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Web Video Watchers Have Short Attention Spans

posted on November 27, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

Whenever a friend or coworker sends me a YouTube video, the first thing I do is look at the length. Anything over a minute I hesitate to watch. Now that I think of it, anything over 30 seconds in length I hesitate. I just don’t want to invest that much time in it. There are plenty of great short videos out there that I can waste my time on. Apparently, I’m not alone.

According to a recent TubeMogul study, the average video watcher spends less than a minute watching any given clip. Ten seconds into an average clip, more than 10% of viewers move on to something else.

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Google Analytics Launches New Help Forums

posted on November 26, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

The Google Analytics Blog announced today that they are opening up a new forum within Google Help to assist you in finding answers to your Google Analytics problems quickly. Not only will users be able to get advice from Google Analytics employees, other Google Analytics users will be able to answer your questions as well.

By opening up the forums for all users to contribute, the GA team hopes that problems/questions will be resolved in a more timely manner. The forum will also allow users to vote on the best answers, so that users can easily identify valuable information. A list of “related questions” will also appear as you create a new thread.

I spoke to John Henson of LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, about Google opening up the forums for all users to contribute.

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Jury Set to Deliberate MySpace Suicide Case

posted on November 26, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

A Los Angeles jury is set to deliberate the suicide of a Missouri teen who was emotionally tortured on MySpace and committed suicide. In yet another blow to the human race, a 47-year-old woman posed as a 13-year-old boy to tease and humiliate a 13-year-old girl named Megan Meier.

Lori Drew, the 47-year-old woman, lived just a few houses down from Megan. She was upset that Megan had been teasing her daughter in school, and sought revenge. I’d like to take a moment here for you all to read that sentence again, focus on “sought revenge.” We’re talking about 13-year-old girls here. I know they are mean to each other, but as a parent, don’t you sort of prepare for this type of thing to happen in your daughter’s life? Has there even been a kid who wasn’t made fun of at some point in their life? It is part of growing up. It is what shapes us into who we are. As a parent, you have an ethical responsibility to teach your children to overcome those obstacles, not to retaliate to the degree that Lori did. </rant>

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Did “Lazy Sunday” Really Lead to a $1.65B Price Tag for YouTube?

posted on November 26, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

The growth of YouTube over the last few years has been amazing. According to Hitwise, YouTube has grown from less than 0.05% of weekly US Internet visits to close to 1% over the last three years. 

hitwise chart: youtube marketshare growth over three years

What caused this dramatic shift in YouTube’s popularity? According to Nate Anderson of Ars Technica, NBC claims their viral video hit Lazy Sunday propelled YouTube to its fame. Could NBC be right?

According to Hitwise, the premier of Lazy Sunday in 2005 was the start of an upward traffic trend for YouTube. Prior to Lazy Sunday’s release, traffic had remained level. Once the video was uploaded to the site (and became the viral hit that it was), the site took off. Next thing YouTube knew, they were being snatched up by Google for $1.65 billion dollars. The video was removed from the YouTube website in February of 2007.

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Google Chrome Improves Bookmarking Feature While Speeding Past Competition

posted on November 25, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

Last night Google released an update for Chrome that featured a new bookmarking manager. The same bookmarking manger was released a few weeks ago to the developer version of Chrome. While Chrome’s new bookmarking manager is a huge improvement over their previous release, I’m in agreement with Lifehacker that it is still second fiddle to Firefox 3′s bookmarking tool. Chrome’s bookmarking manager still lacks the use of tags and smart folders. To update Chrome to the latest build, select “About Google Chrome” in the settings drop down menu, and click on the update button.

google chrome bookmarking manager

In addition to the bookmarking update, ExtremeTech crowned Chrome the speed king of the major web browsers. Competing against Firefox, Opera, IE7 and Safari, Chrome stood far ahead of the rest in ExtremeTech’s scoring algorithm (with Firefox finishing in second ahead of Opera).

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Omniture Brings Analytics to Google Android Phones

posted on November 24, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

Omniture SiteCatalyst customers will now be able to access their data from their Google Android phone, according to Manoj Jasra of Web Analytics World. SiteCatalyst becomes the first analytics application available on the Android Market.

In an interview with Matthew Langie, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Omniture, Matthew said:

Our goal is to provide marketers with the leading web analytics found in SiteCatalyst on their mobile devices such as the Google Android phone so they can make decisions on the go to remain competitive.

Omniture customers will be able to access their dashboards, bookmarks and SiteCatalyst reports up-to-the-minute with this Android application. The announcement comes after Omniture provided a similar application for the iPhone in October.

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Be-A-Magpie Brings Advertising to Twitter

posted on November 24, 2008

By Taylor Pratt

Looking to monetize your Twitter efforts? Well now you can! Thanks to Be-A-Magpie, Twitter’s spam filters (or lack thereof) will be put to the ultimate test!

Be-A-Magpie will pay you to insert ads into your tweet stream. Advertisers will pay a Twitter user on a cost-per-thousand impression basis, and are tailored to your Twitter audience by analyzing your Twitter messages and matching keywords to various advertisers. Magpie advertisers can bid on a particular keyword and the winning bid will be shown in a person’s tweet.

By default, “Magpie-tweets” are inserted once every five tweets, but you can create a range anywhere from one Magpie-tweet per 20 tweets or as often as one Magpie-tweet per tweet.