Marketing Pilgrim

Are you a YouTube junkie? Apparently there are a lot of them out there. According to a Wall Street Journal Digits article and comScore there over 100 million YouTube users in the US that average watching 68 videos per month. Wow. I certainly keep that average down but I suppose watching just over 2 videos a day, every day of the month is reasonable. I prefer to think of it as a little lame (don’t people have something better to do?) but that is just my opinion.

So if you are YouTube what would your next move be? Of course they are working on the advertising and further monetization model. What goes hand in hand with that though is figuring out a way to make that average number of videos watched increase so more ads can be served and more money can be made. Makes sense but how to do it?

It was announced today, confirming rumors, that MySpace will be acquiring iLike for an undisclosed amount. MySpace’s press release makes everyone out to be giddy about the acquisition which is what one might expect. According to cnet though there was some underlying suspicion that iLike was purchased on the cheap.

No terms of the deal were disclosed, but reports have indicated that iLike was sold at quite a bargain–something in the neighborhood of $20 million total–because its ad-supported, streaming music model failed to rake in the profits that investors hoped it would.

OK, so struggling social networking entity, MySpace, buys supposedly struggling social music discovery service. A marriage made in mediocrity? cnet goes on to say that MySpace itself is having trouble in the space where it is supposedly concentrating.

Microsoft is certainly determined to at least make life a little less sunny for their buddies in Mountain View (that’s Google). Of course, we are all familiar with the badda bing! impact of Microsoft’s re-entry into the search game. That was followed up by the successful unification of two of the search engine world’s biggest ‘threats’ to Google’s search supremacy. So what could be next?

While not as dramatic or even impactful as the first two events the announcement that Advance Internet has decided to go with Microsoft by running its Content Advertising links on its sites rather than stay with Google’s AdSense program. ClickZ tells us a bit more

“Google now has been replaced with the Microsoft product,” Advance Internet President Peter Weinberger told ClickZ News. The company began running AdSense ads in early 2008.

Let’s say you own the most popular microblogging service on the Internet. Let’s say you want to grow that service and make it more valuable to your users (and maybe make money. You wouldn’t complain.). So you’re going to feature third party apps, but you want to feature the best ones.

And naturally, to find the best ones, you turn to . . . your tech blogger friends. Not your millions of users (and thousands of followers), but a tech blogger who you just know is just going to turn around and ask his readers.

I hate to tell you this, but you don’t sound very smart today.

Okay, let’s end the hypothetical there. Obviously you’re much more intelligent than that. And yes, there are advantages to asking someone with their finger on the pulse of your product and access to thousands of active Twitterers.

Believe it or not, Google has come out with new data to indicate that ad position doesn’t affect conversation rates for a single ad. Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, posted his team’s research at the Inside AdWords blog.

While there are several caveats (such as the fact that they had to rely on average position, instead of examining each position in each auction each ad is a part of), the results are interesting:

We have used a statistical model to account for these effects and found that, on average, there is very little variation in conversion rates by position for the same ad. For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5% across positions. In other words, an ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position, would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average. Ads above the search results have a conversion rate within ±2% of right-hand side positions.

As an online reputation management consultant, I often find myself on both sides of the fence. Sure, I help a lot of companies and individuals with their reputation needs, but I also study and comment on the effectiveness of the different methods and tactics open to a brand’s detractors.

A new court ruling provides the perfect platform for discussing both sides of the fence.

As SMH reports, a US judge has ruled that Google must hand over the identity of an anonymous Blogger.com author that posted defamatory remarks about glamor model Liskula Cohen. In a series of attacks, the blogger behind “Skanks in NYC” made many disparaging remarks about Cohen, including:

“How old is this skank? 40 something? She’s a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.”