What we didn’t know, until now, is how greatly other link services would benefit from news of the closure.

Late last week, Delicious competitor Pinboard tweeted a link to a screenshot of its traffic graph from the couple of days following the Yahoo leak, overlaid on more-typical traffic from previous days.

The sea-foam green area is Pinboard traffic after the leak, in number of server requests per minute (not unique or new visitors, which would undoubtedly be far lower).

The tiny blue and purple areas beneath represent typical request rates.

You can click on the graph to see it in full size, though the sense of scale speaks for itself.

As displayed by its policy of declining to give Google a way to extract user email addresses–which Google called it out on last week–Facebook is clearly worried about Google extending its excellent Gmail product with a rocket booster of emails imported from Facebook for a competing social tool. The timing of all this is coming to a head as the companies seek to release products before the end of the year.

So, is a social network that adds email better or worse than an email service that adds social?

Put another way, if you had to give up your Facebook or Gmail, which would go first?

An email service from Facebook would almost certainly have novel social features and the company’s trademark opt-out viral hooks. The Facebook emails will supposedly include @facebook.com addresses (and probably be the unique usernames that people have set up through Facebook’s vanity URL program). They would also be integrated into other Facebook products along with Office.

Meanwhile, a social product from Google, if done well, is one of the only things that could knock the young Facebook out of its dominance in the category. So many people today already depend on Google (you may have heard of its search product) and trust its brand.

Will Facebook email have Gmail’s hallmark feature, conversation threading? Will some young people who only use Facebook and texting for communication even notice a difference? Will Facebook finally release a better calendaring tool alongside email? We’ll let you know as soon as we find out.

By the way, this comment from Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal explaining why Facebook doesn’t want to export email addresses to Google (even though it already sends them to Yahoo and Microsoft) looks a bit different four days later:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

In August, the Worcester, Mass., paper put up a Times-style pay wall: Visitors can read 10 “local” articles a month for free, but after that they need to pay up. It’s not a coincidence that the Telegram is using the same idea that the Times will try in a few months–the paper is one of several local titles owned by the Times itself.

So. How’s that Telegram doing since the wall went up?

Just great, Times CEO Janet Robinson said during the paper’s earnings call today: The Telegram’s metrics are “on plan,” and traffic hasn’t suffered.

In fact, Robinson said, the Times was pleasantly surprised to see that the Telegram’s unique visitors number had increased since the wall went up.

What’s that? I asked the Times for numbers to flesh that one out, but it declined. ComScore, though, does back Robinson up: The Web traffic counter says 281,000 U.S. unique visitors came by the Telegram in August, and that number crept up to 294,000 in September.

That’s a tiny bump, though comScore often has a difficult time measuring smaller sites. For comparison’s sake, note that the Telegram tells advertisers it reaches 700,000 uniques a month.

Still, a bump is a bump. And it’s certainly not the plummet that many people would expect. When the London Times put up a pay wall this summer, for instance, it saw traffic drop a reported 90 percent. (News Corp. owns both the London Times and this site.)

So how do we explain the Telegram’s increase? In the absence of input from the Times or the Telegram (I’ve asked both for comment), we have to speculate. Feel free to add your own in, but I can start with a few theories:

• Maybe the Telegram had some particularly blog-friendly, Facebook-friendly or Google-friendly stories in September. If that’s the case, the metered model would work well for the site, since it encourages casual visitors to show up via referral, without having to pay up. For a relatively modest site like the Telegram, you wouldn’t need many high-traffic stories to push up its base number.
• Or maybe it’s just as simple as a seasonal spike: Traffic numbers often droop in the summer, when people have better things to do than sit in front of their browsers, and then spike back up in the fall.

In any case, this should give the Times a bit of confidence about its strategy for the flagship paper, which it promises to tell us more about soon.

UPDATE: Some readers are having a hard time accepting Robinson’s assertions and comScore’s numbers.

I have no reason to think that Robinson, the Times or the Telegram made the data up. If you’re a conspiracist who thinks otherwise, you should note that the NYT wasn’t boasting about the data during the call, though Robinson did take time to read off a whole laundry list of digital accomplishments. It only came up in response to a question about the Telegram’s performance.

But different third-party analytics companies often reach different conclusions. So if you do want to look at a different data set, here’s one from Compete, via Jonathan Mendez. As you can see, it tells a very different story–a 20 percent drop from August to September (click to enlarge):

BlueCava hopes that its device identification system may eventually replace online tracking tools such as cookies. Instead, BlueCava hopes companies will track users based on their device IDs. Consumers will be able to visit BlueCava to see how they are being tracked and to choose not to be tracked.

“We represent a brand new way to disclose to consumers how they can receive targeted advertising,” said BlueCava Chief Executive David Norris. “Some people view us as the next generation of technology that will extend beyond what cookies can do.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

We’ll see more of this over time, as the overstuffed ad network industry consolidates, and this one makes some sense on paper: BBE, formerly known as Broadband Enterprises, specializes in video ads, and Specific doesn’t have any video business at all.

I don’t have a price for the deal, though industry observers guesstimate that BBE might go for something in the $65 million to $85 million range.

I’ve asked officials at both companies for comment, but the best I’ve been able to do is get Specific Media co-founder and SVP Russell Vanderhook on the phone. He told me he was “not the one to speak to about that” and promised to pass my message on to his brother Tim Vanderhook, who is CEO. (There’s a third Vanderhook at Specific, too: Chris, who is COO).

BBE is one of the biggest ad networks in the world, at least by comScore’s measurement: It says the company’s ads reach 192.8 million unique visitors per month, enough to earn it the No. 6 slot.

By comparison, comScore pegs Yahoo’s ad network at 185 million, AOL at 183.6 million and Google at 181.5 million. And the measurement company says Specific Media reaches 158.6 million, which puts it in 22nd place. [UPDATE: The BBE number that comScore provides is for "potential reach," which is awfully theoretical, while the other network data represents a "real" audience. Thanks to Tod M. Sacerdoti, who runs BBE competitor BrightRoll, for catching my mistake.]

Specific is getting more than an ad network with BBE. The company runs its own video ad-serving arm, which industry observers tell me has been performing quite well.

BBE raised $10 million in 2008 from Velocity Interactive Group, now known as Fuse Capital. Specific has raised a reported $110 million since 2006.

[Image credit: Steve aka Crispin Swan]

Bleacher Report is a two-year old company roughly similar to the better-known SB Nation. The start-up employs lots of writers and stringers to produce lots of local content, claiming it is now churning out more than 500 stories a day.

The company is trying to make money by selling ads on its core site, which Quantcast says draws eight million monthly uniques. And it’s doing syndication deals with the likes of USAToday.com and some of Hearst’s newspapers; last I heard, it was also trying to get a deal with Tribune’s Los Angeles Times.

Bleacher Report has raised $8 million in two rounds; investments include Series A financing completed in February 2008 from Hillsven Capital, Gordon Crawford, SoftTech VC and, sort-of oddly, Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick.

The login page is prime real estate. ComScore (SCOR) says it attracts 26 million U.S. uniques per day, and Yahoo (YHOO) says the page is its third-most popular, after the homepage and Yahoo Mail page. But the Yahoo login has been ad-free–just a white page with a login box and some technical/privacy verbiage–for some 15 years.

Now Yahoo is renting out the page as a “takeover.” That is, everyone who visits the site on a given day sees the same thing.

How much is that worth? Yahoo won’t say. But note that the company is selling takeover spots for its OMG property for $80,000 a day. And OMG gets about 20 million uniques a month, a tiny slice of the login page’s reach.

The new ad units are supposed to cover your entire screen, and run 1,400 pixels wide; by comparison, the column of text you’re looking at now is 350 pixels wide. They’re supposed to be a canvas for “custom, gorgeous, beautiful engagements for an advertiser, that are really meant to be art,” says Yahoo ad VP Mitch Spolan.

Okay. So describing these initial Chevy ads as “art” is a bit of puffery. But they are big:

Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.

A study conducted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 84 percent of browsers leave a unique marker, via different combinations of settings and configurations. That percentage moves up to 94 percent if your browser uses plug-ins for Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash and Oracle’s (ORCL) Java.

What to do about it? There’s not a lot an individual user can do, the EFF says. But it says these kinds of broswers tend to be less identifiable than others:

• Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
• Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements
• Mobile devices like Google’s (GOOG) Android and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone (the study was conducted in January and February, before the iPad hit the market)
• Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another

So if you’re the kind of person who only browses the Web via your smartphone, perhaps you’ll be okay. Otherwise, “the best solution for web users may be to insist that new privacy protections be built into the browsers themselves,” the EFF suggests.

Or, failing that, accept that absolute privacy–the kind where no one has any ability whatsoever to track your actions–may be unattainable on the Web. The real solution may not be a technical one, but a social one, whereby we come to a rough agreement about what we’re okay sharing and what we really, really need to keep to ourselves. That could take a while.

“A Google approach to sharing,” Buzz is designed to, in the words of Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management, “find the signal in the social networking noise.”

The service exists within Gmail and promises to bring the social network that Google (GOOG) says always existed beneath the email service to the surface.

“The stream of social messages has become a torrent,” said Horowitz. “There is no way to parse that amount of information that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime. We think this has become a Google-scale problem.”

Hence, Buzz.

Buzz taps into the torrent via the sort of feature set you’d expect: auto-following, which turns Gmail contact lists into social networks (which seems to me a horrifically bad idea; Like most folks, I imagine I have quite a few contacts I absolutely do NOT want to included in my social network); public and private sharing options; support of the “@ reply” feature popularized by Twitter; and a feature called “Recommended Buzz” that allows users to endorse updates they enjoy. The service also strives to make it easy to enhance those updates with content from other sites–Flickr, Picasa, YouTube and, yes, Twitter (no Facebook, though–yet).

Buzz, which launches Tuesday, is closely tied to Google’s mobile ambitions. It will debut in concert with a Web app for Android and iPhone and an enhancement to Google Maps for Mobile that will use GPS data to associate public Buzz content posted from mobile phones with location.

Google is the latest search company to try to graft social-networking features onto email service. Yahoo did it last year by adding “status casting,” its variation on Twitter, to Yahoo Mail. That feature has been mostly ignored since its debut. Perhaps Google’s effort will fare a bit better. It is, perhaps, the one company with enough heft and market power to reasonably take on Facebook. But it won’t be easy: Facebook has some 400 million unique users. Gmail, about 176 million.

Still, embrace and extend. Embrace and extend.

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

How to help marketers to better understand the site and, therefore, spur this significant monetization will be his main focus at the Huffington Post, said Greg Coleman to BoomTown in an interview over the weekend.

Coleman–a former Yahoo (YHOO) advertising exec, as well as one for Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL–was named president and chief revenue officer a month ago by Huffington Post’s new CEO, Eric Hippeau.

Hippeau, who was himself just appointed in June, is another well-known online media exec and has been a big investor and board member of the Huffington Post. (You can read a thorough interview by Staci Kramer with Hippeau on paidContent.)

“It’s important for advertisers to know how big we have gotten, while also highlighting this amazing audience of influencers we have gathered,” said Coleman, in his first media chitchat since taking on the job. “I think it is the beginning of a tipping point.”

Well, of course, Coleman would say that, as the guy looking to drum up interest among marketers in spending their money on the Huffington Post.

But stats seem to indicate that consumers are increasingly liking what the Huffington Post is creating, because it is starting to surpass some well-known media icons on the Web in traffic.

While more of this increase is going to be due to a socialization of the news–the Huffington Post has an aggressive deployment of Facebook Connect called HuffPost Social News–the growth is more about building a brand people trust and seek out.

According to recent reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online, for example, the site just became larger than several online brands of big media companies, such as the Washington Post (WPO), in terms of unique monthly visitors.

In its September report, Nielsen clocked the Huffington Post at 9.47 million uniques, up 26 percent, while the Post site was at 9.2 million–a drop of 30 percent.

According to the Nielsen, the Huffington Post is within spitting distance of USA Today’s Web site (9.9 million), a Gannett (GCI) property.

And, it is bigger than Hearst Newspapers Digital (7.9 million) and the BBC (7.2 million).

For September, comScore has the Huffington Post (at 6.83 million) besting the Post (6.77 million)–as well as WSJ.com (6.7 million), a unit of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS).

(The Wall Street Journal site, to be fair, makes a chunk of its revenue from subscription fees, rather than relying solely on advertising from traffic like the Huffington Post. And full disclosure: Dow Jones owns this site.)

In any case, big traffic is key for most news sites, and internal numbers from Google (GOOG) Analytics that Huffington Post execs cite are higher, as is typical for most sites, pegging traffic at about 27 million monthly uniques with more than two million reader comments per month.

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging icon Arianna Huffington attributes the recent boost in traffic to the site’s proclivity to “start conversations” that interest readers, such as her recent suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should resign.

“We are aiming to go beyond just facts, to create a narrative,” said Huffington, who thinks the speed of news helps attract visitors to the site. “We think bringing journalism to a new level is exactly what people are looking for.”

Perhaps. But, even if traffic increases continue to bear her theories out, she and others have said that the Huffington Post still has not been regularly profitable despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

While the site is aiming to invest rather than focus too hard on showing profits, Coleman said he would like to make revenue seven times larger in the next years, building on the performance of the site to vaunt past old media giants online.

“This kind of thing is a milestone for the marketing community,” he said. “Our goal is to be the top Internet newspaper, and this points out that we are on our way.”

To do that, he will have to spend some of the $37 million in funding that the Huffington Post has raised from venture investors.

While the edit side is using the money to expand the number of news categories, Coleman said his focus will be on building a higher caliber team of sales and marketing execs with deeper relationships to big clients.

“Unlike selling an auto page on Yahoo (YHOO), our site has a more complex sales process that takes some time for people to understand,” said Coleman. “But once they get it, it should be an easier sale.”

Until then, check out the video of the entire interview I did at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Huffington and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth in which they talk about the future of journalism and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091020/as-traffic-booms-is-huffpo-ready-to-make-some-real-dough/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090320/cbs-says-no-ones-getting-anything-done-at-work-march-madness-web-traffic-up-56/ http://allthingsd.com/20090320/cbs-says-no-ones-getting-anything-done-at-work-march-madness-web-traffic-up-56/#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:33:38 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5540 I’ve only watched a couple minutes of March Madness so far, and I haven’t watched a second on my laptop. But apparently I’m in the minority: CBS, which is streaming the entire college basketball tournament for free on the Web, says traffic to its video player is up 56 percent compared to last year.

CBS (CBS) says it logged more than 2.7 million uniques to the player in the first day of tournament; last year it logged 1.75 million during the same period. And it says it has streamed 2.8 million hours of live video and audio so far, up 65 percent from last year.

Bonus stat for the good people of Comcast (CMCSA), who are sponsoring the player’s “Boss Button”–users have clicked on the defraud-your-employer tool 1.5 million times. Last year’s figure was 2.5 million for the entire tournament. But no stats from CBS on the number of people who have used Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight software to watch the games on HD.

Most important stat for CBS and its advertisers: Television viewing, which is still much more important than any Web metric, was up nine percent for the day. Another vote in favor of the “Web video is additive, not cannibalizing” argument.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090320/cbs-says-no-ones-getting-anything-done-at-work-march-madness-web-traffic-up-56/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/ http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:39:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1939 That was fun writing not-bad news from Time Inc. yesterday. Let’s try it again:

While it’s true that Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is embattled, there are bright spots in the portfolio. Take People.com: The gossip magazine has always been one of Time’s strongest performers (good luck trying to find a discounted subscription). Now its companion Web site is, too.

The site boasts 8.6 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR), up 36 percent in the last year, and generates a staggering 700 million page views per month–per Omniture (OMTR). Meanwhile, once-hot sites like TMZ.com (another Time Warner property) have tailed off.

Much of the credit for that goes to Mark Golin, the awesomely sharp and frumpy editor best known as the man behind Maxim magazine’s rise, way back in the late 1990s. He’s successfully broadened the site beyond just Britney/Paris/Lindsay news by adding features like a game channel, a shopping channel and the like.

One of the most successful expansions came via acquisition: When People.com bought Celebrity Baby Blog back in May, it was generating 6.9 million page views per month. Now it’s doing 30 million, Time execs say. And before my fellow journobloggers dismiss the work that the people at Celebrity Baby Blog do, ask yourself this: Did you know that Ashlee Simpson has named her kid Bronx Mowgli? Aren’t you glad you know now?

In any case, all those page views are translating into actual dollars–not digital pennies, as NBC’s Jeff Zucker would say. Time Inc. says People.com is now one of its 10 most profitable titles–that’s out of all of the company’s 174 properties, on or offline.

The company won’t attach numbers to that claim, of course. But given that Time Inc. generated $162 million in operating profit during a very lousy third quarter, you can get some sense of the property’s success. Now Time just needs many more just like it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck/ http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:52:23 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7909 Tuesday’s presidential election was a historic one for more than just the obvious reasons. Monomaniacal interest in its outcome drove Internet usage to a new record. According to Akamai Technologies, which operates a content delivery network that includes the likes of CNN, NBC, and the BBC, traffic to its member news sites reached 8.57 million visitors-per-minute at 11 p.m. EST, right around the time Barack Obama delivered his victory speech.

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck-2/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:52:23 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=7909 Tuesday’s presidential election was a historic one for more than just the obvious reasons. Monomaniacal interest in its outcome drove Internet usage to a new record. According to Akamai Technologies, which operates a content delivery network that includes the likes of CNN, NBC, and the BBC, traffic to its member news sites reached 8.57 million visitors-per-minute at 11 p.m. EST, right around the time Barack Obama delivered his victory speech.

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081105/and-we-couldnt-have-done-it-without-jessica-yellin-and-the-cnn-holodeck-2/feed/ 0