August 4, 2008
A sample piece of American Apparel ad inventory.
It’s no surprise to anyone who reads blogs about celebrity gossip, nightlife, indie music, or pretty much any other niche of pop culture: American Apparel, the Los Angeles-based retailer infamous for bringing back the ‘80s aerobics look, has been named by ComScore as the top apparel outlet in the online ad world.
In other words, that means their ads, many of which feature nubile young models clad in just about nothing, are freaking everywhere on the Web.
A total of 483,389,000 American Apparel ad impressions were seen across the Web in April, reaching a whopping 48,887,000 unique visitors according to ComScore. That’s far ahead of the No. 2 advertiser, sports-duds manufacturer Under Armour, which chalked up 311,528,000 impressions. No. 3 was SnorgTees, an online t-shirt retailer known for having a really cute girl modeling its creations.
Sports-related retailers and t-shirt outlets make up the bulk of the rest of the list, with Nike, BustedTees, Skechers, and NFLShop.com all making ComScore’s list of the top 14 apparel advertisers.
So where does American Apparel chuck its ads: On the social networks that its young customers fill up with photos of themselves. Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, is American Apparel’s top advertiser, making up nearly a quarter of the retailer’s ad impressions. Facebook was next with 18 percent, followed by AOL (which owns Bebo) with 12.5 percent, and Photobucket with 6.1 percent. Less than 2 percent apiece were each devoted to Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, creative community DeviantArt, and Time Warner’s non-AOL sites.
Not encompassed in ComScore’s stats: American Apparel’s racy print and billboard ads that have caused quite a stink.
CNet News
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August 1, 2008
The Yahoo Local SearchMonkey application can shed more light on results involving local businesses.
(Credit: Yahoo)
Yahoo has begun using its
SearchMonkey technology by default to give more prominence and potentially usefulness to search results involving LinkedIn contacts, Yelp reviews of businesses, and local companies.
Most of Yahoo’s search results are a plain, textual list of Web sites. SearchMonkey, though, lets Yahoo’s servers present some results with richer accompanying information, such as product prices at Amazon.com or movie critic ratings. If it works out as promised, that could make search results more useful, keep searchers coming back for more, drive more traffic to those sites that take advantage of SearchMonkey technology, and help Yahoo compete with Google.
The hitch for most companies that might want to use SearchMonkey to gussy up their own search results on Yahoo, though, is that they generally must convince users go to a SearchMonkey application gallery and enable that specific SearchMonkey behavior. But on Thursday night, Yahoo switched on three SearchMonkey options so all searchers will see enhanced results from Yelp, a site that lets members review restaurants and other businesses, Yahoo Local, which connects people with nearby businesses, and LinkedIn, which lets members keep in touch with contacts.
SearchMonkey relies on “semantic Web” technology that’s designed to label Web site information with tags computers can process, giving more structure to the data.
Yahoo said on its Search blog Friday that it’s judicious about which SearchMonkey applications it chooses to switch on.
“Before making an application ‘default on,’ we require a few things: access to the site’s structured data through semantic markup or a data feed, a well-designed and broadly useful application, and positive user metrics,” said Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo search.
And when Yahoo tested the applications on a subset of users, it found good results.
“To understand how a SearchMonkey app affects user metrics, we generally expose a small percentage of our users to a default-on experience and measure if and how it changes their usage. We started with Yelp, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local because they were among our first partners to share structured data,” Kumar said. “Our tests uncovered that users found these apps useful; in fact, in some cases, we saw a lift in click-through rate of as high as 15 percent.”
(Credit: Yahoo)
Using technology called SearchMonkey, Yahoo search results now spruce up some search results by default, including results with LinkedIn content.
CNet News
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July 25, 2008
Amazon.com could become the e-commerce engine behind the MySpace Music service expected to launch in September, according to a report on TechCrunch.
In April, MySpace, which is already used by young acts trying to promote their music, announced it was working on a music service that would handle songs from at least three of the four major record labels. The labels will get an equity stake in the new joint venture and a share of all the revenue the service collects.
TechCrunch reports that Rhapsody and (interestingly) Apple are also bidding for the business.
The MySpace service is expected to offer free streaming music, unprotected MP3 downloads, ring tones, and e-commerce offerings such as merchandise and ticket sales, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in April. Among the top four music companies, EMI has so far been the lone holdout.
Can MySpace Music become a welcome alternative to iTunes dependency? No other music site has had either the audience or the clout with the labels to offer a strong option to Apple’s wildly popular music service. But with well over 100 million users, 30 million who already listen to music on the site, and 5 million music acts already promoting their music on the site, MySpace could have the heft to give iTunes a strong challenge.
Update: Our music industry sources say Arrington’s story is right on, that Amazon is in talks to provide music downloads to MySpace Music, and indeed, MySpace executives are telling the recording companies that their target launch date is Sept. 15.
CNet News
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July 24, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO—Google opened its website Knol to the public on Wednesday, allowing people to write about their areas of expertise under their bylines in a twist on encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows anonymity.
“We are deeply convinced that authorship—knowing who wrote what—helps readers trust the content,” said Cedric DuPont, product manager for Knol.
The name of the service is a play on an individual unit of knowledge, DuPont said, and entries on the public website, knol.google.com, are called “knols”. Google conducted a limited test of the site beginning in December.
Knol has publishing tools similar to single blog pages. But unlike blogs, Knol encourages writers to reduce what they know about a topic to a single page that is not chronologically updated.
“What we want to get away from is ‘this last voice wins’ model which is very difficult if you are a busy professional,” DuPont said.
Google wants to rank entries by popularity to encourage competition. For example, the first knol on “Type 1 Diabetes” is by Anne Peters, director of the University of Southern California’s Clinical Diabetes Programs.
As other writers publish on diabetes, Google plans to rank related pages according to user ratings, reviews and how often people refer to specific pages, DuPont said.
Knol focuses on individual authors or groups of authors in contrast to Wikipedia’s subject entries, which are updated by users and edited behind the scenes.
Knol does not edit or endorse the information and visitors will not be able to edit or contribute to a knol unless they have the author’s permission. Readers will be able to notify Google if they find any content objectionable.
Knol is a hybrid of the individual, often opinionated entries found in blogs and the collective editing relied on by Wikipedia and other wiki sites.
The service uses what it calls “moderated collaboration” in which any reader of a specific topic page can make suggested edits to the author or authors, who retain control over whether to accept, reject or modify changes before they are published.
In its early stages, Knol remains a far cry from Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org, which boasts 7 million collectively edited articles in 200 languages.
Google signed a deal with Conde Nast’s New Yorker, giving Knol authors the rights to use one of the magazine’s famous cartoons in each Knol posting. Google will allow Knol writers to run ads on their entries and will share income with them.
DuPont said that rather than competing with Wikipedia, Knol may end up serving as a primary source of authoritative information for use with Wikipedia articles.
“Knols will fill gaps on what we have on the Web today. That is what we hope,” DuPont said.
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July 24, 2008
This week, Facebook took a number of strategic steps toward its goal of giving people the “power to share and make the world more open and connected.” That’s how founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the mission statement for Facebook.
With that mission statement, similar to Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Facebook is highlighting its noble aspirations, but underneath the “make the world a better place” is the fact that both Facebook and Google, as well as Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace, and others want to be the portal for the masses.
By portal, I mean more than just a place to share content with friends, search or wire up a social graph. If the Web is becoming social at its core, Facebook (90 million and growing at hundreds of thousands per day) and its competitors want to be the center of their members’ lives in the same way that
MyYahoo became a personalized home base for millions of users over the last decade.
As evidence of Facebook’s portal ambitions, the company introduced Facebook Connect, which will let users access and feed their Facebook profiles and friends on any Web site. Facebook is the identity system and portal through which the content from other sites flows—all roads leading to Facebook, which is distinct from what Google’s more open and distributed approach with Friend Connect. Facebook Connect is not yet generally available, but demos from Digg and Six Apart, among others, indicate that it has substance.
Om Malik extrapolates from Facebook Connect that Facebook is building a money machine:
You are essentially telling Facebook’s proverbial brain what topics—blogs or specific posts—with which you like to engage. In other words, you just told the system a little bit about yourself. Now imagine such information coming from dozens of Facebook Connect partners.
Each service adds a few more data points about you inside the Facebook brain, which is quite aware of your activities inside the Facebook ecosystem. The brain can then crunch all that information and build a fairly accurate image of who you are, what you like and what might interest you. With all that information at its disposal, Facebook can build a fairly large cash register.
The cash register is an advertising platform, a follow on to
Beacon, that leverages the social graph and each member as a potential marketing engine. With all the data and user permissions, ad targeting could be more precise. Zuckerberg has also talked about a payments system, a la PayPal, for the platform. After getting Chat launched, Facebook is likely working on making its e-mail application more robust as part of building out the portal.
Microsoft is poised to bring its Web search and paid search results into Facebook’s U.S. site.
With 400,000 developers, according to Facebook, working on the platform, thousands of applications—from e-commerce to games—and widgets with any kind of feed will be available for each user’s Facebook portal.
Facebook also has more than 10 million users of its mobile services, which is the next major frontier for building user portals. For example, Facebook Connect for Mobile, due for release in the fall, will allow members to hook up with friends over mobile devices to play games with friends and learn which friends downloaded applications of shared interest.
Challenges for Facebook are scaling to support the increased amount of data pouring into its servers and adapting to different geographies. More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of the U.S., but all of Facebook’s servers are inside the U.S. Decreasing latency, which leads to increased page views, will be a key to Facebook’s ability to keep up with demand.
If Facebook can continue to roll out new features, maintain its growth pace and improve site performance, it will be on a collision course with the Web portal giants who were born in the 20th century. Of course, one of those Web giants may pay mega-billions to consolidate the market, but it’s unlikely that Facebook will give up its independence any time soon.
CNet News
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July 24, 2008
Facebook made several important announcements to kickoff its F8 developer conference this afternoon: the launch of Facebook Connect, the Great Apps program for preferred applications, and the ability for developers to translate their applications into different languages. However, a few things that developers and onlookers thought Facebook might announce didn’t come to pass. Here’s a look at a few of them:
Payment System – There was a fair amount of speculation that Facebook would announce a payment system to allow developers to monetize their applications. Facebook made no mention of this, and didn’t touch on monetization throughout the keynote. 
Meanwhile, some developers are already starting to integrate their own payment options, including Playfish, which I profiled this morning.
Advertising Program for Developers – While Facebook has made it clear that no advertising will be permitted outside of application canvas pages in a new set of platform policies issued earlier this week, there was no announcement of plans for Facebook to launch its own revenue share program for developers to monetize their apps. This is good news for the dozens of advertising networks currently selling inventory for developers.
Support for OpenID – Following MySpace’s announcement yesterday that they will support OpenID, it seemed possible that Facebook may at least become an identity provider, if not the first big social network to actually let users login using the standard. No such announcement was made.
Finances – While Facebook shared a lot of numbers, including announcing that it has passed 90 million active users worldwide, there was no mention of the company’s overall financial performance. However, they did note that more than $200 million has been invested in Facebook application developers – $34 million of which came this week with venture capital investments in Zynga and LivingSocial.
Clearly, the focus of this year’s F8 is on the Facebook re-design, its implications for developers, and moving the platform in the direction of creating a better end user experience. But short of Facebook Connect, which everyone knew was coming, there was certainly no “wow factor” in today’s announcements of the magnitude of last year’s platform launch. What do you think? Pleased or disappointed with the Facebook announcements? Voice your opinions in the comments.
Mashable
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July 23, 2008
Not even a few months ago, Digg was on the verge of being bought out by Google or Microsoft. While those rumors have largely disappeared, the possibility (and even likelihood) of one of the two giants snatching up Digg is still prominent.
I had a debate with a friend of mine over the usefulness and future of Digg. It got me thinking about which direction Digg is headed. So I am performing a thought experiment to explore the possibilities (I love these).
What should each of these companies do with Digg if it bought the social media and user-chosen content powerhouse? Where would the integration points be and what would be the long-term strategy and direction for Digg under new overlords? And how would an acquisition affect the Internet landscape?
I’m going to start with Google (Microsoft will be next week). After that, there will be one more article about the impact of Digg on the internet.
So without further ado, here’s 7 things Google should do if it buys Digg:
1) Integrate Digg with Google News and the news algorithm
Google is a company of synergies. Utilizing its unparalleled efficiency in search in all of its products gives it a distinct advantage. Integrating your email with Google calendar keeps you on the Google servers (and makes life quite easy, too!). You get the idea.
The same would hold true for Digg if they buy it. There are many ways to incorporate Digg as the preferred social content destination of the Google empire. I’ll start off with Google News.
Google News aggregates the major news into one simple and efficient interface. But its relevancy and popularity rankings for stories of similar topics can always be improved and Digg would help in that endeavor.
Yes, the male-skewed demographic of Digg may not be the best source of demographic information for Google News, but it is a good indicator of the popularity of major news stories, of the most popular article within a certain topic, and can help find more obscure stories that should be on more peoples’ radars. Also, over time, the Digg demographic would become more representative of the general internet population. See #5 below.
Google could do a few tweaks to the Google News algorithm, nothing big, to improve the rankings of news articles within categories and to bring out some of the more obscure but very interesting news of the day. Also, Digg icons next to Google news stories. News stories are what reach the Digg front page the most often, so this integration feels natural.
2) Place Digg icons in search results (but do it methodically)
Let’s get a little more controversial. Digg is the largest player in the social media space, but Digg is still small compared to the vastness of the Internet. Google isn’t though, and it can leverage that size and reach to really combine the social with the computational. Social search engines like Mahalo and Wikia Search are already beginning to fill their niches. Although it’s unlikely, it’s possible that one of these engines innovates enough to knock Google on its ass, or at least give it major headaches. Hell, just look at Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Internet Explorer.
The other thing is that people power can actually improve search results, weed through irrelevant data, and bring up the best information. To that end, if Google bought Digg, it must be committed to integrating social data into its overall data empire, and it starts with Google Search. The first step in this process would be integrating Digg into Google Search results.
Next to the “Cached – Similar pages – Note this” and other link items that appear with all Google search results, there would be a link with either “# Digg(s)” or “Digg this.” Perhaps limit it to certain topics, to sites with a previously popular story on Digg, or don’t have the Digg link appear until there’s a predetermined # of Diggs (by algorithm), but integrate Digg if you buy it, Google. Hell, Google has something similar to the Digg/Bury system in its Google Experimental Search program.
Yes, this suggestion is a bit more radical, but there’s no other way if Google buys Digg. It must expand the site, its demographic, and its influence on the web. The Digg community would be a lot larger if Google took it over.
3) Heavily tweak the Digg algorithm based on Google’s massive stores of data
Sorry kids, the Digg algorithm isn’t perfect. It can be gamed, it can be manipulated, and poorly researched or really strange items sometimes crawl their way to the front page. But if Google took Digg over, it wouldn’t have to be this way. Certain things would (and should) happen:
- Google would bring in more users, and thus it would take more votes for an item to become popular. This makes it harder to game the system by begging for Diggs.
- Google’s engineers would use their data to spot low-quality. It will know that the website is poorly made, that the content is poorly written, and that the credibility is suspect. It doesn’t mean the item wouldn’t front page; it just means it would take more Diggs.
- A plethora of changes to the Digg algorithm based on Google’s research and wealth of information. I can’t even begin to imagine the many tweaks Google engineers would apply to Digg. Knowing what’s popular in searches can really bolster Digg’s usefulness to those beyond the current Digg demographic.
4) Digg integration with Blogger, Google Reader, Orkut, YouTube, and Google’s many other services
I talked about news, I talked about search, now what about all of the other many wonderful nifty services Google owns? Oh, they’d get the Digg treatment. YouTube and Blogger are prime candidates. YouTube is one of the most popular websites on Digg, and Blogger websites would probably get a boost to the detriment of rival Wordpress.
Orkut, Google’s social network, would probably include streaming your activity on Digg to your Orkut account (yes, people actually use Orkut); Google Reader would probably display Digg stats for the blogs you read. We could go on and on with all of Google’s other services, but really, there’s more that would be done since Google would probably add many more features to Digg after the acquisition.
5) Expand Digg’s demographic and reach
Now that Digg is integrated with most of Google’s services, the real work for Google begins: turning Digg into a mainstream social destination. Digg is the main player in the social media world, but as I’ve said before, it’s small when compared to the rest of the internet.
- It is used by a predominently male, 16-34 aged audience (hell, go look at the Valleywag pictures of the NYC meetup, one of which I’ve attached here, for unequivocal proof)
- Digg is ranked #116 on Alexa. While that’s a number I could never ever dream of reaching with this website, it is trumped by the Amazons, Microsofts, Googles, and even the Megauploads of the world.
A website where the popular will brings out the best the internet has to offer. Doesn’t that sound like something that could be absolutely mainstream? I do, and that’s why I think Google would broadly expand the user base of Digg. Methodically, of course. You can’t change it so fast that its current users abandon it – the community’s very tight-knit and is, rightly so, defensive of its community. But Digg will expand in users as Google integrates Digg into its other services. People who simply come to Google for search and email will learn more and more about the site that generates great content, entirely by the will of the internet. And Digg will grow. Hell, it will balloon.
Digg would be unstoppable if Google buys it.
6) Use Digg data to tweak Google search results (the human factor)
Here’s the most controversial one, one I’m not even sure I agree with. This one would not come until YEARS down the line, after Google has expanded Digg’s demographic and after it has gathered a ton more data through Digg. Remember those social and human-powered search engines I told you about? Well, this would completely eliminate the threat.
Use the social data and commentary from Digg and integrate that data to improve Google search results.
Okay, so Google search results are pretty damn good. Hell, they’re extraordinary. But they are not perfect, and as newer and nimbler companies innovate, Google must respond. Search, in my opinion, is innovating in two directions: Semantic Search and Human Search. In buying Digg, it can most effectively end the threat of human search.
Digg information will be able to better help Google understand demographics, reach, popularity, trends, and more. These are all important in advertising and in search, and using the human data from a more mainstream and more efficient Digg would all assist towards Google’s goal of gathering the world’s information and making it universally useful and accessible. It could use it to create an experimental human search engine or to tweak Google algorithms.
Digg’s information would also help increase advertising revenues by improving advertising targeting.
So I’m going in a million directions, but I’ll just say this: Google search would benefit from information from Digg. Digg would benefit from Google’s reach, engineering, and management.
7) Transform Digg into the destination for social media content
Conclusion Time.
If it isn’t ambitious, it isn’t Google. Google doesn’t buy anything just because it’s a hot property or because it’ll rake in some extra side cash. No, Google buys or builds something because it’s going to create long-term value, create a plethora of synergies, or dominate an industry with an iron fist. DoubleClick? Google wants to rule advertising. YouTube? Google wants to rule video.
Digg? Oh yes, Digg too. Google would buy Digg only if it could use it to rule social media and social software space. So if it does buy Digg, it’s going to make Digg the king of social media. And with Google’s reach and talent, it would almost certainly succeed.
benparr.com
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