open(ish) Google? And let us know in the comments if you’re attending Google I/O and if so what do you expect to get out of it.

Related: ReadWriteTalk did a podcast with Tom Stocky in April.

Results: Data Portability’s Future

A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.

Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.

To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone’s guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.

The Results

A reminder that the ‘opinion’ category is what you hope will happen and ‘prediction’ is what you think will happen.

Two points were consistent with our expectations:

• The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won’t.
• The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.

One result that surprised us was that many people didn’t expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.

For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina’s post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure’s response.

What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?

Semantic Tagging with Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool that offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, and Diigo do not - semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

About Faviki

Faviki’s backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).

This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it’s simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.

Using Faviki

Despite Faviki’s lofty goals, it’s just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site’s tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.

A Search on Faviki

Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link-  that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it’s also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.

What Problem Faviki Solves

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.

If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

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