Alex Schultz: APIs

Revver Blows Me Away Again

I want revver to win in online video... badly. These guys do a really fantastic job on quite a few fronts. #1 they pay you a revenue share of the money they make with your content. #2 their product just works... no fuss no faff, upload your video and go. #3 they don't shy away from user forums so I am confident can give my input and will be heard.

They even have a developer program which I hadn't even looked at man I have ideas how I can make money with that. Today's post is however all about their analytics.

 

They now offer me reports by video for the revenue I am making

They also graphically displaying completion rates for videos.

Using this data I can do a lot of optimization for my site of which videos to display and where. Ideally I would like to be able to do some more granular tracking by inserting my own tracking ID by which I can report as well. Perhaps some classes of user do not convert well into advertising dollars and so I shouldn't show them a video. Perhaps some users only ever view videos and so I should put the video above the fold for that class of user. Who knows? I would love to track it.

The future is bright for people exploring online videos to help improve user experience AND make money. Long live revver and their undeniable talent...

Free Gifts - Another Viral Facebook App

I am really enjoying the phenomenon of Facebook apps and totally loving the way they have exploded from zero to infinity and beyond so quickly! The arguement that facebook just added a quarter of a billion dollars of RnD to their platform is looking more and more realistic to me.

The apps I like the best are the ones that have exploded without the help of the directory and hardly surprisingly these have exploded because of interpersonal activity. The latest great app I wanted to show case is Free Gifts. The Facebook Gifts product is really cool and not too dissimilar to the ze frank concept of gimme some candy. The 2 mistakes I feel facebook made was making all gifts the same value (since surely if there were expensive and cheap gifts you'd give your girl/boyfriend a more expensive one) and not expiring the gifts after a given time (i.e. flowers might last a week, a teddy for a month etc...). Differentiation is key in many things.

 

Well the app above is giving away gifts for free and when you send a gift to someone they have to add the app to display it... how perfectly viral I really love it!

The image above shows the current user base and all without the use of the facebook directory, pretty incredible stuff, keep it up Zachary. I am excited to see how far this one goes!

Awesome use of eBay by Alan

A good friend of mine Alan lewis (technical evangelist at eBay) has produced a fantastic use of eBay to promote his project San Dimas by auctioning the first BETA place on the project through eBay. This auction is dubbed "for the alpha geek who has everything" and is well worth a bid:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item...

A Beautiful Internet Marketing Experience

This has to be one of the most beautiful graphic integrations I have seen. Smirnoff Black Cherry on Pandora. It really set me longing for a smirnoff black cherry and coke which I will be having this evening in the bar. Very cool indeed and I can only hope that I will be able to produce a calibre of IM similar to this as I progress in my career!

 

Does mybloglog reduce adsense earnings?

I have grown to really appreciate mybloglog, I think it's a totally awesome tool. Also as an internet marketing professional I think that Yahoo! got mybloglog for a song. With the distribution this widget gets I am sure there are some quite incredible opportunities for mybloglog to earn millions a year in revenue. However 2wks ago I added mybloglog to my paper airplanes site to see if I could create a community around that site which would be totally awesome. With c. 150 000 unique visitors a month it seemed like a good idea.

The above graph shows my daily CPM for my left hand adsense skyscraper since the start of 2007 (although I have removed the absolute amounts from the left axis). On adding the my blog log widget (directly below the adsense ad) the CPM dropped dramatically and interestingly as the below graph shows the CTR % stayed the same through that period so effectively for some reason my average CPC dropped.

I don't know if it is google detecting there are images close to the adsense ad, I don't know if it's mybloglog changing Google's opinion of my page quality for the adsense crawl or what (it certainly isn't people clicking on mybloglog and joining my community :( - it didn't work for paper airplanes, that's why I took it off) but somehow there was a directly correlated change both when I added my blog log and when I removed it on my CPMs through adsense. I'd love to hear if anyone else has seen the same or if I am just a screw up :)

Skype in Facebook contact details

Yes I am partizan but facebook has finally put more than just AIM into it's instant messenger list. As someone who had 12 skype windows open when I saw this information and who logs into facebook at least 10 times a day this is huge news... HAPPY DAY (oh yeah and sorry for the cheesey photo below, training camp, seville, 2005)!

Keyword Spamming YouTube

Google is being exploited by spammers on Google video and YouTube. When they start paying for content it will only get worse! Jeremy wrote a little rebuttle of a MyBlogLog spammer, cornwall seo talks about it too and browsing google video directly after that I started seeing the same there.

I am a big fan of NCIS... I can't help it I like the humour coupled with the overwhelming sense of coolness and fairly decent plots. Very quickly since google video integrated YouTube listings into it's search results (great quick exploitation of synergy there well done G men + women) I realised that all my fave shows were now being offered up as bootleg copies:

This in itself isn't the end of the world since it costs $1.99 to get the CBS version and I can keep it on my machine easily and (thankfully) don't have to get up every 10min to move onto the next clip but it led me to test out a theory on another nasty spam technique I used to use in my early days of SEO (which timed with Napster). Keyword stuffing...

On this page you can see a search for NCIS turns up Gilmore Girls and South Park (page 2 of results). You can also see that the descriptions are keyword stuffed with "ER", "CSI" and various other popular TV shows.

The joy of using back links to help determine the keywords a web page is valuable for in Natural Search means you can devalue the keywords on the page (to some extent) or at least get a hint to pick the most relevant ones. Combine this with the fact that (excepting cloaking) the page has to be user readable it's not too hard to see why keyword stuffing doesn't work for webpages any more. I however rarely read the descriptions of the YouTube and G Video's I watch and so spamming the description isn't going to hurt me. Combine that with the fact all Google has to go on is title, description, #times viewed and a little bit about the uploader I think we are coming to an interesting challenge for Google to deal with, similar to Jeremy's mybloglog problem and eBay's keyword stuffing problem in search results.

Good luck Google... get your brains on it (and get your users tagging that content ;) )!

YouTube vs Revver the fight is on

I am very excited about this recent post on bbc news stating YouTube is intending to start sharing it's revenue with it's users!

Since revver is now making a good 10-20% of the revenue I get on my paper airplanes website. I started off using YouTube for the videos on my site and now have c. 300k views on my YouTube videos but just a 3 short months later shifted to revver since they paid me for my videos and I have now earned just shy of $1000 from them and been paid $700 of that through paypal (quality service doubt youtube will do that :( ).

The questions I have outstanding are:

1. Will YouTube allow you to earn money from embedded videos or just on YouTube?
2. How will the ads work, are they inline or are they the ones surrounding the videos?
3. How can YouTube pay kids?
4. Did the you tube founder just tread on his tongue by saying this in the quiet period pre earnings :s ?

Overall this is a great shift and one I have been hoping for for a while. It opens up a whole new territory on the web for people like me who create how to sites and have skills to share (as well as kids who set themselves on fire and steal copyrighted material ;) ) and with a big power in advertising behind it (Google) I am totally stoked.

Skype Users on Christmas Day

The above graph uses my little program on randomdomainname.co.uk to show the number of skype users online over christmas day by hour of the day. The blue line is Christmas day and the red line is Christmas eve. The hour of the day is given in GMT and the whole program is built by sampling skype's feed of users online, which they expose on their homepage, once an hour. I don't vouch that it is 100% accurate of course but I think it's a very interesting graph to see to give an indication of the % of people who have their computers on or are online on Christmas day at all. I certainly was one of the peak 6million or so people online on Christmas day even though I didn't actually do any Skyping.

Taking Brand Advertising Learning's Online

A relatively standard way of working out the value of a brand building campaign in old media is to advertise say Bold washing up powder in all regions but the Northwest and define that region as a control group for research. The advertiser can then watch the uplift in purchases of Bold in the regions with the advertising vs. the trend they would have seen based on the control. This is obviously tricky because it is hard to pick out local PR effects and so on from the overall trends and does the Northwest really have the same trending as the rest of the country in general but in broad strokes it works.

Something that shocks me is that I have not heard of large brand advertises using this trick online and I have been browsing blogs and searching for evidence of this happening. Geotargetting through Ads on Google/Yahoo/the big banner networks to a city level is totally doable. Why not just for a test spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a banner advertising campaign in say for example York in the UK or Boston in the US on a sizeable network like adsense or valueclick. Running this campaign for a similar period to an offline campaign and looking for uplift.

Maybe I am being foolish and this is already happening, I just don't know about it or maybe brand advertisers are convinced of the value of online already (as a site owner I don't believe this... if they did I wouldn't have smiley ads continually appearing through Valueclick, Casalemedia and Burst on my site) but I love to do things that I can measure and as such this idea really excites me esp. since it could convince more advertisers to spend money online.