Marketing Pilgrim

This week, Google announced that YouTube is extending its Partnership Program. Formerly only for professional and very popular accounts (think thousands of views per video), the Partnership Program shared ad revenue between YouTube and original content creators.

Now anyone can participate in the ad-sharing program . . . almost. Actually, you still have to get thousands of video views to participate. The real change here is that instead those thousands of views can come to just one of your videos, instead of each of them. Before, several of your videos had to be popular to get into the Partnership Program. Now, just one of your videos has to go viral, and Google can invite you into the program—for that video:

Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We’ll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.

Last January, Yahoo first unveiled its plans to bring social networking into their email inbox. Now, over eighteen months and one new CEO later, it looks like those plans are finally ready to roll out.

In changes that bear an eerie resemblance to the most popular social network in the world, Yahoo is bringing your friends’ “connections’” updates, pictures, and birthdays, the Wall Street Journal reports.

WSJ’s new Yahoo image	Yahoo’s image from a presentation in Jan 2008

Some users in the US and Australia have already seen the changes, but the new system is set to roll out for all users over the next four weeks.

Yahoo thinks the change will be well received because so many Internet users are using social networking and email—and they believe there’s a big demand for convergence:

Ever wonder what exactly some of the biggest names in most anything read? Are they looking somewhere that we are not and that’s how they got big? While you may not have thought about it, now that you are thinking along those lines it might interesting to see just what these folks do keep up with, right?. Google Reader has added to its Power Reader offering so you can do just that. Google reached out to some ‘important’ folks to get a window into how they keep up to date. In the Official Google blog we learn that

If you ever see a Twitter pop-up message that looks like the following:

RUN! Close down your browser, turn off your computer, do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200!

Why such panic? Because, if you ever see a pop-up similar to that above, it may not be as innocuous as the one created by the guys over at Dave Naylor’s blog. In fact, someone with half an ounce of tech savvy could

…make a Twitter ‘application’ and start sending tweets with it. Using the simple instructions below, it can be arranged so that if another Twitter user so much as sees one of these tweets – and they are logged in to Twitter – their account could be taken over.

Yikes!

The last time I criticized AstroTurfing, I caught a surprising amount of flak. <sarcasm> I guess honesty and integrity are overrated these days anyway, so I’m updating my morals to get with the times—and to applaud Reverb Communications, a PR firm that’s also gotten with the times by having its interns positively rate clients’ apps in the Apple Store.

Reverb is one of the top gaming PR companies in the world. (No pun intended.) They represent companies including Harmonix (makers of Guitar Hero), MTV games and dozens of other iPhone developers. They say they have “personal,” “first party” relationships with Apple. They do Apple’s TV commercials and Apple has even referred developers to them. MobileCrunch, unfortunately, says that Reverb doesn’t “always follow the rules, and they have been stupid enough to tell that to prospective clients.”

While the subject is often debated, there is mounting evidence that the Internet community’s desire to pin the label of ‘early adopter’ for new technology advances on the youngest users may be misguided. Earlier this month we asked the question as to whether teens use Twitter and it looks like the answer is, for the most part, not so much.

The New York Times examines this area in more detail as it becomes more an more apparent that many of the users of social media skew much older. While this has been suspected for a while now there needs to be more unearthing of this phenomenon before it can be declared reality.