Archive for December 28th, 2006
If it’s not blatantly obvious already, Mark Cuban is not a YouTube fan. But in this case, I think he has a point. Cuban breaks down the list of the top 20 videos in December and discovers that most clips are commercials and fake porn. What’s fake porn, you ask? It’s a headline and thumbnail that promises nude video of, say, Britney Spears but turns out to be a cat with the message, “Excuse me, WTF R U doin?” Between the commercials (which he defines broadly, like clips from SNL and Letterman) and the fake porn, Cuban found just 3 user-generated clips out of the top 20. “Could it be that Gootube will fade?” he asks. Unlikely, but he raises some interesting questions. If YouTube begins to delete the fake porn, are they going astray of Safe Harbor laws? What really qualifies as a video view if people are bailing out of a clip a second after it plays? Will fake porn discourage major content providers from partnering with YouTube? All worthy questions, although I’ll remind folks that the vast majority of YouTube’s traffic is not from the few “most popular” hits but the long tail of video that people are uploading and sharing with their friends. Plus, the home page is still hand-selected and largely user-created. Cuban adds in comments below, in part: “What I tried to do is look at it from a business perspective. YouTube can’t subsidize bandwidth forever. If it’s merely a hosting service for the LongTail, then they are going to have a huge bandwidth bill. How are they going to pay for it?”
December 28th, 2006
VentureWire reports Digg has raised another $8.5 million in funding from previous investors, Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network, which is run by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. “A lot of where this is going is increasing our development team and focusing on the features our users are telling us to add,” said Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson in an interview. “Our board and investors did not want us to focus, at any time, on monetization at this stage. Our focus has been on user growth.” Greylock investor David Sze says it’s unlikely Digg will be sold anytime soon as they’re looking at partnering with sites interested in integrating Digg’s functionality. (Via PaidContent)
December 28th, 2006
Earlier this year, Google rolled out click-to-play video ad units as part of its AdWords network (demo here). Now Google is testing in-stream video ads, a sort of video AdSense for content publishers. Here’s how it would work: Publishers upload video to Google Video, embed the players on their own sites and the Google-powered ads are embedded in the streams (currently as post-rolls). The revenue is then split. Google has been testing the in-stream ads on Beet.TV (although I didn’t see them when I checked today) and also working with MTV. Add YouTube to this equation and you have a massive network of video blogs that are shooting, posting and embedding video content, a market ripe for video advertising.
December 28th, 2006
You’d need a lot of diamonds to afford the rights to the diamond.com name. According to DNjournal, it sold for $7.5 million this past year, making it the highest amount paid for a URL in 2006. Vodka.com, which resolves to Russian Standard vokda’s site, sold for $3 million, (a heck of a lot of money for a redirect, no?). Other big ticket names were used for annoying Google-ads-only sites: Cameras.com snapped up $1.5 million, and the $500,000 sites wrestling.com, bike.com and blue.com are just traps for searchers. Also going for a half-mil was gays.com which looks to be under construction. And this note: typosquatting was big business, too, with mortage.com requiring a mortgage-like $242,000 and forclosures.com getting $150,000. Memo to Cory: Must purchase lostremoat.com, lostreemote and lostreemotez in 2007. (Via Freakonomics Blog)
December 28th, 2006
CBS did not break into its regular programming to announce the death of President Ford on Tuesday. The news came late on the East Coast and during prime time on the West Coast. CBS went with a crawl announcing the news rather than a full-on special report. ABC and NBC ran special reports. Katie Couric is on an overseas vacation, but CBS says she is coming home to anchor the news and for any upcoming Ford coverage, possibly starting Friday. CBS’s choice reflects recent decisions by the networks to steer away from news during programming and leave it to the news channels.
December 28th, 2006
MSNBC.com has put together a year-in-review section that includes some of the best video from 2006. According to a MSNBC source, the vids are streaming in excellent numbers: 1.5 million in the first week of the section, and that’s during a slow work week when not as many people are going online. What I like about this stat is how MSNBC.com went to the well to find a creative way to use its existing material. Most stations do year-enders on-air. It makes sense to highlight those online, and even do a few different ones. Just put up the top videos from the year, and you’ll see a bump.
December 28th, 2006
