AllThingsD » Google Analytics http://allthingsd.com Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:35:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpg All Things Digital http://allthingsd.com/ 144 22 Ex-Googlers Raise $5.8 Million to Help Retailers Track Foot Traffic http://allthingsd.com/20111103/ex-googlers-raise-5-8-million-to-help-retailers-track-foot-traffic/ http://allthingsd.com/20111103/ex-googlers-raise-5-8-million-to-help-retailers-track-foot-traffic/#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:00:20 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=140102 Euclid Elements is hoping to be the Google Analytics of the physical retail world.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company helps brick-and-mortar retailers track shopping behavior by putting sensors in their stores; the sensors pick up Wi-Fi signals from smartphones.

Euclid has raised $5.8 million in capital, led by New Enterprise Associates with Harrison Metal, Triple Point Capital and other investors also participating.

Euclid’s CEO Will Smith said the system tabulates anonymous foot traffic and collects the data on a dashboard, where retailers can track loyalty by a phone’s unique user ID.

Challenged with the suggestion that most people turn off Wi-Fi on their devices to save battery life, Smith disagreed. “It’s accurate,” he said, adding that the sensors can even tell whether someone is entering the store, or just walking by.

The system cannot collect any information on a person and can’t communicate with them. But it can track whether the same person visited a coffee shop in the morning and returned for lunch in the afternoon.

The company’s COO, Scott Crosby, is the co-founder of the original Urchin team that was acquired by Google in April 2005, and which became the basis for Google Analytics.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111103/ex-googlers-raise-5-8-million-to-help-retailers-track-foot-traffic/feed/ 0 The Four Tiers of Twitter Users: Tweeters, Voyeurs, Readers and the Uncounted Masses http://allthingsd.com/20110908/the-four-tiers-of-twitter-users-tweeters-voyeurs-readers-and-the-uncounted-masses/ http://allthingsd.com/20110908/the-four-tiers-of-twitter-users-tweeters-voyeurs-readers-and-the-uncounted-masses/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2011 20:17:47 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=118707 Twitter for the first time today offered measurements of how many people actively use its product and how those numbers are growing.

What emerged is a view of Twitter usage that is more nuanced than a social network, where it’s clear what being a “user” means, or a media site, where it’s obvious who is the content creator and who is the content consumer.

After a very long time of withholding active user numbers, Twitter disclosed that 100 million people log into its service at least once per month and 400 million people visited its Web site in the past month.

But there’s still a massive amount of Twitter activity that goes uncounted, both through widgets and clients built on the Twitter API and through mass distribution of tweets in other news media like television.

Here’s my attempt at describing those users:

The Tweeters: Some 60 million registered Twitter users have logged in at least once in the last month and tweeted. That includes real people, corporate accounts, parody accounts, group accounts and bots.

Active tweeters generate 230 million tweets a day, up 110 percent from the beginning of the year.

The Voyeurs: An additional 40 million people have gone to the trouble of logging into Twitter in the last month but haven’t composed anything themselves. These are often people who find value in getting a real-time and more personal perspective on sports stars, celebrities and other news makers. Twitter said today that 75 percent of NBA players and 85 percent of U.S. senators have Twitter accounts.

In a way, curating other Twitter users is a form of content creation, as Jeffrey Kalmikoff, VP of product at SimpleGeo, pointed out to me on Twitter. This may be increasingly true with new Twitter activity stream tools, where users can more easily see which accounts their contacts are following and which tweets they are favoriting.

Twitter lumped its logged-in active users together for some of the growth stats. Active users are up 82 percent since January 1 to 100 million. That’s up from just 26 million at the end of 2009.

Half of that 100 million logs in every single day, up 105 percent since the beginning of this year. Fifty-five percent of active users are mobile users.

The Readers: Another way to measure Twitter users is to go to Google Analytics, which says 400 million people have visited Twitter.com in the past month. That number is mostly inclusive of the 100 million in the past two categories (though some active users might use only Twitter mobile or desktop clients).

Visitors to Twitter.com can view almost all Twitter content without logging in, and there are many people who drop by on a tweet-by-tweet basis or go directly to the pages of tweeters they are interested in.

Twitter said its monthly visitor count has grown 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

The Uncounted Masses: Many, many more people read tweets than visit Twitter.com, but it’s hard to measure them. Twitter offers its own clients for various platforms and other developers make them too. There are also lots more tweets displayed using applications built with the Twitter API — for instance, a tweet widget on a news site might show the latest messages from its writers, or a stream of tweets could be displayed at an event using a common hashtag.

Beyond that, tweets are an excellent source of breaking news and popular sentiment, so they’re syndicated all over the place. I dare you to watch an hour of television news without hearing a mention of the latest on Twitter.

Twitter doesn’t even seem to be attempting to measure this number, though it would be nice to see the company take a stab at it by asking API users to report back user numbers or maybe even assigning an intern to watch for tweets on TV.

Twitter in the past had offered a dramatically unhelpful metric: The number of people (hundreds of millions, at this point) who had ever registered for an account. Not only does that not include people who view Twitter content while logged out, it also ignores the many dormant accounts that are bound to accumulate on a five-year-old service.

So altogether, the balance of Twitter activity tilts toward people consuming content — which could be a very good thing for Twitter to emphasize. Twitter sales marketing director Shane Steele pointed out after Costolo’s address that what advertisers care about is the potential reach of their content, not how many people are creating tweets. These tiers of public usage make Twitter’s business much different from social networks like Facebook and Google+, where much of users’ activity is personal and private.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110908/the-four-tiers-of-twitter-users-tweeters-voyeurs-readers-and-the-uncounted-masses/feed/ 0 Chartbeat Says the Rise of the Machines Won't Be So Bad if You're a Cyborg http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27571 Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/feed/ 0 Real-Time Web Analytics Start-Up Chartbeat Tallies Up More Investors http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/ http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/#comments Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:16:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23727 Chartbeat, the real-time Web-publishing analytics service, has added a few more investors to its previously announced $3 million funding round. Joining Index Ventures et al are: Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, former Verisign CFO Dana Evan and Code Advisors, best known as Quincy Smith’s newish gig.

All three are interesting names to attach to the company: Mullenweg created one of the Web’s most popular publishing platforms; Evan used to sit on the board of Omniture, Chartbeat’s giant rival (which is now owned by Adobe); and this is only the second investment that Code has made in its brief life–it has also put money into Flipboard, the much-buzzed-about iPad publishing app.

Meanwhile, Chartbeat is gaining rapid acceptance at big Web publishers that also use Omniture and/or Google (GOOG) Analytics. We’ve got an account here at All Things Digital, and I can confess that I’ve sometimes spent way too much time watching people come and go on my site–the interface is intuitive and sort of addictive, and it’s kind of like pachinko, that oddly mesmerizing cousin of pinball.

But I’m also not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information that Chartbeat provides me–it’s great to see how many people are reading this particular story at a given moment, but so what? I’ve already written my story–there’s not much else I can do at this point, right?

And if I can’t do much with that information, what can publishers at much larger, sclerotic shops do with the data?

I posed those questions to Chartbeat General Manager Tony Haile, who was kind enough to sit down with me for a minute before heading off to Africa for his honeymoon:


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100922/real-time-web-analytics-startup-chartbeat-tallies-up-more-investors/feed/ 1 Meta Voyeurism! Watch Chatroulette's Users Watch Each Other, in Real Time! http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/ http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21228 Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

But! It’s still drawing plenty of visitors. And if you want to watch people watching each other on the voyeur site, in real time, now you can. See this display from Chartbeat, the start-up Web analytics company that competes with the likes of Adobe’s (ADBE) Omniture and Google (GOOG) Analytics and that lets you track visits to a site as they’re happening.

Plenty of great nuggets here for anyone who wants to poke around (Hehheh. Hehheh. I said “poke.” Hehheh.). Like right now, for instance, there seems to be a large number of people from Texas who like the site. You can also peruse the dashboard to divine longer-term trends, like the fact that Chatroulette traffic seems to peak around 8 pm Eastern time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch – Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time/feed/ 0 Meta Voyeurism! Watch Chatroulette's Users Watch Each Other, in Real Time! http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:26:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21228 Remember when Chatroulette was this crazy, sort-of-hard to explain phenomenon with explosive growth?

Right. That was months ago! And it may well have peaked since then.

But! It’s still drawing plenty of visitors. And if you want to watch people watching each other on the voyeur site, in real time, now you can. See this display from Chartbeat, the start-up Web analytics company that competes with the likes of Adobe’s (ADBE) Omniture and Google (GOOG) Analytics and that lets you track visits to a site as they’re happening.

Plenty of great nuggets here for anyone who wants to poke around (Hehheh. Hehheh. I said “poke.” Hehheh.). Like right now, for instance, there seems to be a large number of people from Texas who like the site. You can also peruse the dashboard to divine longer-term trends, like the fact that Chatroulette traffic seems to peak around 8 pm Eastern time.

Oh, and in case you were wondering–it’s safe for work.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch – Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party
]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100701/meta-voyeurism-watch-chatroulettes-users-watch-each-other-in-real-time-2/feed/ 0 Huffington Post Still Growing Like a Weed http://allthingsd.com/20100304/huffington-post-still-growing-like-a-weed/ http://allthingsd.com/20100304/huffington-post-still-growing-like-a-weed/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:16:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=16978 Another step in the Huffington Post’s relentless march toward world domination: The company attracted a staggering 40 million unique visitors in the last month.

That’s per Huffpo’s own numbers, served up by Google Analytics (GOOG). And as usual, outside auditors provide a different number. ComScore’s (SCOR) January numbers put the site at 26.4 million unique visitors (see breakdown at bottom of this post).

But no matter how you count it, there’s now a really, really big audience for a site the smart set derided as a vanity project for Arianna Huffington when it launched in 2005.

You may also recall predictions that Huffpo would wither after the 2008 elections, but that hasn’t happened either. So what’s driving the growth?

Verticals, says Huffington–the mini-Huffpos the site has been pumping out on a regular basis. The site’s technology and sports sections, for instance, didn’t exist six months ago. Now they account for 10 percent of Huffpo’s traffic, she says. (Did you know ultimate fighter Chuck Liddell has a nude workout tape?)

Other big hits: Comedy (up 58 percent in the last six months), style (37 percent), entertainment (25 percent).

Huffington was less boastful about the site’s attempts to roll out local sections. That started with Chicago in August 2008, and now includes Denver, Los Angeles and New York.

But she’s not sure where that will go next: “This year [we] have prioritized launching other sections, which has been a great decision,” she says. It’s possible that Huffpo will launch more local sites, or it may partner with other sites instead.

Huffington’s competitors and/or detractors would also want to point to the site’s team of technology wizards, which allow it to extract the maximum value out of a relatively small (100 full-time employees) staff. Huffpo has mastered the art of turning other people’s work into its own stories and eyeballs.

But eyeballs are eyeballs. Next up: Turning them  into dollars. That’s up to sales boss Greg Coleman and his brigade of Yahoo (YHOO) veterans.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100304/huffington-post-still-growing-like-a-weed/feed/ 0 Google Outage Caused by Asian "Traffic Jam" http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam/ http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 19:23:56 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=17698 livesearchgfail

If the Web has a single point of failure, you’d think it was Google, given the outcry over the the outages suffered by some of the company’s services Thursday. Something went wrong this morning and whatever it was had widespread effects on a broad spectrum of Google services–Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Docs. It outraged Twitter users and provided Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search team with no end of amusement. “Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine,” it quipped in a tweet.

The source of the disruption? A system error that sent a bunch of Google (GOOG) Web traffic to Asia and waylaid about 14 percent of it, apparently.

This just in from the Google Blog:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam/feed/ 0 Google Outage Caused by Asian "Traffic Jam" http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam-2/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 19:23:56 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=17698 livesearchgfail

If the Web has a single point of failure, you’d think it was Google, given the outcry over the the outages suffered by some of the company’s services Thursday. Something went wrong this morning and whatever it was had widespread effects on a broad spectrum of Google services–Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, Blogger, Google Analytics, Google Docs. It outraged Twitter users and provided Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search team with no end of amusement. “Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine,” it quipped in a tweet.

The source of the disruption? A system error that sent a bunch of Google (GOOG) Web traffic to Asia and waylaid about 14 percent of it, apparently.

This just in from the Google Blog:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090514/google-outage-caused-by-asian-traffic-jam-2/feed/ 0 adCenter Analytics: Beta Off Dead http://allthingsd.com/20090312/adcenter-analytics-beta-off-dead/ http://allthingsd.com/20090312/adcenter-analytics-beta-off-dead/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:30:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=14821 Poor adCenter Analytics. Never even made it out of beta. Microsoft (MSFT) today announced plans to scuttle the Web publishing metrics service, which was being developed as a rival to Google Analytics. Scheduled to shut down on Dec. 31, it will never go head to head with the search behemoth’s offering now. The company announced its decision in a post to the adCenter Analytics blog. “You’ve helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution, and despite the end of life plan, the beta was very much a success,” the adCenter Analytics team said in its blog post. “It enabled us to confidently determine that we can be of most value to advertisers and publishers by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.”

Just why Microsoft made that determination is unclear. What could have possibly happened to make it not just abandon adCenter Analytics, but to refer clients to rival services, including Google Analytics?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090312/adcenter-analytics-beta-off-dead/feed/ 0 Yang's Golden Rule: "Do Unto Others as Microsoft Would Do to Yahoo" http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools/ http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:35:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools/ yang_decker_spree.jpgYahoo (YHOO) isn’t letting the looming threat of a Microsoft (MSFT) acquisition ruin its own acquisitive appetite. This morning the company announced plans to purchase Web analytics outfit Tensa Kft, better known as IndexTools. Yahoo expects the purchase to bolster its current analytics offerings, which haven’t evolved much since it inherited Keylime Software’s paid-search management tools as part of its 2003 acquisition of Overture.

IndexTools “will give our customers tools for monitoring and analyzing Web sites and marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights into key metrics, traffic patterns and performance,” Bassel Ojjeh, head of Yahoo Strategic Data Solutions, wrote in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. “And that means consumers are more likely to see marketing content that’s engaging and relevant.”

One would hope so. Because at this point, Yahoo doesn’t need to simply distinguish itself from Google (GOOG) Analytics. It needs to catch up to it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools/feed/ 0 Yang's Golden Rule: "Do Unto Others as Microsoft Would Do to Yahoo" http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools-2/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:35:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools/ yang_decker_spree.jpgYahoo (YHOO) isn’t letting the looming threat of a Microsoft (MSFT) acquisition ruin its own acquisitive appetite. This morning the company announced plans to purchase Web analytics outfit Tensa Kft, better known as IndexTools. Yahoo expects the purchase to bolster its current analytics offerings, which haven’t evolved much since it inherited Keylime Software’s paid-search management tools as part of its 2003 acquisition of Overture.

IndexTools “will give our customers tools for monitoring and analyzing Web sites and marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights into key metrics, traffic patterns and performance,” Bassel Ojjeh, head of Yahoo Strategic Data Solutions, wrote in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. “And that means consumers are more likely to see marketing content that’s engaging and relevant.”

One would hope so. Because at this point, Yahoo doesn’t need to simply distinguish itself from Google (GOOG) Analytics. It needs to catch up to it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080409/yahoo-indextools-2/feed/ 0 No, They're Video 'Ad' Tools, Not Video 'ID' Tools http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/feed/ 0 No, They're Video 'Ad' Tools, Not Video 'ID' Tools http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/ddv20071009-2/feed/ 0 New From Google Labs: Google Big Friggin' Video Ad http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:01:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads/ Google hasn’t yet figured out a way to find and remove video content posted to YouTube and Google Video in violation of copyright, but it may have finally figured out something far more important: how to advertise on it.

This morning, the company announced a new service that allows publishers to embed ad-supported YouTube videos in their Web sites. The videos will be distributed through Google’s AdSense network and will carry two ad placements: a banner at the top of the video player that can be either text links or a graphical display, and a text link ad at the bottom. Ad revenue will be split between site publishers, video publishers, and Google. The ads themselves, according to Google at least, will be relevant to both video and site content, as well as “unobtrusive.” A win-win service for everyone involved.

“Content distribution on AdSense improves the overall Web experience by connecting consumers with more relevant information and entertainment on the sites they visit,” Google explained. “This new program is a scalable and cost-effective way to distribute content online, creates a new revenue opportunity for publishers and content owners, and helps advertisers reach their target audiences in new and innovative ways. It will also allow AdSense publishers a unique way to enhance their sites with fresh, dynamic content.”

Or gum them up with behemoth video ads fattened with Google Analytics code, something Google would never do to its own famously spartan pages. Remember, text ads save lives, flashy ads take them, as Rough Type’s Nick Carr aptly notes:

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of how Google used to brag about the way its refusal to serve banner ads was literally saving people’s lives–a claim that earned it some fawning press coverage. Sergey Brin would point to the case where a fellow was in the early stages of a heart attack and went online to find out what he should do. As Fortune Small Business reported:

“ ‘He started using one search engine, but it was too slow because the banner ads were loading, so he switched to Google. After getting the information he needed, he headed to the hospital immediately … “Not only did our search engine save his life, but it shows that these decisions–like whether to use text-based or graphical ads–matter,” says Brin, the co-founder of Google.’

“I don’t think Brin talks about this story so much anymore. While Google has yet to incorporate graphical ads into its search pages, it does serve millions of them up to outside sites through AdSense. I wonder how many people in the throes of a medical emergency have rushed to a health-care information site only to find themselves helplessly waiting for some big animated AdSense ad to load (and, as well, the Google Analytics code to run). Now, these poor souls are also going to have to endure the loading of YouTube videos and their accompanying ads. I can only hope that they’ve kept up with their life insurance premiums.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads/feed/ 0 New From Google Labs: Google Big Friggin' Video Ad http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads-2/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:01:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/google-video-ads/ Google hasn’t yet figured out a way to find and remove video content posted to YouTube and Google Video in violation of copyright, but it may have finally figured out something far more important: how to advertise on it.

This morning, the company announced a new service that allows publishers to embed ad-supported YouTube videos in their Web sites. The videos will be distributed through Google’s AdSense network and will carry two ad placements: a banner at the top of the video player that can be either text links or a graphical display, and a text link ad at the bottom. Ad revenue will be split between site publishers, video publishers, and Google. The ads themselves, according to Google at least, will be relevant to both video and site content, as well as “unobtrusive.” A win-win service for everyone involved.

“Content distribution on AdSense improves the overall Web experience by connecting consumers with more relevant information and entertainment on the sites they visit,” Google explained. “This new program is a scalable and cost-effective way to distribute content online, creates a new revenue opportunity for publishers and content owners, and helps advertisers reach their target audiences in new and innovative ways. It will also allow AdSense publishers a unique way to enhance their sites with fresh, dynamic content.”

Or gum them up with behemoth video ads fattened with Google Analytics code, something Google would never do to its own famously spartan pages. Remember, text ads save lives, flashy ads take them, as Rough Type’s Nick Carr aptly notes:

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of how Google used to brag about the way its refusal to serve banner ads was literally saving people’s lives–a claim that earned it some fawning press coverage. Sergey Brin would point to the case where a fellow was in the early stages of a heart attack and went online to find out what he should do. As Fortune Small Business reported:

“ ‘He started using one search engine, but it was too slow because the banner ads were loading, so he switched to Google. After getting the information he needed, he headed to the hospital immediately … “Not only did our search engine save his life, but it shows that these decisions–like whether to use text-based or graphical ads–matter,” says Brin, the co-founder of Google.’

“I don’t think Brin talks about this story so much anymore. While Google has yet to incorporate graphical ads into its search pages, it does serve millions of them up to outside sites through AdSense. I wonder how many people in the throes of a medical emergency have rushed to a health-care information site only to find themselves helplessly waiting for some big animated AdSense ad to load (and, as well, the Google Analytics code to run). Now, these poor souls are also going to have to endure the loading of YouTube videos and their accompanying ads. I can only hope that they’ve kept up with their life insurance premiums.”

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