Search: Video
The Future of Search: Will Fragmented Search Mean Death by a Thousand Shards for GooHoo?
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 18, 2008 | Share This
|
|
So I’m stalking this girl who rejected me in high school and Google just isn’t delivering the detailed, timely information I need to stake out her current place of residence and/or job. What’s a mentally imbalanced loner to do?
This morning my colleague Ruth Nightengale, Vice President of Account Management at Reprise Media, sent me a blog post by Marci Albomer at the New York Times. Well Marci, you’re now on the shortlist to get your own dedicated shrine in my apartment thanks to drawing my attention to pipl.com. Pipl bills itself as “The most comprehensive people search on the web” and claims to trawl the “Deep Web.” The Deep Web is not the part of the web where Foucault discussion groups live (though it can be), rather it’s the equivalent to dark matter on the net, great gobs of unindexed material that the search engines don’t see. You’ve also got to love the testimonial banner on the top of pipl’s homepage. That’s gonna come back to haunt somebody at the trial…
SEO: Does Giving Your Customers a Free Hit of Your Good Stuff Make Them Jones For More? Site Junkies Boost Traffic, Profits and SEO
|
Written By Noah Mallin | June 6, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Yesterday we touched on the importance of making your site habit-forming for search marketing and optimization. One of the many things I learned from watching HBO’s The Wire is that if you give your potential clients a taste of the good stuff they’ll come back for more. Even better, you create converts and we all know how annoyingly persistent they can be about getting others to try something new, whether it be the latest web app, crazy cult religion, or mind altering drug.
Google Wants to Read Images, Video
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 4, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Google patent applications published this week reveal the company’s ambition to “read” images and video - i.e., to recognize and understand text in them. This has obvious implications for video and image search, and significant implications for SEO and web accessibility, as search engines currently rely on oft-insufficient alt text, on-page keyword tags and other surrounding text to make sense (or not) of an image on the web.
Because Google has been taking pictures for the Google Maps Street View feature, an image-text reading capability means it gets closer to its goal of indexing the entire world, which would be a boon for its local search capabilities. Google explains in its application:
Digital images can include a wide variety of content. For example, digital images can illustrate landscapes, people, urban scenes, and other objects. Digital images often include text. Digital images can be captured, for example, using cameras or digital video recorders… Image text (i.e., text in an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, and typeface. Text in a digital image derived, for example, from an urban scene (e.g., a city street scene) often provides information about the displayed scene or location. A typical street scene includes, for example, text as part of street signs, building names, address numbers, and window signs.
The patents also specifically mention indexing images taken in stores and museums (with robots, natch), which again would have a huge impact on local business and also on education. And of course, video search would get infinitely more sophisticated if Google learns to understand text spoken in videos.
One caveat: Information Week notes that Street View privacy issues will get even more complicated. It’s definitely something to be concerned about; though online privacy is really a thing of the past at this point, violations (perceived or real) of offline privacy will really get people up in arms. But it’s a good bet that’s something that will get ironed out if this innovation comes to pass soon, because it would really change search in a huge way.
Blinkx Launches Monetized Video Widget
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 10, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Video search engine Blinkx today launched a new widget called “AdHoc,” which includes contextual text ads not unlike the new YouTube/AdSense video units. However, Blinkx’s system allows users of AdHoc to use any embeddable video available online, not just those on YouTube. From the Blinkx press release:
Based on blinkx’s ground-breaking AdHoc platform, the new widget places unobtrusive, highly-relevant text advertisements against embedded video from popular sharing sites such as YouTube, GoogleVideo and DailyMotion. blinkx will share 50 percent of the revenue generated from the ads with users, and payments will be facilitated through PayPal.
The New York Times explains how it works:
Under Blinkx’s new program, to be formally introduced in London today, Internet video fans can post film clips to their sites and then submit them to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.
Each time the video is watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places — either in a small transparent window at the bottom of the video screen or in a box outside the top of the frame.
Every time an ad is clicked, the host Web site for the video will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies, based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies for each click.
YouTube Gets AdSense
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 1, 2007 | Share This
|
|
According to several sources, YouTube late last week added a customizable, embeddable player that will display AdSense ads. Marketing Pilgrim has more:
Just like the existing customized YouTube players, you can select which channels to show or let Google target the videos based on your site’s content. The ads appear to run at the top of the YouTube player, keeping them in view but not annoyingly so.
However, the custom player page isn’t working right now, there’s no announcement from Google, and there are no reports of these players actually being used - so nothing’s official. Despite that, there is a screenshot of the player and I doubt they’re taking it back, as AdSense in YouTube videos would be a natural follow-up to YouTube’s in-video ads introduced in August and a logical extension of the AdSense model.
Yahoo! hosts U.S. Presidential Debate
|
Written By Mohammad Usman | August 7, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Yahoo! recently announced that it will be hosting its first online
Yahoo! will be hosting the event along with co-sponsors Slate and The Huffington Post.
As Bloomberg reports, these debates signify a turning point for Yahoo!’s online video capabilities. By the end of year, the company plans to completely revamp its offerings, adding music videos, movie trailers, television shows, and sports highlights as well as content created by internet users.
As Mike Folgner, Yahoo’s general manager for video attests,
“One of our strategies is to put video everywhere you are on the Internet…We’re going to build a much better destination for you to access all this different content.”
Given YouTube’s obvious competitive edge in online video, the debates will give Yahoo’s new video services much needed visibility. Perhaps more interesting, however, will be watching if and how the candidates implement online marketing practices to help control the conversation. The speed at which the debate will escalate - both within Yahoo video, and elsewhere - could prove overwhelming for candidates that neglect to properly utilize search and social media marketing.
YouTube Carries More Traffic Than Next 64 Video Sites Combined
|
Written By Drupad Sil | June 28, 2007 | Share This
|
|
In a survey published Wednesday, online audience measurement firm Hitwise Inc. announced that YouTube.com increased its U.S market share of visits by 70% between January and May 2007.
The popular video sharing website has enjoyed dominance of the online video market despite increasing competition, most publicly from MySpace Videos, which recently announced plans to redouble their efforts to compete with YouTube. The survey noted that the traffic to the next 64 largest video sites rose only 8% over the same period
Overall, YouTube commanded 60.2% of the online video market in May, nearly four times that of its nearest competitor, MySpace Videos, which held 16.08%. Rounding out the top five are Google Video, Yahoo Inc., and Microsoft’s MSN, which obtained 7,.81%, 2.77%, and 2.09% of the American audience, respectively
YouTube’s stunning growth in popularity has implications for the search engine and online media industry. Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott summarizes it thusly:
Not only are more individual searches ending up at video sites, but clickstream data shows that more traffic is leaving search engines for video sites … a 300% increase in the amount of traffic leaving search engines and going to video sites in the past year. Clearly optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web.
With Google Inc. having acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in November 2006, the same company now boasts over 50% of the market share in both search and video, showing that the quantity of competition in both fields has a large gap to close in terms of quality.
MySpace TV to focus on professional video content
|
Written By Emily Koh | June 28, 2007 | Share This
|
|
The New York Times reports that MySpace will launch MySpace TV on Thursday. It will operate as an independent website where people can watch and share videos, regardless of whether they have MySpace accounts or not. It will be available immediately in 15 countries and in 7 languages, and videos will be divided up into categories for easy navigation.
Unlike YouTube, which is famous for its archive of home videos, MySpace will focus on providing professional video content. It already got a head start last week offering Sony’s “Minisodes” — five-minute versions of ’80s sitcoms like “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Starsky and Hutch,” and “Charlie’s Angels.” NBC Universal and Fox, both under the News Corp umbrella, have already started talking with MySpace to hammer out a deal that will allow MySpace to feature TV shows or movies from both studios.
MySpace’s hope is that this emphasis on professional material will essentially make it more appealing and “safer” to advertisers than YouTube:
Short ads will appear before clips on the site. Josh Felser, chief executive of the video-sharing site Grouper, which was bought by last fall by Sony, said advertisers clearly preferred such professional content over less predictable user-submitted material.
“Most of the video content today is unsellable,” Mr. Felser said. “We are all in this industry looking at generating inventory that is higher quality.”
MySpace expects that part of the appeal of MySpace TV to studios and professional videomakers will be its aggressiveness in protecting intellectual property. The company was among the first major video sites to use filtering software, which checks uploaded videos to determine if they are protected by copyright. YouTube has also embraced filters, but it is fighting a lawsuit brought by Viacom over past infringement.
“We are sensitive to that issue because we are part of a bigger content company, and protecting intellectual property is part of our bigger business,” Mr. DeWolfe said.
YouTube is well-known for having fought its share of battles regarding copyrighted content being dispersed throughout its site (instigated by the viral popularity of the “Lazy Sunday” clip from NBC’s “Saturday Night Live”). Given YouTube’s notorious legal issues, it’s no surprise to see Myspace using copyright protection as their competitive edge.
Forrester Prediction: Paid Video Downloads are Dead
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 15, 2007 | Share This
|
|
ATTENTION iTUNES - Your market is a dead end! According to a new study from Forrester, paid video downloads will peak in 2007 at $279 million revenue. From here on out, Forrester believes that demand for online video will increasingly favor free, ad supported models. Says Forrester Research Principal Analyst James McQuivey,
“The paid video download market in its current evolutionary state will soon become extinct, despite the fast growth and the millions being spent today. Television and cable networks will shift the bulk of paid downloading to ad-supported streams where they have control of ads and effective audience measurement. The movie studios, whose content only makes up a fraction of today’s paid downloads, will put their weight behind subscription models that imitate premium cable channel services.”
The study goes on to make a number of other provocative implications:
- Apple will have to rethink Apple TV, shifting it from a closed pay-per-view system to an ad-supported, broadband service provider model that puts YouTube videos as well as ABC.com TV shows directly on the TV.
- Television networks will allow ad-supported downlaods of prime-time TV shows
- Satellite and telco service providers will partner with paid video download pioneers to provide video-on-demand content.
- By 2008, more people will be streaming ad-supported TV shows than using DVR
Forrester’s ominous predictions bring to mind some other recent news:
- Joost Attracts More Content Partners, Gets Closer to Public Launch
- Early Apple TV Sales Sluggish
- ABC.com: Streaming Video a Big Success
CBS Buys Wallstrip for $5 Million
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 14, 2007 | Share This
|
|
CBS is rumored to have purchased the popular videoblog Wallstrip for $5 million. From Jossip,
“The Wall Street web video program featuring Lindsay Campbell trying to make the Nasdaq hilarious – is being snapped up by CBS News, we’re told, for something in the $5 million range.”
$5 Million is a pretty high valuation for a site with “mixed revues, dry topics and patchy scripting” - leaving many dubious of either the veracity of the rumors, or the sanity of CBS. Host Lindsay Campbell, a huge part of Wallstrip’s success, could be the driving factor behind that price tag. As TechCrunch reports,
“The deal is said to be focused on signing Lindsay Campbell. CBS was keen to have Campbell on board and a cast iron contract meant that acquiring WallStrip was the only way they could get to her.”
Likewise, Read/Write Web confirms,
“WallStrip host Lindsay Campbell will become the face of CBS’ web video initiative, not unlike what Amanda Congdon, of Rocketboom fame, does for ABC.”
Wallstrip, CBS, and early investor Fred Wilson (said to have been involved in the deal) have all declined to comment.