You might have already seen some of my fellow bloggers talking about this product. So much that I actually avoided posting about it because I felt with my Authority Blogger launch you might have gotten sick of hearing me toot my horn, until Michelle gave me an email bottom-kicking …
So here I am telling you [...]
Hulu had a good 2009, and to celebrate the end of it, the company’s CEO, Jason Kilar, has decided to share some stats.  Here’s a quick hint as to just how successful his organization was: to describe Hulu’s growth, the word "double" often doesn’t cut it.
In a post on the Hulu Blog, Kilar started off by relaying some data from comScore.  It seems that "[m]onthly users of Hulu . . . grew to over 43 million, a 95 percent increase over this time last year."  Also, "[m]onthly streams . . . grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year."
Of course, these trends weren’t without their causes and effects.  Kilar noted that Hulu’s content library has gotten bigger, offering 14,000 hours of content now versus 5,600 hours one year ago.  And while Hulu was in touch with just 166 advertisers at the end of 2008, it’s now doing business with 408 of them.
Then here are some facts about what specific videos people watched.  SNL, Family Guy, The Office, The Simpsons, and Naruto Shippuden were the most popular shows, and SNL‘s "Motherlover" sketch and Family Guy’s "Stew-Roids" installment were the most popular clip and full episode.  Meanwhile, the live stream of Barack Obama’s inauguration was the most-embedded video.
Anyway, Kilar concluded, "On behalf of the Hulu team, thank you for joining us in the adventure that was 2009 and we look forward to even greater heights in 2010."
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Google’s empire hasn’t exactly crumbled, and to be honest, the average person will probably never even realize what’s happened.  But what’s happened is this: for just the second time in its history, Google’s lost a domain name dispute.
Google submitted a complaint about a site called Groovle to the National Arbitration Forum (which ICANN lets decide domain name disputes) on November 6th of this year.  The search giant argued that Groovle is "nearly identical or confusingly similar" to its own name.
Complicating matters is the fact that Groovle markets itself as "your groovy custom search homepage," while noting on every page, "Groovle.com is not owned, operated, or sponsored, or endorsed by Google."
Anyway, a bit of back and forth ensued.  Then the National Arbitration Forum sided with Groovle, and in a document released today, it explained the decision.
"Respondent argues that the disputed domain name is not a misspelling of Complainant’s mark; Respondent asserts that the disputed domain name contains the significant letters ‘r’ and ‘v’ which serve to distinguish the sound, appearance, meaning, and connotation of ‘groovle’ from Complainant’s GOOGLE mark.  Furthermore, Respondent contends that its alterations clearly transform the predominant word of the <groovle.com> domain name to ‘groove’ or ‘groovy,’ not GOOGLE. . . .  The Panel agrees . . ."
This is a blow for Google in a symbolic sense, at least – it’s participated in 65 disputes – even if the development has no measurable effect.
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Facebook – along with a few other social sites and the developers of games for them – may be in for a great few years.  Certain experts believe that the business of virtual goods is going to take off in a big and very profitable way.
Here’s the opening line of a new article from the BBC: "Virtual goods such as weapons or digital bottles of champagne traded in the US could be worth up to $5bn in the next five years . . ."  Which would correspond to a whole lot of nonphysical stuff, if you consider that transaction prices are often in the $1-$2 range.
Still, the BBC interviewed Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Playfish’s Tom Sarris, and a casual gamer on its path to that conclusion.  Plus, there are the recent deals involving Zynga and Playfish to consider ($180 million and $400 million changed hands), along with the fact that Asia’s virtual goods market is already worth around $5 billion.
Toss in Facebook’s semi-sporadic support for its payment system and the new Preferred Developer Consultant Program, and it’s not hard to imagine that a great deal of growth in the virtual goods space is indeed possible.
Sarris addressed critics by saying, "The way we look at it is it’s no different from paying money to go and see a movie or rent a DVD.  What you are paying for is the experience and that notion of entertainment."
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I am going to explain briefly what T3Leads is to people who have never heard of it. T3Leads is a pay per lead affiliate program that deals with the finance niche, such as payday loans, mortgages, etc. Simply put, this pay per lead program will pay you a commission each time someone fills out a form, but T3Leads might reject the lead as a “bad lead“. A good lead will pay you as high as [...]
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Using YouTube may become a much less passive experience in the near future.  Google’s received a patent on a "Web-based system for [the] generation of interactive games based on digital videos," and several facts point to the search giant moving ahead with the idea.
Let’s start with an overview of the patent.  As explained in the official application (hat tip to Erik Sherman), "The present invention includes systems and methods for modifying playback of online hosted videos via interactive annotations, allowing the creation of interactive games."
The application later added, "Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video."
Considering that YouTube can already handle annotations and time markers, this concept would be easy enough to implement.  That’s one possible hurdle down.
Another factor is that interest in "choose your own adventure"-type uses of YouTube is high.  People have been writing about the subject on a regular basis since at least late 2008, meaning YouTube hasn’t prepared to meet a demand that doesn’t exist.
Finally, YouTube filed for the patent on February 19th, and since patent applications can get tied up for years, it’s important that this one isn’t too dusty.
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In what may be a mini ‘bell weather moment’ in advertising, Pepsi has decided to keep its usual Super Bowl advertising money in its bank account. While they are not exactly saving it they are certainly redirecting it to online opportunities. I say this is a potential ‘bell weather’ moment because it ends a streak of 23 consecutive years where Pepsi has advertised during the event that attracts some of the largest viewing audiences in the history of television.
So what is Pepsi saying with this move? It’s more like a question they are asking the NFL and the advertising world that has made such a big fuss over Super Bowl ads for years: Where’s the value? Not to worry about the NFL though because they are still getting Pepsi-bucks……just not in a big chunk for the big game. Compete tells a little more
Pepsi is already a large sponsor of the NFL, having paid millions back in 2002 to replace Coke for the title of the official soft drink of the NFL. The company also sponsors Rookie of the Week section on NFL.com.
So the big moment is more about the how Pepsi is deciding to spend its money rather than with whom. The NFL is a marketing juggernaut (I had to use that word before the close of 2009) and will remain so. Even the NFL though is going to have to adjust to the dollars that are moving online that once fueled the just as important Super Bowl activity of watching and rating the advertisements. If last year was any indication that ‘pastime’ may be on the decline as well as many companies didn’t even create specific ads for the big game but simply rehashed old ones. Kinda takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?
So why is Pepsi seeing the online space as the way to go? Compete shows a little data below that may become the new version of the old ‘Pepsi Taste Challenge”.
Even more interesting are the differences in competitive share of visitors to Pepsi and Coke sites between control and exposed consumers. Among the control group, Pepsi captures only 16% of visitors versus a lion’s share of 84% for Coke. However, the numbers are completely reversed among the exposed group.
So what is your thought about the days of the big Super Bowl advertising buys and the excitement around the creativity of the ads? Are the days of Super Bowl ads being a huge deal going the same way as my NY Giants (meaning directly south and in the toilet)?
Your thoughts?
A couple of the mysteries surrounding the forthcoming Nexus One/Google phone may have been solved.  Information related to the price of the phone and its plan has leaked, and assuming the details are accurate, the device should line up pretty well with the existing marketplace.
Here’s the bad news: rumors that Google would offer a cheap or free phone weren’t confirmed.  The standard monthly fee doesn’t look like it will be trivial, either, meaning the Nexus One may not be as revolutionary as many people expected.
Instead, according to Jason Chen, consumers will be asked to pay $179.99 for the Nexus One if they lock into a two-year contract with T-Mobile for $79.99 per month.  Or they can choose their own service provider, but they’ll have to fork over $529.99 for an unlocked phone.
Still, these prices aren’t so high that ordinary people wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the Nexus One.  Indeed, the T-Mobile prices should make the Nexus One competitive with the iPhone, so if the hardware measures up, Apple may find itself with a serious rival.
Hopefully we’ll get firm numbers and a much more solid idea of the Nexus One’s capabilities on Tuesday at the Android press gathering.
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While most of us in the Internet marketing “industry” were all aghast at the Facebook privacy problem of ’09, the rest of the world could have cared less. You know those people, right? The ones who don’t live and breathe this stuff to the point that all perspective is lost? These are the ‘everyday’ Facebook users who don’t give a rip about Mark Zuckerberg and the continued search for 7,000 people who care enough to impact any policy changes with the social media giant. 
So those regular folks pushed Facebook to a point where it had never been before: the number one site during the Christmas holiday. ReadWriteWeb tells us
Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples’ Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today.
Makes sense doesn’t it? Personally I was more prone to using Skype rather than updating everyone but that is certainly a personal preference.
So while the site finished third for the year behind Google and Yahoo Mail it was certainly a milestone to be seen as the Christmas site of choice. Last year Facebook finished second in this contest to Google but was able to flip positions this year.
See what a year of gigantic growth can do for you? Wonder if Santa will be as nice to Facebook next year after the rest of the world catches on that their “goings on” at Facebook aren’t as private as they used to be?
Content duplication has been a buzz topic in SEO for a while now. You can read about it til you puke and never have to leave WebProNews.com. It’s one of the modern webmaster’s favorite things to fret over and has been for at least two years.
Google doesn’t like duplicate content.  We all get that now.  There is still the lingering perception that there is some sort of duplicate content penalty despite repeated assurances from multiple Googlers to the contrary.  Maybe there is no penalty; maybe there is some sort of mechanism at work that webmasters perceive as a penalty… it really matters very little.  At the end of the day, if you aren’t showing up for your own content but somebody else is… you probably aren’t the happiest little webmaster.
As a result, syndication has been quite unfairly vilified.  Traditionally speaking, having a site link to your content has always been perceived as a compliment of sorts (Google certainly thought it was a fair indicator of quality). That said, syndicating content… having your great content actually picked up by a larger, more influential site was even better in a lot of ways.  The syndicated content was put right in front of a whole new user base without them having to click a thing.  Generally you also got a nice link back to your site to boot. If you produced a great piece of content, why not have it show up everywhere you possibly could?
Penalty or not, it is clearly the case that the site where content originates may not always rank best for that content.  Google wants to do their best to make sure they keep the content of their results pages as distinct from one another as they can. In short, Google doesn’t want to have a result page where 4 of the 10 results are all essentially the exact same article.
Here’s the thing though syndication is good.  It can drive traffic to your site.  It can establish your reputation and credibility within a niche and it can generate high quality inbound links.  If you are upset because the larger, more recognized and more popular site’s syndication of your content outranks your own then I’d have to say you might need to rethink that one a little bit.  So what if it does? You are there because you want to be exposed to the larger site’s community.  You want the links, attention, reputation and all the good things that go along with that don’t you?  Of course you do.  So if you do a search and find that the big site is number one on a good search query with your content, you don’t get upset – you say ‘yay’.
Why do you say yay? Because your super great content would never have that top position if not for the fact that Google found it on the larger more authoritative site. Sure, if it’s that good you can probably get a decent ranking but it won’t be as good.  Beyond the ranking, even if your site is #2 and the big site is #3 for the same article, guess which one is likely to get clicked thru more; the link to your site, which is not all that well known? Or the link to a site that somebody has heard of?
If you aren’t a household name or a recognized authority in whatever areas you are covering, the fastest way to build that reputation and credibility is to become associated with the brand that is. What’s the best way to do that? Get your name, your company and your link on their domain. Because at the end of the day the likelihood of you just outranking them on your own for similar subject matter is probably going to be a tough order.
Abby Johnson talked to Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting at SES recently about the syndication vs. duplicate content problem.  Eric has some great tips in the video for minimizing the negative aspects of duplication on a syndication model.  Three specific items he talks about are syndicating excerpts, including a no-index tag, and writing ‘alternative’ versions of your content expressly for syndication.  He also talks about how effective a syndication model can be.  One site he’d worked with increased their traffic by over 50% using syndication almost exclusively. 
Google is also working on some stuff to help us help them (isn’t that just awesome of them?).  Read up on their new cross domain canonical tag.  It’s new, none of the other search engines support it yet, and it remains to be seen how effective it will be, but it’s a start.  Whatever you do, don’t throw the proverbial baby (syndication) out with the bathwater (duplicated content worries). There is a lot of upside to an effective syndication strategy.
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