Marketing Pilgrim

Google is really almost totally on the way to eventually turning a profit on little-known video site, YouTube. (Okay, one of those phrases is an understatement.) But over the last year, reports Bloomberg, Google says they’ve increased their YouTube advertisers tenfold. Sameet Sinha, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC., says brand advertisers are returning to the site, too.

Bloomberg talked to Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms for the Americas at Google. YouTube has been gearing up for the resurgence of display, which CEO Eric Schmidt said in January was the company’s next focus.

To attract customers, Google has expanded an exchange that matches buyers and sellers of display ads and added tools that help small companies build their own ads on YouTube. Salzman’s teams focus on packaging display advertising on YouTube as well as Google’s content network of more than 1 millions sites.

Every week, there’s some new concern with Internet privacy, either from a specific company’s actions or the ongoing suspicion of companies that collect user data without notice, often to display ads on other sites. While relevant advertising is a good thing (especially for advertisers), many are becoming uncomfortable with the amount of information collected about us on the Internet—including federal lawmakers.

Representatives Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) are working on a bill to help protect Internet users’ privacy. As the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Energy Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, Boucher and Stearns are in a good position to introduce legislation on the matter. While the mere idea strikes terror into the hearts of many a marketer, the current draft may not be as restrictive as we imagine. Boucher outlined the current draft for an American Business Media conference.

Isn’t this interesting? Right in the middle of all the hubbub around Facebook and Google’s alleged lack of concern for the privacy of their users, the former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook is running for the office of California Attorney General. Hmmmm. Chris Kelly was with Facebook from 2005 until August of last year when he took a leave of absence for his run for office. He officially left the company in March to take a swing at public service. Of course, he probably made some serious scratch from his time at Facebook so making this break may be a lot easier for him than for most.

We all know that Google is on a buying / investing spree of sorts. Google Ventures was announced last year and Andy Beal took a look at the fine print for us. Now a year later, the Google Ventures team is moving right along with plans to invest $100 million this year.

Yesterday Google invited reports to the Internet’s equivalent of a high holy place, the Googleplex, for more information. Venturebeat tells us:

Reporters asked company chief executive Eric Schmidt and Google Ventures partners about the kinds of startups the firm is interested in, but they refused to be pinned down to a specific industry, trend, or stage of investment. It’s better to lead the firm into new areas than to jump on a bandwagon like mobile applications, Schmidt said. If anything, Google is more interested in investing in smart people.

Twitter is rich, fertile ground for everything from the mundane and often stupid to the insightful and often helpful. The Twitter train makes all stops in between on that continuum of relevance and we are stuck with trying to determine just where someone else’s 140 character bit of wisdom fits. Oftentimes that can come in the form of using that tweet in a post or as a quote in some other content format.

Until today, if we wanted to put that tweet in our articles or posts we have needed to do it the old-fashioned way which is to copy and paste the image of the tweet. Twitter has taken the step to now make that easier to do. Twitter’s media page points to a ReadWriteWeb article that uses tweets to make its points about HP’s purchase of Palm for a prime example of the power of tweets as quotes.

The battle royale over federal authority for Net Neutrality all started when Comcast shut down certain user transfers on its service. The FCC claimed authority to enforce Net Neutrality against the company (although last month Comcast prevailed in its argument that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to regulate broadband).

However, now it seems Comcast is changing its tune. As Ars Technica reported last week, Comcast filed comments on the FCC’s proposed Open Internet rules. And now they’re actually in favor of the FCC regulating Internet access—as long as they’re not the ones being regulated. Nope, that “honor” should go to Google (and Akamai Technology), of course.

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