Alex Schultz: APIs

YouTube insights – further enhancements

A recent update from the youtube insights team that (it seems) didn’t even merit a blog post has made the youtube insights even better which is awesome.

Below you can see the data on my paper airplane video views for just the UK traffic. The way the new stats work you can select a region or country you want to dive into and the whole of the rest of the page will update to show you the insights for just that country: demographic, top videos, daily views vs time and in the US even state level data (TX and CA love my site ;)!

Hats off to the youtube insights team for another nice advance… I loved checking out my youtube dashboard before and will now enjoy it even more.

One practical thing which would be awesome is to make the discovery section below a little bit better:

I would love to understand which videos dominate where my key related video referrals come from (are my own videos referring other videos or is it other people’s) and then which related videos are actually being referred to. I would also love to understand what “featured video” really means in more depth and so on. I could then create more content tailored to appeal to those videos/channels.

Either way things keep getting better with youtube insights. Nice job team!

Chrome share up 200% year on year now 1 in 20 visits

Chrome launched in 2008: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

I am lucky enough to have 300k visitors a month to my sites which is a decent sample size to get a read on a lot of things including browser market share. A while ago I did a post on browser market share over the last 4 years but now I just want to focus on Chrome.

Chrome share over time

The above graph shows chrome usage as a percentage of my site visitors over time. It is smoothed using a 7 day moving average.

The most interesting thing for me as an internet marketer is that this growth is not organic. Organic growth tends to look exponential… a great product spreads virally where the rate of growth grows exponentially (see the trends data for twitter, youtube, facebook or any number of other recent web companies) and this growth is linear. This is a marketing driven product leveraged out of Google’s huge web audience promoting the browser.

Chrome is a home (not office) Software

The below graph shows (in PST) percentage of visits using chrome and internet explorer against time of day. You can see the % of us visits that are from IE is almost perfectly inverse to Chrome.

Chrome’s lowest % use is the start of the business day on the east coast (6am PST 9am EST) and it’s peak use is overnight in the US when (most) people are at home with internet explorer the inverse.

IE just won’t die as long as IT departments rely on it so much but it is really getting crushed in the home market by chrome and everyone else. Outside of work hours there are now a few hours a day where internet explorer isn’t even the majority of visits anymore. That’s a huge shift.

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Great social media analysis from Alan Long in Oz and NZ

One of the biggest mistakes folks in silicon valley make is starting too much at what goes on out here and ignoring the rest of the world. That is not to say of course that there is always something better somewhere else in the world (since often the best companies move here – e.g. Facebook from Harvard) but it is true that there are lots of interesting things outside of the bubble.

One of the more interesting people I follow in the web analytics space is Alan Long at Hitwise in Asia Pacific. His latest two articles on social media are definitely worth a read.

• Social networks and forums take over search engines in NZ
• Facebook driving industry growth

The highlights are pretty obvious but firstly social networking is growing very fast in Asia Pacific and much of that growth is being driven by Facebook. Here is the NZ example:

Secondly in New Zealand (and very shortly in Australia) social networking has overtaken search as the most visited industry segment online.

I really believe the Marshal McLuhan “the medium is the message” idea that is very popular in the valley right now. If we truly believe the internet is the dominant media vehicle of our time and social networking is becoming the #1 activity on the internet very rapidly (already the majority of page views and time spent in Russia) then we have to accept that the world is going to become more and more driven by conversation and participation again and less driven by just sitting in front of the goggle box and passively consuming.

I think this is a good thing. The next century is going to be amazing!

Social gaming taking off everywhere

http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2009/11/24/650000000-downloads-via-playstation-store-facebook-connect-goes-live/

Ryan has a good post about how huge playstation is with 650M downloads of data before Facebook connect launches.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/23/zynga-crosses-100-million-users-and-expands-beyond-facebook-games/

The above is a note about Zynga flying through 100MM users and if you take a look at the Zynga jobs page you can see how mainstream they are becoming

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/09/playfish-ea

There were of course a lot of articles about the sale of playfish to ea which makes me for one really excited about the idea of getting all those great ea games (e.g. Risk http://hasbro.ea.com/game.action?game=risk) onto my favorite social networks.

http://www.talkxbox.com/article3495.html#

And finally xbox announced 2MM users connecting via Facebook already in just days.

People want to play games with their friends (I for one love farmville and would really like to see Risk on the Facebook platform and would pay to play).

The Kindle will Crush it in the UK

 

As you can see above one thing is completely lacking from the Amazon.co.uk homepage that dominates the US homepage. The Kindle.

The kindle will launch in the UK soon and when I does I believe it will be even more successful than in the US. The big reason why is public transport. Whereas in LA and the Bay area and even to some extent the east coast (although less so) people love to commute by car in the UK everyone uses public transport. For example in London (where 1 in 5 britains live) every train is massively crowded. The whole newspaper format was changed after 100years to make them easy to read on the train. I was reading my Kindle on the train this morning and noticed lots of people staring (at it sadly not me :) ). They were all struggling with newspapers and big books on a fast moving, rocking train. I had one hand on the rail and was controlling the kindle easily with the other hand and had lot’s of books at hand (currently reading the tyranny of email).

Anyway just a general thought but look for kindle sales and associated book sales to go bananas (technical term :) ) when the kindle launches in the uk.

The Browser Landscape 2006-2009

The above graph shows market share by browser type from 2006 to 2009 for my cocktail making site. I reviewed the traffic to both cocktail making and paper airplanes which have very different traffic types and global compositions but together make 300k visits a month now and millions of page views so have a relatively large sample. As such both sites have a non tech audience which I think makes them good subjects for reviewing this data and it is very similar across both sites.

Bottom lines:

Chrome (% below is surging)

Safari is still growing strong (most likely driven by mac market share which I will share data for another time):

Firefox growth seems to have slowed significantly (at least in terms of market share they are capturing):

and internet explorer is in continual market share decline:

All of this is purely data from my websites but it is a pretty large sample set and I think what is very interesting is that after a long time of being on the sidelines Google and Apple are leveraging their dominant market share in their particular markets to be really competitive in the browser market. I am personally not convinced this is market share leakage driven by competitive products rather than by different companies leveraging their different dominant market positions (in different markets) to succeed in this one and again I am not convinced there is true innovation happening in the browser business… it feels to me like getting your browser installed is just a ploy to get more searches on your service (not that there is anything wrong with that).

Crowdsourcing by the Guardian

I have to say I am super impressed by the Guardian’s crowdsourced analysis of the MP expenses scandal in the UK. Awesome fast turnaround to get it up and a third of the documents human reviewed. This kind of mash up is amazing and I think puts pay to the statement that the web will destroy great investigative journalism. Instead it seems really clever use of the web will enable more impressive journalism.

Of course one of the main reasons folks think the web and blogging will destroy great investigative journalism is that it needs to be funded by good advertising revenue. My perspective is that excellent use of targeting and loyal customers will allow newspapers online to fund the journalism with advertising. One thing that stands out to me is we need better targeting… the Guardian and other newspapers clearly have precisely the audience I want to target somewhere within their 30MM monthly unique visitors but no one seem to have a product yet through which I can buy exactly who I would want unless they allow a third party ad retargeting network to be live on their site.

Found via the awesome Dan Wilson and props to Tanya a friend at the guardian from eBay.co.uk days.

Behavioral targeting is getting almost ridiculous

Below is kind of amazing. I am on The Guardian website (a British newspaper website) and I am being advertised to by the Mirage for rooms there (based on the fact that I have been browsing their site). On the whole I love retargeting, I think better ads are a good thing. That being said I would love to see folks being a bit more subtle about their retargeting.

Yelp linking to Yahoo!

I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of the following las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way): http://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-steer-las-vegas there is a link to Yahoo! local which says:

 

The link is not “no followed” and points to http://local.yahoo.com/NV/Las+Vegas/Food+Dining/Restaurants/Steak+Houses and this yahoo page is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

I looked into a few other verticals and the same thing is happening in Italian restaurants ( http://www.yelp.com/biz/enoteca-san-marco-las-vegas ) and so on:

Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page you see the following results ( https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Flocal.yahoo.com%2FNV%2FLas%2BVegas%2FFood%2BDining%2FRestaurants%2FSteak%2BHouses&bwm=i&bwmo=d ):

All 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages (wherever their main web presence is, be that on Yelp! or a standalone website). I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

Brand Keyword Bidding

Brand keyword bidding is big business and it’s becoming bigger. For anyone in the internet marketing industry it’s crucial to watch this trend and esp the decisions Google is making around it.

 

Within the affiliate industry brand bidding initially was a quick way to make a buck. In 2003-2005 affiliate managers were often slow to realize affiliates were making money for essentially no work. Even now many affiliates use a combination of geo-targeting and day parting to work around affiliate managers and get away with brand bidding.

       

As that loop hole was closed and brands took their brand name bidding in house worldwide and affiliate networks policed out the majority of the affiliates doing brand bidding Google made two changes which made brand names far less lucrative for them in many countries (esp. the UK). Google stopped allowing multiple ads for one website to appear on the same search result (i.e. no longer 10 eBay ads to a page) and Google also allowed companies to claim their brand so that no one else could bid on it (in the UK). On April 4th Google changed this second policy and that angered a lot of brand owners in the UK who are prepared to sue others have promised not to bid on competitors brands. The most interesting article I saw about this was from Hitwise’s Robin Goad. According to Hitwise in the US (where this has always been the policy) only 84% of branded search make it to the brand owner’s website, in the UK before this change 92% did and Robin just followed up showing that the change in the UK is having the expected effect.

 

Two things make this policy change an excellent way for Google to make money:

 

   
1. Branded search made up 76% of searches in the UK in 2007 according to some studies. Simply look at the famous lycos 50 to back this up or numerous studies showing either eBay or Facebook is the most searched for term online.
   
2. Having only one person bidding on their own brand can result in their bid being as low as $0.01 (esp. because their CTR is usually very high) just adding another person into the auction can push that up tremendously giving a huge boost in Google revenue from companies who can’t afford to not buy their keyword.

 

I can’t really decide what to think about the way Google is acting here. Would it be fair for companies who sell NorthFace clothing not to be able to bid on the word NorthFace? On the other hand is it fair that Google essentially extorts brands to spend in some cases $100k’s a week to simply ensure that someone who was looking for them comes to their site? There’s a tonne more depth to this, for example no one is appearing on a search for Facebook, presumably because that is purely navigational and no one clicks on a non Facebook paid link whereas NorthFace has 10 pages of ads. Google’s decision seems to say you need to sink or swim on your marketing ability and brand strength. Make your brand strong enough that people simply don’t think about clicking onto another site.

 

This little post is just a thought starter BUT as an internet marketer it is crucial you have to have a branded search strategy covering both SEO and SEM. Google won’t let you get away without it.