Apr 13, 2009 at 1:21pm ET by Barry Schwartz

PC World reports Google has disabled the ability for users to upload videos or comment on videos at YouTube Korea. Google made this move after South Korea passed a new law that requires sites with 100,000 unique visitors per day to require users to provide their real name and national ID card number before posting such videos and comments. Google still allows videos to be uploaded and comments to be added while in Korea, as long as you change the YouTube Korea site to a non-Korean version, within the YouTube settings section. This is Google's way of "skirting around" the new law. YouTube [...]

Google To Create “Hulu” For Music Video, Moves Toward Inclusion Of More Professional Content On YouTube

Apr 10, 2009 at 7:12am ET by Greg Sterling

YouTube spawned Hulu and Hulu is having a big influence on the future of YouTube. Hulu has had great success with brand advertisers, while YouTube has struggled to sell itself to brands despite being the dominant video site online (see chart below). Accordingly, last month ClickZ reported that YouTube was getting a Hulu-like makeover that would better showcase some of the professionally produced TV and film content YouTube has been working to acquire: The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from [...]

Google Slowly Turning YouTube Into A Moneymaker

Apr 9, 2009 at 1:34pm ET by Matt McGee

There are signs this week that Google is slowly turning YouTube into a legitimate source of revenue, but there are also questions whether that's happening quickly enough and if the revenue will ever become a profit. Let's start with an AdAge article that reports YouTube is selling ads on about 9% of its video views -- up from 6% a year ago. A slow increase for sure, but with comScore estimating YouTube showed 5.3 billion videos in February, it means YouTube is selling ads on almost 500 million video views. According to AdAge, that's more videos than its nearest competitor has total views. [...]

Google Employee Alleged To Have Bypassed AdWords Trademark Policy For Own Benefit

Apr 8, 2009 at 3:01pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Well-known internet marketer Jeremy "ShoeMoney" Schoemaker has filed suit against Keyen Farrell, apparently a Google employee alleged to have used Schoemaker's US-registered trademark in search ads on Google. While issues over trademarks in search ads are heating up, the bigger issue in the case is why Google itself didn't take action to stop the ads and whether an employee did indeed access Schoemaker's AdWords account to gain competitive data. Google's trademark policy allows for trademarks to "trigger" ads -- make ads appear when a trademark word is involved in a search query -- [...]

Google “TV Ads Online” Dangles Multi-Platform Lure For Brand Advertisers

Mar 27, 2009 at 10:01am ET by Greg Sterling

It's now a cliche to point out that consumer audiences have fragmented. However, once mighty media have seen audiences dwindle over the past five or so years. Accordingly almost all traditional media are struggling, exacerbated by the recession to be sure but caused by the rise of the internet (mobile will fragment audiences further). Many advertising sales channels are trying to respond to the audience fragmentation issue with network and/or multi-platform strategies. Call it an effort to put "Humpty Dumpty back together again." Google for its part had once seen itself as a kind of medi [...]

Hitwise: Visits To Gmail Surpass YouTube

Mar 11, 2009 at 7:11am ET by Greg Sterling

Hitwise reported that "for the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube." Accordingly, the measurement firm says that Gmail is now second only to Google.com in terms of visits among Google's properties. Gmail has recently had a number of problems, with several outages and problems of varying degrees of severity. I wonder if there's a relationship between the growth of Gmail and these problems. As they say correlation doesn't equal causation, but it would make sense. I took a look at Compete and Google trends comparing traffic [...]

Google Brings Back Video & Drops Shopping From Top Navigation

Feb 20, 2009 at 11:07am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has dropped the "Shopping" link from the main top navigation on Google.com and replaced it with a "Video" link. What is the big deal? Well, in November 2007, Google did the exact reverse. They dropped the video link for products to replace it. Then Google renamed products to shopping but that link remained at the top. Google has now brought back the video link, which has recently dropped the top viewed, top blogged and so on features from the home page of Google Video. We know Google Video also stopped allowing uploading directly to Google Video, so one may have thought Google w [...]

Judgment Day For Four Google Execs In Italian Court

Feb 3, 2009 at 9:29am ET by Barry Schwartz

Today is judgment day for the four Google executives charged by Italian prosecutors in June 2008. The New York Times blog reports a trial against them involving criminal charges of defamation and privacy violation begins this week in Milan. Like we reported in the past, the case is about a video uploaded to YouTube where a disabled child is being taunted. This case was supposed to go to trial in September, but did not actually happen until today. The four executives include David Drummond, Google’s senior vice president and chief legal officer; George Reyes, its former chief financial o [...]

400,000 Google Video Searches Are Polluted: Report

Feb 2, 2009 at 2:55pm ET by Matt McGee

400,000 search queries on Google Video lead to poisoned results and may lead users to download malicious software. That's according to a Trend Micro blog post this weekend reported today by The Register. Trend Micro believes this "blackhat SEO poisoning" comes from a group that maintains multiple domains with "keyword-riddled pages" that often appear on top of the search results. When users click through to one of these domains, the problems begin: "... instead of legitimate videos researchers found some 400,000 queries returning video results that have a single redirection point, and on [...]

YouTube Searchers: It’s All About The Music

Jan 29, 2009 at 2:22pm ET by Matt McGee

You can learn a lot about a web site by peeking below the hood of its internal site search. And, based on Hitwise data out today, YouTube is a surrogate music video search engine. Hitwise research suggests that 72% of the site's Top 50 search terms from December 2008 are music-related -- from L'il Wayne to Beyoncé, to song titles like "Womanizer" and "Heartless." That YouTube leans heavy toward music shouldn't be a surprise. Universal Music's channel is the most popular on the site, with 3.3 billion views, and seven of the top ten channels are music-related. We've reported previously t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video

Google Ends Google Video Uploads, Shutters Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball & Jaiku

Jan 14, 2009 at 9:41pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Google's announced they're closing or ceasing development of a variety of products as part of an already continuing move to keep efforts focused on other products with greater usage. These include an end to video uploads to Google Video, closure of Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball, the microblogging service Jaiku and the Google Mashup Editor. Google's written officially about the closures and changes in these posts: Turning Down Uploads at Google Video Farewell, Google Catalog Search Stopping development on Google Notebook Changes for Jaiku and Farewell [...]

Want To Rank Tops In Google? Do YouTube Videos, Stupid!

Jan 9, 2009 at 11:26am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Forrester Blog published a small but interesting study on how you can improve your chances, by 50 times, of showing up at the top of the Google search results. Their tip? Utilize Google's Universal Search by creating videos. Not only does Forrester share statistics and analysis on how to improve your odds with videos, but they also share tips on how to improve your video's chance at being the top video in Google web search. Let's first discuss the odds. The blog post showed that a video has a "11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results." If you compare that to [...]

Online Video Tactics For Small Businesses

Dec 18, 2008 at 8:15am ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Online video has been explored as marketing tool by large companies, and as a buzz-builder for content producers of all sizes. But what about small businesses: can they jump into the fray and get noticed by video audiences? The short answer is yes. Let's look at some formats and how they can fit into your small business marketing plans. Behind-the-scenes videos The concept here is that people will be curious about topics that are related to your business, and that you can leverage their curiosity to inform them about your business. You're basically playing the role of a Discovery Chann [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video | Video Search

Google Maps Integrates YouTube Videos

Dec 16, 2008 at 8:26pm ET by Greg Sterling

No surprise here: Google Blogoscoped has spotted YouTube videos showing up on Google Maps when you click the "more" button (upper right) and select video. The geotagged videos then appear and can be played within an info-window: Google added YouTube videos to Google Earth in October, 2007. Maps and Earth are on the same platform so it was only a matter of time before the same thing was done with Maps. (Indeed, video was previously available on Maps in the mapplets/add-ons directory; now it has become much more prominent.) We should also see more and more video showing up unde [...]

YouTube Continues To Dominate Growing Video Landscape

Dec 9, 2008 at 7:29pm ET by Matt McGee

Google continues to dominate the online video market in much the same way it dominates search. Google properties set a record in October with more than 100 million video viewers -- 99.5 million of whom watched videos on YouTube. Those are some of the numbers issued this afternoon by comScore from its Video Metrix service. Google's video market share represents more than two-thirds of the estimated online video watching audience for the month. As the chart below shows, Fox Interactive and Yahoo ranked second and third, respectively, in audience share. As you'd expect, YouTube also dom [...]

Google Adds Search Box To YouTube Videos & Adds HD Embed

Dec 4, 2008 at 9:05am ET by Barry Schwartz

A week ago, YouTube changed the format of their videos to wide screen and HD format. My main issue back then was that the embed options did not give people a way to embed the wide screen format, easily. That has changed. YouTube now allows you to embed a wide screen format and they also added a search box at the top of those embedded videos. In addition, Google added a search box to the top of the search frame of an image search. Let me explain this below. Here is a picture of a standard embed that now includes a search bar at the top of the video: Now, depending on your vide [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: Images | Google: YouTube & Video

YouTube Defaults Videos In HD Format: But Forgets Embed Feature

Nov 25, 2008 at 9:09am ET by Barry Schwartz

YouTube announced that all videos on their web site will now be in the wider format HD format, 16:9 ratio. The YouTube player is now 960 pixels wide, as opposed to the standard format of 4:3 ratio. 4:3 aspect ratio videos will continue to play in the wider format, but YouTube has added black borders to the right and left of the video, to fill that space. YouTube has a help document describing how to upload better quality videos. It includes using MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format with MP3 audio and a video resolution of 480x360 or higher with a frame rate of 24fps or higher. Below is an embed [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video

YouTube Formally Introduces ‘Sponsored Videos’

Nov 12, 2008 at 4:45pm ET by Greg Sterling

YouTube is formally announcing "sponsored videos." This is an evolution and expansion of what was has been informally running under the heading "promoted videos." The effort seeks to marry Google AdWords-like bidding and targeting with YouTube video content. Accordingly, it's an auction marketplace but somewhat simplified vs. AdWords. And while there apparently will be a view from AdWords of sponsored videos the two marketplaces are largely separate -- for now. It's a smart move for Google/YouTube and will enable content creators, publishers, marketers and even individuals to get their [...]

Monetizing ‘Copyright Violations’: MTV, MySpace & Auditude Announce Ad Deal

Nov 3, 2008 at 9:23am ET by Greg Sterling

We all know the history of the Viacom and YouTube litigation: users relentlessly uploaded clips of The Daily Show and other premium content to YouTube. Viacom didn't like the "settlement" deal Google offered after it acquired the site and so Viacom sued for a billion dollars in copyright violations. That suit may partly succeed or may fail spectacularly for Viacom. But the paradigm has now been superceded by technology offered by a company called Auditude. The company's technology is being used by MTV (whose parent company is Viacom) to deliver ads on videos uploaded by users to MySpace. [...]

Google’s New Metric For YouTube Ads: Brain Waves

Oct 30, 2008 at 1:40pm ET by Bob Heyman

The news came across the wire recently that Google has ventured into new territory to sell the value of their ad space and ad targeting on YouTube. Rather than the standard metrics of clicks and conversions Google is selling a new kind of metric—brain waves. YouTube has recently been pushing overlay ads which appear in the lower portion of the window while the video is playing. Since these ads are often used for branding purpose looking at click thru measurements would not give a true picture of their impact upon the advertisers brand messaging. To prove the efficacy of these ads, Go [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video | Video Search

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