Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.

Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.

In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.

StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.

Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.

Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.

Google has stated that they are doing this because they wish to create a “beautiful, simple and intuitive experience” for their users.

In effect, the new policy will make it possible to share information provided by a user on one Google product across all other Google products and features. This includes Gmail, Google Search, YouTube, Google Plus and others.

A major stumbling block of this new policy is the fact that users will not have the option to disagree with the policy if they wish to continue using any of these Google services.

Consumer Objections

Users have voiced their discontent via comments and votes on the YouTube video introducing the new, unified privacy policy. The major bone of contention for users seems to be that information from any one Google service will now be accessible to a host of other services.

Regular consumers are not blind to the fact that Google makes its money from advertising. They also accept that in order to advertise on all of its services, Google does need to be able to pull information from one service and use it elsewhere. What they dislike is the idea that Google is mixing the concept of privacy in a closed system such as GMail with that on an open network such as Google+ or YouTube.

Official Investigations Triggered

Not surprisingly, the announcement has not gone down too well with certain groups. Gary Davis, the Data Protection Commissioner in Dublin, where Google’s European headquarters are based, has said that their office would be “further assessing the implications of the changes now that they are launched to users”. He also said that “Google has a responsibility to ensure that any such changes are made abundantly clear to users”.

Greg Jones from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office said, “Failure to inform users about changes may not only lead to a loss of trust in the company, but could also mean that they are failing to comply” with U.K. law.

Exceptions to this new policy will be Google Books, Google Chrome and Google Wallet. These sites will continue to retain their own privacy policy.This exception is due to legal reasons.

The new policy will come into effect from the 1st of March 2012.

According to this report, the list is similar to the one they had released last year. However, there has been a significant increase in the number of unique visitors to most of the top sites.

It is no surprise that search, social networking and video remain at the top of the reasons for mobile browsing with Google, Facebook and YouTube scoring the top three rankings respectively.

The world’s 10 most popular mobile websites are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. vkontakte.ru
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com
10. twitter.com

The report has compared the findings between November 2011 and November 2010. Apart from seeing rapid growth in Asia, Opera Mini has also found a substantial increase in mobile Web usage in Latin America, Africa and South East Asia.

Delicious was part of the Yahoo! network and used to be one of the most popular sites in its category. In December last year, there was news that Yahoo! intended to shut down the website.

Following this, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who had earlier developed and then sold YouTube, decided to buy it over from Yahoo! Delicious was taken over as part of their new company called Avos, which they had formed in April 2011.

Both Hurley and Chen had been thinking about the fact that there is always a flood of information on the Internet, and it is very difficult for users to go through all of it and reach the information that they are really looking for. With the revamp of Delicious, they hope to be able to simplify this process for users.

The new Delicious is supposedly a place where users can see the most recent links shared around topical events. On the homepage, users will now see browseable “stacks”, which are collections of images, videos or links to a particular topic.

Stack on Delicious about the TV programme, Merlin

Speaking about the newly launched site, Chad Hurley sa, “We want to simplify things visually, mainstream the product and make it easier for people to understand what they’re doing.” If this idea catches on, Delicious could soon become far more popular than it ever was in the past.

However, the first mover advantage that Delicious once had is no longer the case. Sites like Facebook and Google+ already have far more viewers and are extremely popular for social sharing. StumbleUpon has steadily grown in popularity as a social discovery tool.

Since the demise of Delicious a number of bookmarking sites have stepped in, but none have become quite as popular. While the organisation of information that the new service offers is great, conceptually, the new owners of Delicious might find that their absence from the market has cost them dearly and that they’ve missed the boat to become a social media powerhouse.

YouTube’s parent company, Google, has been fighting a court case with several music publishers and TV / Movie companies regarding the use of pirated and copyrighted content on YouTube since 2007. Viacom had also filed a class action suit at the same time.

In 2007, the courts ruled in favour of Google, stating that YouTube was protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The litigants had filed an appeal against the verdict at the time.

The parties concerned have now arrived at an understanding whereby Google will pay royalties to the music company concerned for the use of their content on YouTube.

Financial details of the agreement have not been revealed.

A post on the YouTube blog says, “We already have deals in place with a number of music publishers in the U.S. and around the world, and today’s deal offers more choice for rights holders in how they manage use of their songs.”

The blog further states that “When these publishers allow YouTube to run ads alongside user-generated videos that incorporate their compositions, the publishers and the songwriters they represent can make money.”

While the deal has been signed only with publishers, it is also expected to benefit songwriters, recording artists and record labels. This will be possible thanks to Google’s Content ID technology, which allows recognition of songs and other music.

How exactly Google will monetise the content sufficiently to pay for every instance of copyright infringement is not clear. However, the relatively recent success of YouTube’s monetisation efforts obviously will play a big part in this.

While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.

In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.

However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.

This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.

A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.

YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.

In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.

As the name suggests, the service gets activated when any user decides to watch a video on YouTube for the first time on any given day. In other words, this is a new kind of pre-roll ad.

In the past, ads in the header would start playing as soon as the YouTube homepage was opened. According to Baljeet Singh, Senior Product Manger at YouTube, the ads on the homepage were highly successful and were “Starting to sell out.” Hence they felt the need to try a new form of pre-roll advertising.

First Watch ads are an extensionof the ads that are visible on the top of the YouTube homepage. These ad units will be visible to users who avoided watching the ad on the homepage and instead directly reached an inner page on YouTube by clicking on a link or when they visit a channel directly.

YouTube has been trialling this new facility. They have already rolled out such First Watch ads to about 15 million users and have received click-through rates around 1%, which is pretty good.

An advertiser interested in this service would need to buy a spot on the first video view by users on a given day.

First Watch ads will be applicable only to professional content partners such as The Onion, Tommy Hilfiger, Macy’s Inc and other similar brands. It will not be applicable to regular user-generated videos.

It is not yet known what YouTube will charge advertisers for this new service. However, Baljeet Singh said that it was “comparable” to what they charged for videos on YouTube.com “but less expensive”.

In the past, advertisers were charged their average cost per click amount every time a user clicked on a promoted video ad, irrespective of whether or not the user then actually viewed the video. This system obviously was not ideal for advertisers and is therefore due to be changed.

From the 25th of May, promoted video ads on YouTube will be charged on a CPV basis, which means that the advertiser will only be charged when a user actually begins to view the promoted video. This change will benefit advertisers as the number of times they will be charged for clicks could be reduced, giving them a better return on investment.

Promoted video ads on a YouTube search results page

Now, when a new promoted video campaign is created, advertisers will be required to set a maximum CPV, which represents the maximum amount they are willing to pay per view of the promoted video.

AdWords will continue to use the old format of charging only one cent more than the next advertiser who is competing for the same slot on the page, with similar keywords. Advertisers can continue to set up the campaigns in AdWords or at ads.youtube.com as before. From the 25th of this month, the billing terms for all the video campaigns will officially be converted from the CPC model to the CPV model.

Advertisers may continue to see the CPC terms in their campaign for some time as additional CPV reporting formats are introduced gradually.

For quite some time now, YouTube has been one of the most popular sites on the Internet and provides its users with a variety of content ranging from personally made videos to sporting events, live concerts, breaking news and a lot more.

They have now expanded this service by tying up with some major Hollywood studios to roll out about 3,000 titles for rental in due course of time. These movies will be accompanied by reviews from popular movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes and behind-the-scenes information.

New releases for rent on YouTube Movies

Some of the major studios that have agreed to tie-up with YouTube for this service include Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros, Universal pictures and Lionsgate.

Older movies such as ‘Good Fellas’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ will be available for a lower fee of $2.99. New releases such as ‘Inception’ and ‘The King’s Speech’ will be charged at $3.99. Movies that were previously offered for free will remain free to view on the new service as well.

This service is expected directly compete with sites such as Netflix and Redbox. However, these sites are currently priced a lot cheaper than YouTube, and so YouTube might eventually have to rethink their pricing strategy, which currently seems closer to old-fashioned rental services such as Blockbuster.

Expanded movie rental services from YouTube will help to further consolidate the video-sharing site’s position in the market, while at the same time narrowing the gap between online video and television.

This service has only been started in the U.S. as of now, and it will serve their 105 million customers. Once Google expands this service and realigns prices in other regions such as Europe and Asia, they could make it a real success as online rental services are not very popular there and theirs would be the only popular service to offer immediate legitimate streaming movies.

Happy Feet movie rental page with reviews, previews and related videos

This is the first nationally broadcast television ad for the Chrome browser. It is a 91-second ad and was aired during the popular US television series, Glee.

Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users have been sharing the video widely since its release just 3 days ago, generating almost half a million views on YouTube and a lot of discussion for and against it.

This isn’t the first time that Google has shown a definite pro-gay bias. They were pretty vocal about their stance on gay marriage too, when Proposition 8 was up for debate in California. However, this is the first time such a large corporation has launched a major product ad campaign on the back of a strong pro-gay and pro-equality stance.

Everyone from the President of the U.S.A, Barack Obama, to Lady Gaga, to regular gay and heterosxual users have posted messages supporting the campaign and voicing their solidarity with the gay community. A similar campaign in the U.K, called “It Gets Better Today”, featured Prime Minister David Cameron and the Home Secretary, Theresa May.

Well known writer and columnist, Dan Savage, who used to play agony uncle to gays through his column ‘Savage Love’ had first started this campaign. He used it as a means to encourage teenagers that life does indeed get better, by referring to his personal experiences with his partner, Terry. His original video has been viewed well over a million times.

He had said then, “When a gay teenager commits suicide, it’s because he can’t picture a life for himself that’s filled with joy and family and pleasure and is worth sticking around for. So I felt it was really important that, as gay adults, we show them that our lives are good and happy and healthy and that there’s a life worth sticking around for after high school.”

This campaign is especially thoughtful as it seeks to help youngsters who need to come to terms with their so called “different” preferences, and deal with their family friends and colleagues who may have a lot of prejudices towards them and can end up hurting or being mean to them at a very delicate phase of their lives.

At the same time,  this ad will help Chrome to compete with its competitors, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, which currently have a much larger market share than Chrome.

They have selected Accenture PLC to build their official website, and Accenture in turn has decided that Google and their Video site YouTube are best equipped to handle the event.

It is estimated that about 400 million people will watch the event online. While this is a huge figure, nearly 2 billion are expected to watch on TV.

The official Google website will be the main source through which all authorised information will be relayed.

The revelation of the bride’s wedding dress is expected to generate much curiosity as also the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

Live feeds will also be posted on Twitter and Facebook.  Other broadcasters like BBC and CNN will also be relaying the events and it is hoped that the internet will not collapse under the pressure.

In the past events such as the death of Michael Jackson and the inauguration of Barack Obama have generated a lot of interest but this event is expected to be bigger.

While experts believe that the internet will be able to hold out, it is hoped that the mobile networks, which will also see a lot of pressure will not collapse.

Prince William’s spokeswoman has said, ‘We can’t predict what is going to happen with the Internet, but we are doing this with Google and YouTube — and if anyone has the experience to do this, it’s Google and YouTube.”

They had tries this feature last year during the Indian Premier League cricket matches, and they will now go ahead with this service on a regular basis.

An announcement on the site says, “Today, we’ll also start gradually rolling out our live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube. The goal is to provide thousands of partners with the capability to live stream from their channels in the months ahead. In order to ensure a great live stream viewing experience, we’ll roll this offering out incrementally over time.”

For these live broadcasts, users can turn to http://www.youtube.com/live.

They will start with a live relay of ‘The DigiTour’ which will be running for 6 weeks across various cities in America.

YouTube partners, in the cities where the concerts will be held, will be able to make the most of this opportunity by reaching out to a large audience during this event as also during all future live events.

• YouTube Trends Dashboard

Topics of interest can range from news and events to pop culture, people, new ideas and much more. For instance, during the last week, some of the videos in trending topics ranged from footage of the protests in Syria and a tornado in Pennsylvania to a videos about the supposed worst singer in the world and cartoons about the Middle East leaders.

The Trends blog lets people get to know what is happening around the world in real time. The feature highlights the daily trending topics twice a day – at 4.00 a.m. ET and at 4.00 p.m. ET. The four most viewed videos during this time frame are highlighted.

YouTube Trends Dashboard allows users to find out what are the hottest topics of the day across different demographic groups worldwide. The most popular videos of the day are shown according to location, age group and gender of the user along with information about the most shared, trending videos and trending topics.

In the screenshot above, the YouTube Trends Dashboard is being used to compare the most viewed videos in the United Kingdom for Males versus Females aged 25 – 34 years versus all users aged 55 – 64 years. Videos that are unique to the older demographic are highlighted with the red number.

This feature can be of great help to advertisers and agencies as it can tell them what sort of topics a particular group of people would be interested in. They can then select appropriate ad content designed specifically for their target audience.

As expected, Google continues to be the number one site, with a very wide margin. However, they have undergone a slight setback, as the number of unique viewers has gone down from 144.1 million in January to 141.1 million in February. The number of minutes spent online per session has also gone down.

On the other hand, Microsoft has had a very good month as they have risen from ranking seventh in January to ranking second in February. They have also had 48.8 million unique viewers in February which represents an absolute increase of 10.7 million visitors more than they had January.

Yahoo! has retained the third place as before and Facebook is now fourth in the list, in place of Viacom. VEVO, which was second in January, now occupies the fifth place, and Viacom is sixth, in place of Facebook. AOL has now taken Microsoft’s previous position at number seven. Turner Digital has retained the eighth spot in both months. Hulu, which was tenth in January, is now at number nine, and NBC has entered the list at number ten.

The study also shows that 170 million users watched online videos in February in the U.S. at an average of 13.6 hours per viewer and more than 5 billion viewing sessions.

It remains to be seen if the list will remain more or less steady in March or will change drastically again.

The largest spending was seen in November ($14.5 billion) and December ($18.1 billion). Cyber Monday – the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday – broke all records with $1.028 billion being spent in a single day.

Among electronic items, flat panel TVs and mobile devices were the fastest selling, followed by computer hardware.

Online Consumers

Group buying through sites such as Groupon and Living Social gained tremendous popularity during the year. Social networks also continued to grow. Facebook became the number 1 site in August 2010, for time spent online, beating sites like Google and Yahoo! It now accounts for 12.3% of the total time spent online in The U.S.

The amount of time spent on leisure activities online also grew in 2010. Portals represented 20.2% of the share of time spent online, while social networks accounted for 14.4% and entertainment sites for 12.6%.

Social Networks

The growth of social media caused web-based email usage to reduce from 12.5% to 11.0%, especially among the younger generation. Social networking accounts for 14.4% of all time spent online, but its share much higher for youngsters. Women also tend to spend more time on social networks than men.

Facebook also now accounts for 10% of the U.S. page views and has gained millions of new users. MySpace, on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline, losing 27% of its users. LinkedIn, Twitter and several new social sites continue to grow gradually. While it has lost some users in the 35-54 years demographic, the number of users below 18 years and above 55 years have grown significantly. On the other hand, Twitter saw maximum gain in the 18-34 years demographic.

Search Marketing

The search market has also seen innovation with the introduction of instant search by Google. Google continues to be the market leader in the States, with over 60% of the market share, while Yahoo! had 16% and Microsoft had 12% in December 2010. ‘Facebook’ was the most searched term, with 1.9 billion queries in 2010, followed by ‘YouTube’ with 790.7 million searches.

Online advertising has grown by 23% between December 2009 and 2010. Leading brands have now started reallocating a larger share of their ad spend to online advertising. Over 1 trillion display ads were shown on Facebook and 529.4 billion ads on Yahoo! The strategies being used for display as have also improved resulting in better user response especially through retargeting. The online video and TV market are also growing, which is a fact that advertisers should take note of.

The Egyptian protests, which started last Tuesday, have been gaining ground. The opposition in Egypt declared January 25 as a “Day of Rage” to end the 30 year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

People with varying ideologies ranging from Islamist to Communists and Secularists have come together for this protest. They have been gathering in huge numbers on streets and squares. They have been shouting and burning symbols of the dictatorial government.

The government, for its part, is doing all it can to subdue the protestors. They have set out the secret police as well as the riot police. They have resorted to using water cannons and even assaulting the public.

Egyptian government officials have also tried to deactivate the mobile towers and block sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which are being used for propaganda.

While they have succeeded in blocking communication channels to an extent, they have not been entirely successful in doing so. Users are still able to access Twitter in English, Arabic and French. Mobile phones are also partially functional. Photographs and videos of the protests which have been uploaded are being sent around the world by supporters of the uprising.

A curfew was imposed in the country on Friday, but it was defied. The riots have reached such proportions that the police were eventually forced to retreat and the army had to be called out to control the situation for the first time in 25 years.

Update: Google has joined in on the fray by enabling Egyptians to call a local number in order to tweet about the uprising. The new service has been introduced via SayNow, a company that Google bought just last week.

Enterprising young job seekers have tried various means to attract the attention of potential employers. Some advertised their portfolio pages and personal websites for relevant keywords and even for particular brand and key executive names, so that their job application would show up alongside organic results on Google.

Recently, an innovative PR executive took things one step further, potentially changing the age-old system forever.

Graeme Anthony was on the lookout for a new jobwhen he changed his residence from Manchester to London. He created a video, using his skills and talents and then uploaded the video on YouTube. The video not only contained an introduction to himself, but also contained sections such as ‘Skills’, ‘Portfolio’ and ‘Contact’. Viewers could decide which section to view first.

Apart from being live and interactive, rather than a dull representation on paper, the video is also interspersed with a healthy doze of humour, which could rarely have come across well on a CV document.

The video, which was uploaded last September, has certainly got a lot of attention. It received 2,000 views within the first hour of being uploaded. Anthony’s Twitter account was also mentioned a number of times with comments regarding the video.

More importantly, the video also drew the attention of potential employers, some of whom even commented on their corporate blogs, calling it “the best job application ever.”

On his part, Graeme says, “It brings me to life in a completely new way. It shows off my personality in a way a paper CV can’t. It’s got the wow factor.”

Recently, Frank PR, an agency based in London, saw the video and after interviewing him, gave him the job.

This rule will automatically make the companies responsible for all content on their site and they will thus have to comply with certain rules and regulations including:

• They will have to pay a tax of €500
• Content considered inappropriate for children will have to be restricted to certain times of the day
• Corrections will have to be made within 48 hours, when requested by any person or group who feels they have been slandered or victimised on a video
• The company will be held responsible for all content on the site.

YouTube Would Need To Change Functionality

As far as the restriction of content according to time is considered, YouTube’s current configuration would make this impossible to control. Since YouTube supplies video on demand, unlike conventional TV broadcasters that can schedule their programmes as required, YouTube cannot normally control when users request a video.

In order to comply with the new regulation, YouTube would have to build new functionality that would make requested content unavailable before the watershed hour if it is considered to be inappropriate for minors.

Impossible Task

Also, as far as editorial content and control are concerned, videos are uploaded on YouTube independently by individuals, and YouTube does not have any control over this content. An estimated 24 hours of video footage are uploaded on the site every minute, making it practically impossible for YouTube to censor or control all of the content even if they wanted to.

Rumour has it that these rules have been imposed for the convenience of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who owns several large TV networks in Italy, and currently has a €500 million law suit going on against YouTube with respect to copyrighted content.

Google’s Options

YouTube’s parent company, Google, has a couple of options available to them under the circumstances. They can block all IP addresses from Italy and redirect users to use some other proxy address. Alternatively, they could do what they did a while ago in China, and withdraw their operations completely from Italy.

If the latter were to happen, the Italian public would raise a hue and cry and demand that these rules be withdrawn.

TrueView ads will allow viewers to not only choose whether or not they want to watch an ad, but also when they want to watch it.

The best part of this format, for advertisers is that they will be charged only when the viewer chooses to actually see the ad, and not when the ad impression is served. This cost-per-video-view ad model is good for advertisers as they will reach their target audience and only pay when their ad is watched.

Users will also benefit from the new format as it allows them to skip through ads that don’t interest them.

Just Like TV, But Better

Traditional television advertising works in the same way – users view ads before and during the content they’re interested in. However, unlike traditional TV ads, which must be endured by all viewers or can be walked (or channel surfed) away from,  TrueView ads will be skippable and will be priced per actual view only.

With the TrueView Video Ads – In Stream, which play as a pre roll or post roll ad along with a video, the viewer can select or skip a video ad after watching it for 5 seconds, and the advertiser is charged only if the ad has been watched fully or for 30 seconds whichever is shorter.

YouTube has already been experimenting with this ad format in their Promoted Videos advertising service too. They have found that users choose to see those ads that are relevant and interesting to them.

TrueView ad playing on YouTube

Advertisers will be able to collect data about the type of audience that shows interest in their ads. This will help them not only target future ad campaigns better, but also to align products to their target audience.

Google has also tested this system over a large audience and the results indicate a view-through rate between 20-70%. This means that between 20-70% of users have chosen to view the ad during the trial stages, which is an adequate response. This ad format was also tried during the recent U.S. mid term elections and the campaigns were fairly successful.

Hulu also offers viewers a similar choice – to watch or skip an ad. Hulu.com offers it in an InSlate format where users can watch one ad out of several or take a regular commercial break.

At present this ad format is available only in the U.S. and Canada and for limited testing in the U.K.

According to this deal, the societies concerned will be paid by YouTube whenever any of the works of artistes affiliated with them are shown on YouTube.

The three societies are SACD, SCAM and ADAGP. These societies represent artistes ranging from directors and screen writers to film makers and authors. The society in turn will distribute the money to the artistes.

The financial details of the deal are not yet available but the payments will be starting from 2007 when YouTube was first launched in France. The contract will remain valid until 2013, but only for content which is seen in France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

A couple of months ago, YouTube had made a similar deal with music video makers. These deals could well be part of the strategy to counter the competition they could receive from Dailymotion, which is planning to introduce content from 20 TV channels.

Although this means that YouTube will have to spend a considerable amount of money, it may be assumed that they might make up for this from any additional advertising they may get for the added content and larger audience on their channel.

Christophe Muller of YouTube says, “The YouTube community will benefit from an ever wider range of videos and will contribute to the promotion of French original creations globally.’

The study, which received responses from over 16,000 participants, found that 75% of users access m.youtube.com primarily through mobile and 70% of them report that they access YouTube Mobile at least once a day. 58% of users spend at least 20 minutes per session on YouTube Mobile and 38% of users feel that YouTube Mobile is fast replacing desktop YouTube usage.

Another report, which was published by Nielsen, shows that YouTube Mobile has now turned into the number one mobile video viewing site in the U.S. with over 7.1 MM monthly unique users.

The growing usage of the mobile to access YouTube is, of course, a good thing for YouTube Mobile, but it is also beneficial to advertisers as they can now reach a much larger audience if they advertise on m.youtbe.com.

As an additional incentive to attract advertisers, YouTube Mobile has now made it possible for advertisers to purchase a daily roadblock running across all available ad impressions for a 24-hour period. The ads run on the search, browse and home page of the mobile website. Campaigns for a variety of products, ranging from entertainment and retail to auto and consumer packaged goods have been successful on YouTube Mobile. Advertisers often run the roadblock to coincide with a product launch or a sales event.

Among the reasons for the growing use of the mobile to access YouTube, could be the fact that the newer range of handsets and Wi-Fi services now available provide a better user experience for video viewing, with better network speeds. Also, the cost of viewing or downloading videos on the mobile has come down considerably compared to earlier, thanks to the availability of better data plans.

The race to 1 billion viewers has finally come to an end, and Lady Gaga has emerged the winner. She hit the 1 billion mark on Sunday 24th October, while Justin Bieber had reached 962,726,797 views, according to reports from Famecount.

To announce this victory, Lady Gaga sent out a tweet saying, “We reached 1 billion views on YouTube little monsters! If we stick together we can do anything. I dub u kings and queens of YouTube! Unite!”

Though the race was quite closely run, sources had predicted that Lady Gaga was likely to reach the landmark first around the 20th of October, while Justin would get there around the 1st of November.

In spite of this so called victory by Lady Gaga, fans of Justin Bieber still consider him to be the “King” of YouTube as his song, ‘Baby’ is the most viewed video of all time on YouTube, with over 366 million views.

Lady Gaga had set up her YouTube account in May 2009, which means that to reach the 1 billion mark on the 24th of October 2010, over 21 people watched one of her videos on YouTube every second.

She is also the most followed person on Twitter, with about 7 million followers, while Justin Bieber and Britney Spears both have just over 6 million followers. Lady Gaga was also the first living person to have 10 million fans on Facebook.

A new site, called Demo Slam, was officially announced yesterday. The site hosts a competition of sorts, where two tech demos are pitted against each other, and Google will decide which one is better, based on a combination of user votes and video views.

www.demoslam.com

It is hoped that after seeing the initial tech demos seeded by Google, users will be inspired to develop their own tech demos on any subject and these demos may be more interesting to the average user when placed in such a setting.

In order to encourage users to see these demos, Google will conduct a competition each week, on a given subject.

Google’s first Demo Slam – Rushmore by Slam Force One v Chubby bunny by The Paul Brothers

Users can create a tech demo, upload the video on YouTube and submit their entries to the Demo Slam website, where selected demos will have the chance to compete against others and potentially earn more acclaim than they would have without Google’s help. Google wants these uploaded tech demos to be seen by as many people as possible so that they become aware of all the latest technology being made available to them by Google.

Submitting tech demos to Google Demo Slam

Users will be allowed to vote for their favourite videos during the weekly demo slam competition and a Demo Slam Champ will be selected every week.

While the format is cool and could potentially help push a few tech ideas further than they would have gone on their own steam, this doesn’t seem to be one for the masses. Have the Googlers at Mountain View run out of ideas or is this just the way for a few geeks to kill boredom?

When the company recently announced their earnings for the third quarter of 2010, they disclosed earnings from the display advertising, YouTube and mobile sectors of their business. CFO, Patrick Pichette, clarified that this may very well be a one-time disclosure that they are making, and they do not intend to do this on a regular basis.

The breakdown of earnings was not provided for any altruistic reasons. In fact, it was meant to prove to their detractors that search is not the only revenue-generating section of their business and that other sectors are making money as well.

Display advertising has had an annualised run rate of almost $2.5 billion. Google had earlier referred to display advertising as their next billion-dollar business, and it looks like they have already achieved that. Of course, a large part of the display ad business has come from DoubleClick, which Google acquired fora hefty price tag of $3.1 billion.

As far as YouTube is concerned, specific revenue numbers were not made available, but it was clarified that YouTube is now monetising 2 billion page views per week, which is an increase of 50% compared to the previous year. Based on some recent reports, Ben Parr at Mashable concludes that YouTube should now be generating approximately $1 billion per year in revenue.

Google’s mobile business has had an annualised run rate of $1 billion this year, which is a very positive sign, and it is the mobile ad business which has been responsible for this growth, rather than the Android system which is available for free to companies.

In what can also be interpreted as yet another sign of growth, Google has also employed about 1,200 additional staff members, including about 300 through acquisitions and executives. They also intend to continue hiring more staff.

All of this extremely positive news has give the company’s stock a good boost of over 10% on the day following the earnings announcement. Share prices for GOOG went past the $600 mark today, reaching their highest point in the past 6 months.

GOOG stock value 12 – 18 Oct 2010

Live programming on YouTube will be available only to the four selected media partners, and not to individual users. These partners are:

• Rocketboom – a news and entertainment channel
• Young Hollywood – a celebrity and lifestyle programming channel
• Howcast – an instructional video service
• BarelyPolitical – Next New Networks’ political satire channel

Live streaming on BarelyPolitical’s YouTube channel

While YouTube has experimented with streaming live video in the past, such as on the occasion of U.S. President Obama’s first State of the Union address and the Indian Premier League cricket matches these were exceptional instances. This time, YouTube will be testing a new technology that will allow their partners to stream live videos continuously over an extended period of time.

The new service will eventually allow users to chat and interact with broadcasters and other users directly, even as they watch the video. They will only require a webcam or external USB / Firewire camera to do so.

Live streaming and live comments tested on YouTube

While this development from Google may be seen as a move to check Facebook, which has been eating into YouTube’s video market share, it will also lead to competition with other live streaming sites like Justin.tv, Ustream and Livestream.

YouTube has not yet set a date by which live streaming will be available to the general public. However, it is believed that the live streaming facility will be limited to professionally content producers only. The service is not likely to be extended to all individual users.

According to YouTube officials, advertisers have requested the addition of such a feature often. This feature is almost the reverse of the above feature, as it will allow advertisers to decide which videos or channels their ads should not be shown on.

This new feature will help advertisers to better target their ad campaigns to a select audience, thus giving them better value for money through a higher Click-through rate.

YouTube senior product manager Baljeet Singh says this feature will give more control to advertisers by allowing them to decide which videos and channels their ad should not appear on.

In the past advertisers had to depend on YouTube’s own marketing services to decide which ad should be shown at which juncture.

For instance if someone is advertising a vegan product, they would obviously not like to show their ad on a TV show or channel which concentrates mostly on meat products.

Even is the advertiser feels that a certain type of audience is inappropriate for his product, thus giving him a low conversion rate, he can optimize the campaign to suit his requirements.

51% of 1,654 people surveyed by online coupon site MyVoucherCodes say they see the Google search engine logo more than 50 times a day. Considering a typical working day to be 8 hours or 480 minutes long, this means that users see the Google logo approximately every 9 minutes.

According to the same study, Microsoft is the next most popular logo and 15% users say that they see its logo most often, while 11% say that Facebook is the most seen logo.

“Which logo do you see the most during an average day?”

About 47% of users say that Google is their homepage or they navigate to the Google page first. 53% users use the site to check spellings and 52% say that they access Google Search between 10 and 20 times daily.

Data from Hitwise indicates that Facebook accounted for 17% of page views in the U.K. in June 2010. It was found that 1 in 6 page views in the U.K. were served by Facebook, which means that Facebook is undeniably one of the most important websites for online advertisers to focus on.

According to Hitwise data, while Facebook accounted for 7.14% of all internet visits in U.K. in June 2010, Google accounted for 9.59% in the same month.

Among social networks alone, Facebook held 54.5% of the market share in that month.

Franklin is a graduate from the Duke and Columbia Universities in the fields of biology and psychology. She now works as a consultant.

When she was notified about the videos and derogatory comments posted by three persons or a person using three different aliases, she decided to face matters head on.

Her attorney, David Fish says, “People hide behind these shields and think they can just post anything. Hopefully, we can put a stop to this.”

The videos were posted last year by users Joebloom08, JimmyJean008 and Greyspector09. They have used clips of a small movie she acted in without authorisation and also used words like “whore” to describe her.

By suing Google, Franklin wants to pressurise the company to disclose details such as the name and address of the person who has posted these videos, so that this sort of thing does not happen again.

In fact, her lawyer says that she has a “pretty good idea” about who the person is, but she obviously needs some proof in order to implicate him in court.

The same tactic has been used in the past by model Liskula Cohen. There has been no comment from Google on the matter. However, one of the offending accounts has been closed and all videos have been deleted from the other two.

Cyber-bully JimmyJean008′s YouTube profile

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

In order to simplify their users lives, YouTube recently introduced a new feature known as YouTube Leanback. As the name obviously suggests, this feature allows users to lean back and enjoy videos with a minimal amount of maneuvering.

YouTube Leanback

To use this facility, users will initially have to feed in certain details, like settings and preferences. They also have to feed 8in the required content, from the subscriptions. They can also access videos which their friends are sharing on Facebook if their YouTube and Facebook accounts are connected.

Once this is done, videos of the user’s interest will start playing as soon as the user opens the site. It is also possible to watch things like news and other entertainment programmes.

To select the required video, the user has to use the scroll keys on the keyboard, thus obliterating the need for the mouse. Each time the user navigates to the button he requires, he has also to click the ‘Enter’ key. The space bar of the keyboard functions as the ‘Pause’ and ‘Play’ key.

Unfortunately, the YouTube Leanback feature does not provide any keys with which to control the volume of the video. For that, one needs to use the controls on the system or the speakers.

Other than that one missing feature, watching videos with the YouTube Leanback feature has become similar to watching TV as one can easily use a wireless keyboard to navigate with. YouTube refers to this as the ’10 foot experience’.

Watching a stream of videos on YouTube Leanback

The most surprising thing about YouTube Leanback is that it eliminates the need for users to search, which goes against all of Google’s business principles!

In fact, as of now, YouTube Mobile receives over 100 million video playbacks daily, which is about the same number of playbacks, which YouTube.com used to get in 2006 when they joined Google.

When YouTube Mobile was launched in 2007, it had only about 1,000 videos available on the mobile site. There were also several limitations in the site, mobile browsers and the hardware then available, thus preventing the YouTube Mobile from being as good as the YouTube.com experience.

YouTube has, however, been working hard to constantly update and improve their mobile site to provide better features tot heir users.

They have recently updated the site yet again, making it much faster than before. The new interface also has more touch friendly features. It also now has most of the features and functionality available on YouTube.com such as search query suggestions, the ability to create playlists etc. It also allows users to put in marks such as ‘favourites’ ‘like’ ‘unlike’ etc. directly from the mobile handset.

YouTube also intends to henceforth update YouTube Mobile every time they update YouTube.com.

These features have only been launched in English for now, but other languages should follow shortly.

YouTube Video Editor

When logged in users start the online video editor, they see a collection of their recent videos in a panel on the left. The user can then select a video and add it to the timeline to edit it.

Editing videos on YouTube does not allow users to do anything fancy. The service simply enables combining different videos that have already been uploaded to create a new, longer mashup video, trimming the beginning, middle or end of any video to make it shorter or changing the video’s soundtrack.

Original video soundtrack can be replaced with any audio sample in Google’s Audio Swap library. An advantage of this feature could be that it might prevent users from inadvertantly violating copyright law.

Other minor advantages include giving users the ability to create new videos without bothering about file formats and eliminating the need to install any special software for basic video editing functions.

Windows Movie Maker, a programme that ships for free with most Windows systems, already includes all of these features and a lot more. The problem with Windows Movie Maker is simply that most users don’t know about its existence or its capabilities.

The best thing about YouTube’s video editor is just the fact that it allows editing within the cloud, on the same site, rather than requiring users to modify content offline.

Creating a mash-up on YouTube Video Editor

Initially, only the video sharing site YouTube had been banned for alleged insults to the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. This ban on YouTube has been in force since May 5 2008. The site had also been previously banned in 2007.

The Telecommunications Presidency issued a statement last Friday, announcing that they were blocking various Google sites. The reason for doing so was stated to be “because of legal reasons”.

Some of the sites have been completely banned while others are very slow to respond. Among them are docs.google.com, translate.google.com, books.google.com, google.com/analytics and tools.google.com.

When users in Turkey attempt to access any of the banned sites they get a message that says, “Access to this site is banned by court order.”

According to local sources, the ban does not punish Google but the local users instead. Many users are now trying to change their DNS settings to bypass the Turkish Internet Service Providers and thus avoid the ban.

A free-press outfit, ‘Reporters Without Boarders’ has said “It is time the Turkish authorities demonstrated their commitment to free expression by putting an end to the censorship that affects thousands of websites in Turkey and by overhauling Law 5651 on the Internet, which allows this sort of mass blocking of sites.”

Google is reported to have told The Register that folk at Mountain View, CA believe that the services have been banned accidentally and they are working with the Turkish government to set matters right.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

Social media will help the parties get the attention of the public and, in turn, garner more supporters.

Facebook has about 20.9 million users aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom, which is almost the same as the number of people who voted in the last general election.

At the time of publishing this article, the official Labour Party page has 11,922 fans on Facebook. The Conservatives have 31,745 fans and the Liberal Democrats have 11,550 fans.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook feature prominently on all three major parties’ websites. RSS feeds are just as prominently available for subscription and blogs are widely used.

The extent to which the Internet is expected to help in the U.K. is less than in the U.S. as it is a much shorter campaign and the level of fund raising is much lower.

It is rumoured that the Conservative party’s digital team is spending as much as 20% of their time on Twitter. Sarah Brown, the wife of the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has a follower count of over 1.1 million on Twitter – which should be a reason for the Tories to worry, as they only have a little over 23,000 followers!

Channels such as YouTube, Delicious, Livestream, podcasting and even email are also expected to play an important role during this election.

This is the first time the Internet will play an important part in the U.K. election process especially by allowing the party leaders to communicate directly with the younger generation – usually the most politically indifferent demographic.

Political parties will be able to show highly targeted ads to the users, which will be much cheaper and more effective than traditional newspaper ads.

The down side of such an increased network presence is that the slightest mis-step by a party leader can go viral and be broadcast to millions of voters in no time. All candidates now need to be more aware than ever of the fact that they can now be tracked almost all the time and their privacy is something they can never be entirely sure of having.

Liberal Democrats on YouTube

According to Mahaney’s estimates, YouTube will generate about $945 million this year, of which $614 million will be net revenue or profit. He further expects that the largest online video site will continue to grow and will generate over $1.1 billion next year, of which over $700 million will be net profit.

Mahaney explains that he has arrived at these figures by applying the same revenue-to-page view ratio on the stats available for YouTube that fellow video sharing site, MySpace, uses.

Patrick Walker, who is a director of video partnerships for Google and YouTube, also believes that YouTube is doing pretty well for itself. According to him, the fact that YouTube has the ability to make lots of users see its ads makes the site inherently very profitable. Also, the fact that they help to sell a lot of CDs and DVDs is very helpful to build a marketing case for YouTube.

Google, as usual, has not yet made any official comment on the matter.

Left to right: Peter Fleischer, David Drummond and the incriminating video

Peter Fleischer, David Drummond and George De Los Reyes were accused of defamation and violation of privacy. A fourth employee, Arvind Desikan, the product manager, has been acquitted.

The judge, Oscar Magi, has absolved them of defamation, but has convicted the three for violation of privacy. Each of them has received a suspended six month sentence.

Needless to say, executives at Google are enraged by this sentence, which they consider to be arbitrary and frivolous. David Drummond, the Chief Legal Officer says, “I intend to vigourously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent.”

Google further clarifies that Google and its employees had nothing to do with the harassment of the teenager, the filming or uploading of the video. If the consent of the teenager concerned was to be taken, it was the responsibility of those who uploaded the video to do so.

Google withdrew the video as soon as it was brought to their notice. They also cooperated with the authorities to identify the people who made and uploaded the video. Their responsibility ended there.

As far as censorship is concerned, it is not possible for Google to screen every video that is uploaded on their site, before it is available for public viewing, simply because of the sheer volumes involved.

If this sentence is allowed to run unquestioned, then Google claims that most sites will be liable for some violations of law. Under such circumstances, many sites may be forced to shut down, and the losers will be the general public, which derives many benefits from the services provided by the internet.

During the week ending on 26th December 2009 social networks and forums took a lead over the search engines, in terms of number of visit, for the first time ever.

This peak over the Christmas holidays was followed by a dip in social networking, but the sector has already recovered and social networks and forums are once again showing a definite upward trend.

During the week ending on 16th January 2010, visits to social networks in Australia were only 0.4% behind search engines.

Another trend, which has been visible over the last three months, is that social networking shows a significant rise during the weekends, especially on Sundays. This was first seen by Hitwise on Sunday the 15th of November 2009 and then again on Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd of November 2009.

One remarkable finding pointed out by Hitwise was that while social networking reached its highest point for 2009 on Christmas day at 14.8% share of Internet visits, search engines reached their annual peak on 10th January 2009 at 14.5% share of Internet visits.

Facebook and YouTube both had their highest number of visits on Christmas day with 8.0% and 2.2% of the market respectively.

Search engines still dominate the market in the U.K. and U.S.A. However, if the trend in Australia is an indicator of the future, social media marketing might be set to increase in importance a whole lot more.

Captions will be automatically generated through the voice recognition algorithm that is used on Google Voice. The technology is known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and can be pretty accurate for some cases.

In many cases, though, the automatic captions result in some rather funny output, even for videos by Google’s own employees. This could lead to some very confused users if they relied solely on automated captions!

Funny Automated Captions On YouTube

In order to use automated captions, a user has must click on the upward arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the video control bar and click on ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the captions (CC) menu.

It is also be possible to translate the captions into several languages.

While this will greatly improve YouTube’s accessibility and benefit people who have difficulties hearing, the translation facility will also help people who do not understand the original language used in the video.

Another feature that is being simultaneously introduced is auto-timing for subtitles. If all the words used in the video are provided in a text file, Google will automatically associate the timing of each caption alongside the video timeline.

In other words, the text of the video will be transcribed. This transcript can obviously be indexed and crawled, thus helping users with search engine optimisation of video content.

The new captioning features will therefore eventually allow users to search for a video based on keywords used in the video script.

The automatic caption feature is already available on most educational and Google-owned channels. Automatic timing is now available on all newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

Talks are still reported to be in extremely early stages, so there is no date set as yet for starting the service. In fact, it may never even materialize.

Apple’s iTunes Store, which has such a service in place, charges users $3.95 per movie. It is expected that YouTube would be looking at a similar figure.

If the deal does come through, it will be a first for YouTube, in that it will be the first time that they will charge their viewers to access content.

In spite of being one of the most popular websites, YouTube has never been financially successful. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has admitted that the site has not lived up to its revenue expectations. Last April, he had said that YouTube would try out various ways of monetisation, including micropayments and subscription models.

YouTube even started allowing ad sales on videos from big media companies, on a revenue sharing basis with the producers, in an attempt to capitalise on the TV ad budgets that already are allocated for these companies.

If talks with some of Hollywood’s studios do succeed, YouTube will start earning some revenue through this new channel.

Discussions were started with Warner Bros. The two companies had reached an agreement in the past to allow clips from Warner Bros. TV shows to feature on YouTube, but so far they have not allowed airing of full episodes on the site.

YouTube is also in talks with Sony, Lion’s Gate and MGM. Though Walt Disney and Fox, who are very particular about their copyrights, have not yet come to the discussion table.

Paramount Movies has raised objections to YouTube’s proposals. This was to be expected as Paramount’s parent company, Viacom, is involved in a law suit against Google. The suit which is on its way to trial, for $1 billion in damages, is based on Viacom’s allegation that Google allowed the viewing of pirated TV shows and other material on YouTube. If YouTube hopes to deal with them in the near future, Google will have to come to an amicable settlement with Viacom first.

While the studios have not been too concerned about pirated TV shows, movies are a different matter altogether.

However, the studios could also be interested in forging a deal with YouTube as DVD sales have dropped quite significantly in recent months and such a deal could be one way of making up for the losses thus incurred.

It so happened that Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz from Minnesota, who were due to be united in holy matrimony, wanted to have an unusual wedding party.

They decided that the bride, the groom and all of their bridesmaids and best men should dance to the song ‘Forever’ by Chris Brown in the church. This unusual entrance was video taped and put up on YouTube, where it has become wildly popular.

So far, the “Forver wedding video” has been viewed by more than 12 million viewers, in just over a week, making it the most viewed and most discussed video on YouTube, globally.

Rather than pull the video, or sue Google for copyright infringement, Chris Brown’s record company allowed the music to be used and InVideo Ads were placed to make it possible for users to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.

A lot of users have responded positively to this offer, earning YouTube, Amazon and Apple a good amount of money.

The record company, Sony, and Chris Brown have also made a pretty penny, not to mention the badly needed positive publicity for Chris Brown that they have earned by not suing the couple for copyright infringement (a first for the music industry?).

Searches for ‘chris brown forever’ over the past 90 days

While all of these beneficiaries have the young couple to thank for the unexpected bounty, the couple has not made a penny out of their own video. They were invited to appear on the Today Show in New York, along with all their guests. They are also using all this publicity to drive donations to the Sheila Wellstone Institute for violence prevention.

Hopefully this incident will be an eye-opener for video sites and music owners and show them that they can make money by other means than prosecuting consumers for sharing and downloading music.

The Forever Wedding Video

These pre-roll ads are run around TV shows and clips on their site.

To begin with they have tied up with their existing partners Channel 4, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, ITN and Discovery Networks as reported in ‘The Guardian’.

The broadcasters who accept this scheme will be eligible for a revenue sharing partnership with YouTube. In the past these partners were earning revenue only from the display ads and in-video format.

Some advertisers such as Nissan, Renault, Warner Brothers, Match.com and Activision have already tied up with YouTube for this service, and Channel 4 was the first among them to run the pre-roll ads to promote the comedy ‘The Hangover’. The pre-roll ads will be run for 15 to 30 seconds, and will be run on a CPM basis.

According to Suveer Kothari, Head of YouTube U.K. YouTube has been trying to maintain a balance between the demands of their users who want free but entertaining and professional content on the web, against the demands of premium content owners, who obviously want to monetize their content on the one hand, and the demands of their advertisers who want more premium content to showcase their TV creative against on the other hand.

He believes this service will help them to attain that balance.

YouTube RealTime shows up as a bar on the bottom of all pages on the site for users who are logged in and participating in the beta test. Not only can participating users see which of their friends are online, but they can also see which videos those friends are watching, and what they think about the videos, based on the comments posted by those friends.

Screenshot of RalTime toolbar showing friends’ video views

The first button on the toolbar indicates that RealTime sharing is activated. The service can be turned off so that users share only videos they wish to. Adjacent to this is a button that is enabled when the user watches a video. Clicking on the button shows a list of other users viewing the same video.

An ‘Online Friends’ button shows a list of friends currently logged into YouTube. The last button, a little bell with a number beside it

During the closed testing period each user can invite up to 25 online friends to try RealTime and share their viewing experiences. While this limits the number of users who can trial the service, it is gradually expanding, as each invitee is given 25 invites to distribute further. Google had used a similar trial invitation system when Gmail was first launched.

A lot of YouTube users go to the site without any specific video in mind. They could be particularly interested in finding out what their friends are viewing and then sharing these videos with other friends. The added video views could generate more ad revenue for YouTube and its advertisers.

This is not the only change coming to YouTube. The video sharing site recently unveiled two new sections featuring full-length movies and TV shows and a limited number of users are also trialling a new channel layout.

Sample new channel layout on YouTube

According to the Google AdSense blog, the AdSense video unit, which enables publishers to show YouTube content and ads on their pages, on a revenue sharing basis, has not performed as well as it was expected to do, and Google will discontinue the service at the end of this month.

Publishers who wish to continue publishing video content from YouTube can do so directly through YouTube.com, but they will not earn any revenue for this.

Video ads will remain functional and will continue to appear on AdSense-enabled pages of publishers who enable the the image ads option.

Google will continue to accept ads from registered publishers until the end of this month (April). New publishers will no longer be able to incorporate video units on their sites.

While Google says they are taking this step to better focus on other opportunities, to help their publishers earn better, it seems suspiciously like yet another move to beat the recession.

Only last month Search Engine Round Table had pointed out that AdSense publishers were upset and complained on two separate AdSense forum threads that their sites were generating very little revenue from AdSense video units. Some of the comments posted on the AdSense forum were:

“My revenue is down more than 50%. There were people who were expecting to earn $200 in January and instead earned $80. I was expecting $1000-$2000 and earned a little over $80.”

“I had $67 in Content Host earnings (63,600 views/1000 clicks) and only $17 in YouTube earnings… sheesh”

One reason for this poor performance could be the current economy. Another could be the fact that it is difficult to target ads consistently based on videos.

It is relevant to note that Google is struggling to monetise YouTube, and this could be the first sign that Google is accepting the fact that it might never be as successful with video advertising as it is with search.

According to YouTube, the Chinese Government has not contacted them or given any reason for the ban. YouTube, and parent company, Google, are trying to have the service restored.

Without either denying or admitting to the blockage of the site, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, “Chinese Government has taken up management of the network according to the laws.”

Blocking of Foreign websites in China is nothing new. The government often blocks any content which they feel is inappropriate or objectionable.

Last year, they had blocked YouTube, for showing videos of the anti-government Tibetan demonstrations in an attempt to prevent the public from knowing about the protests.

The current block, coincides with the release of a video by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, which shows the ill-treatment of the Tibetan protestors by the Chinese authorities during the demonstrations which occurred last year.

Another site, Blip.tv which also posted the said video has also been blocked.

By blocking foreign sites the Chinese government, hopes to be able to lure the Chinese public away from them and towards local websites such as Tudou.com because it is much easier to control the content shown on these sites.

China, is however not the only country to ban YouTube. It has been banned off and on in various countries, such as Thailand, Turkey, Pakistan etc. whenever the governments there disapprove of any content.

Michael Steib, Director of TV ads, for Google said, “the company is working on a technology that allows advertisers to buy ads across Google TV which sells on-air commercials, YouTube and video on other websites, through the same interface.”

Presently, Google is trying out this technology called ‘Google TV Ads Online’ with only a small group of selected advertisers.

If things go well the service may be launched in a few months.

Given the current financial situation, Google no doubt hopes that this new service will lure big brands to spend money on both the platforms, by making the process simpler. However, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s Director of Product Management says, “it is also part of Google’s bigger vision of tying together various platforms to make it easier for advertisers to manage and measure their spending across traditional and online media.”

YouTube will however have to use the ads only during longer videos, such as TV shows or movies, as users will not like to watch long ads during short videos. It may also not be appropriate to run certain TV ads along with online videos, and Google will have to put in a lot of effort to achieve optimum results.

At present Google has only signed full length content deals with a few companies like CBS Corp.

Eventually Google may also be able to sell ads on Internet Delivered TV. YouTube is already having such a deal with Apple TV.

In the meantime Google is expected to layoff a further 200 staff members, which means, they probably expect the recession to continue for some time.

Director of video partnerships at YouTube, Patrick Walker, told the BBC that the two sides were still in talks but the terms of the agreement were priced at a rate that was not sustainable.

At present, UK users who try to view music videos on YouTube just see an error message saying “This video is not available in your country.”

Google claims the PRS asked YouTube to pay a far higher amount than before, and executives at YouTube think this rate is not feasible. Walker says “YouTube cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played”.

The online video giant also blames the PRS for lack of transparency as they refuse to specify which songs would be included in the said license.

Steve Porter, head of PRS, on the other hand, says he is shocked and outraged by YouTube’s decision in the middle of discussions. He says that YouTube’s decision punishes British consumers and song writers. PRS says YouTube wants to pay significantly less than at present to music writers in spite of growth in their viewership.

While both sides are hurling allegations at each other, the Music Publishers Association has urged YouTube to reconsider their decision.

Other sites like Pandora.com and MySpace U.K. have also run into trouble getting licenses in the U.K. recently. YouTube, however, calims to have very strong relationships with 3 out of 4 major record labels and several independent ones. They say they will continue to seek partnerships that will benefit music publishers, music labels and artists.

The music industry remains one of the few major vertical that has managed to continue to operate as it did before the dot.com era, and continues to show much resistance to change. The advent of mp3.com and the ongoing drop in CD sales don’t seem to deter them or push them to change their business model.

Users may start uploading videos illegally if they are not allowed access to them legally. If that happens all parties would be the losers.

The current generation of youth are growing up on digital music, and seem to be accustomed to paying nothing for digital services and products such as digital music. Most of them don’t even think twice about the implication that music piracy is akin to theft.

If record companies continue to dig their heels in the sand and not give up their current business model, they are likely to fall spectacularly in the future, as artists find other ways to reach audiences and listeners find cost-effective means to hear their favourite singers without making record labels richer in the process.

The study was carried out by Technorati asked bloggers to list the sources they refer to the most for information. While 61 percent of bloggers surveyed said they referred to other blogs, 46 percent said they were influenced by the mainstream media sites.

Credibility is an important quality for blogs, and it often decides the number of links a blog receives.  If a blogger is found to be writing untrue and baseless posts, eventually other bloggers will stop linking to that blog. On the other hand, if true and relevant material is published on a blog, more and more bloggers will link in to that blog, thus bestowing more power and authority on that blog.

Based on the results of their study, Technorati has created the ‘Technorati Attention Index’, rating the top 50 mainstream media sites that were linked to by bloggers in the past month. The index will be updated every month.

The top 5 sites this month are:

• YouTube
• The New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN

In comparison, Techmeme’s Leaderboard rates the following  as the top five non-blog sources for bloggers:

• CNET News
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• Reuters
• Computerworld

The complete list of top fifty sites rated by Technorati is available here.

The offensive video is a 3-minute mobile phone video, which had been posted on YouTube in 2006. In this video, a boy with Down’s syndrome was being teased by his classmates in Turin.

People found this video objectionable and complained about it, following which Google responded by deleting it quickly. The prosecutors, however, felt that that was not enough, as the video should never have been allowed to be displayed.

The executives involved are David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, George Reyes, former Chief Financial Officer, Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google and Arvind Desikan, previous head of Google Video Europe.

The trial is being held in Milan and the executives may face up to 3 years in jail if found guilty. If that happens, it will not only mean that henceforth privacy laws will have to be taken very seriously, but it could also force a change in the way YouTube functions in Italy and the rest of Europe.

A thorny issue that will have to be reconsidered, as a result of a ruling against the Google executives in this case, will be whether or not Internet companies should screen content submitted by individuals before it is published.

In the United States, copyright laws so far do not punish online services if they respond quickly to complaints. Europe too has similar laws, but they are unclear about applicability to young people and certain private information.

If Google and its executives are held responsible for this video it will have very wide-ranging implications.

Google has said that their sympathies lie with the victim and his family, and they are happy the culprits have been identified due to their video and punished . However prosecuting Google would be like prosecuting mail services for hate mail. Also, holding Google responsible for content posted on their site is an attack on a free and open Internet and hence they will vigorously defend their employees.

The New york Times reports that the first hearing lasted only about five minutes and none of the defendants were present. The next hearing is scheduled for February 18.