Bambi Francisco

In the Internet era...

In the Internet era, it’s not about getting millions to read articles from a few paid experts. It’s about making millions of people volunteer experts. It’s not about getting millions to watch one program with a few stars. It’s about getting a few people to watch millions of programs with millions of stars.
Moreover, it’s not just about getting users to express themselves, but providing the means to let users connect with each other.

(This is an excerpt from a Net Sense column I wrote. Often times we forget what we had written in the past. A blogger had picked this up from my column, said it was interesting. So, I thought I'd take note of it again and share it.)

Mobile social networks

If you want to see where your kids will be spending their time in the future, take a look at Gemini Mobile’s platform that lets carriers offer their subscribers a social networking community on their phones. Essentially, the service is a mobile community – a MySpace on the go, but for more virtual reality. The platform is called eXplo, and it powers SoftBank Mobile’s S! Town. S! Town is pretty neat. A subscriber can have an avatar that walks around this virtual world. In the demo I was given, Michael Tao, Gemini Mobile’s CTO, had a black anime as his avatar. His avatar strolled through S!Town’s virtual town center, which was quite deserted, given that it was 4 am in the morning in Japan, where this service is available. At first, it seemed pretty silly and useless to be walking around this deserted town. But then Michael bumped into several females (or at least one might think they were female because their avatars were female). Michael tried to befriend them, while at the same time clicking onto a user profile to find out more about this person. All members have profiles that can be made public to the community. All community members can roam around this virtual town and meet other members. Watching this interaction was a bit frightening, especially when Michael could – with just a click of a button -- find out more about the person whom he was interacting with. When I was a little girl, I played tea with some dolls around a mini table. My future little girl will likely be playing tea on her mobile phone with (hopefully) other little girls. So, what's the business model? Consumers don't pay for the service. Rather they can buy content in the town. There are also advertisements on billboards in the virtual town. In 2007, the service is expected to be deployed with U.S. and European carriers.

The Web 2.0 cost - less control

Facebook is going to open up to the masses. Some rabble-rouser Facebook members are upset. But Facebook has no choice.  Even though it has 9.5 million members, that pales in comparison to the 100-plus million members that News Corp's MySpace has.  But here's the silver lining... well sort of.

Facebook founder and  CEO Mark  Zuckerber is likely learning a lessson. And, other Internet startups can learn from him as well. In the Web 2.0 world, control has been shifted over to the audience, or "community." Web 2.0 companies enjoy the fruits of that community labor. Web 2.0 companies haven't paid for the content created either. 

But everything comes at a cost. And, the cost in the Web 2.0 world may be less control.

For my full column, blog, video commentary and interview with Zuckerberg, go to:
My blog on MarketWatch

Google pays up for next generation

Google's $900 million deal with Fox shows that the search giant is willing to pay a hefty amount for the next generation of Internet addicts who tend to socialize as much as they search.

It's been no secret that News Corp been seeking a search partner for the inquisitive MySpace members, who'd been wont to search on Google after socializing on the virtual site. But as the popular social networking sites' traffic surged, so did its ability to leverage its audience. MySpace generated 23 billion pageviews from 45.7 million unique visitors in June, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. sk.com to see who'd offer up, among other things, the highest guaranteed upfront revenue for the MySpace and Fox digital properties' traffic. News Corp set last Friday as the deadline for bids. No one matched Google's offer, though MSN's was competitive.

Obviously, it turns out Google was the most aggressive and willing to capture this exploding network on the Web.

Here are the takeaways. It's great news for News Corp because it's leveraging its online traffic and, if it meets certain thresholds, will definitely beat advertising forecasts set for its digital properties in '07 and the following years. Also, MySpace gets to keep its members on its site searching, because apparently a good portion of them left to search elsewhere.

It's probably good news for Google, since it won't have to pay that revenue unless certain search and traffic. ich had been providing search queries for MySpace, which recently topped the search engine as the most visited site on the Web, based on pageviews. Obviously, MySpace users like to search. According to HitWise, about 10% of MySpace users left the social network and went to Google to search. That's search traffic that Yahoo, MSN or Ask could have had.

It's terrible news for MSN, which is trying to bolster its ad-search business with AdCenter. What was it thinking? To me, the fact that MySpace chose Google isn't that surprising, since I've been writing about this possibility for some time. Whatwill be pretty intriguing to watch from now until the deal is over, is the extent to which Google personalizes the searches on MySpace personal pages and group pages. Now, personal information and search information may actually merge.

Read the rest of my column on MarketWatch.

Paying up for MySpace

You have to wonder what Microsoft's (msn), Yahoo (yhoo) and InterActiveCorp's (iaci) Ask.com were thinking by letting MySpace go to Google. MSN has enough money and it's trying to validate its own search advertising platform. Yet it wouldn't pay up for MySpace traffic, which tend to go to Google to search.

MySpace had 45 million unique visitors in June, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.  And, about 10% of MySpace traffic leaves MySpace to go to Google, according to HitWise. Clearly, there was an opportunity for the other search engines to capture that search traffic. They let it slip away. Too bad for MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com. Also, Bill Tancer noted a while back that when MySpace had an outage, a lot of its users went to Google. Read Tancer's take.

Btw, if you were reading my MarketWatch blog today, you would have known the MySpace/Google deal was coming. It was posted before the close of the trading day.

Blogs.MarketWatch.com/bambi

Also, watch for my Net Sense column, in which I'll comment about the Google/MySpace and Google/MTV deal. Also, go to MarketWatch Tuesday for my video interview with FIM's Ross Levinsohn.
Watch out for my commentary tomorrow.
   

NBC embraces YouTube

YouTube - the online-video sharing service that exploded in popularity after showcasing unlicensed NBC content - managed to ink a marketing deal with the network.  As part of the deal, NBC will make a "small advertising buy" on YouTube's site. The deal runs for a season and includes a cross-marketing and a user-generated video component.   

It's not surprising. YouTube, along with every other emerging video channel or video-sharing service, has been trying to strike such marketing deals with major studios. Guba.com signed with Warner Bros. earlier this week. (Watch my video with Guba.com founder and CEO in my earlier post.)  But Google inked a deal with CBS earlier this year. And, that's not exactly working out so well. Who watches CBS shows on Google? That said, NBC is only putting promotions on YouTube, and not entire  programs.

To read more, go on my official MarketWatch blog at Bambi's blog on MarketWatch

Meanwhile, Guba.com also inked a deal with Warner Bros. earlier this week.

Watch my interview with Guba founder/CEO Tom McInerney

One-off moments in time

Compared with whimsical one-off moments in time captured on video, big media productions just don't seem to matter online. Take a quick scan at the top 100 most popular clips viewed on Google Video, and you'll note that a large majority are far from professionally produced. The No. 1 video, at this juncture, is a 13-second clip, titled "Girl caught cheating." Of all video sharing sites out there, one would think that Google's would be a place where branded productions could get attention. Yet without promotion on Google, CBS content apparently is getting lost in a sea of colorful photo thumbnails, seemingly far more popular if only because they ask little of our time. Consider another example.  The most recent Apple data shows that 30 million videos -- music videos as well as episodes of popular shows, like Desperate Housewives -- have been sold since October 2005, when Apple's store began to offer video. YouTube, the fast-growing video phenomenon, claims that 50 million videos are viewed each day on its site. Put another way, more than 2 million videos are viewed per hour on YouTube vs. 5,000 videos purchased per hour on iTunes, arguably the most successful distribution platform for digital content.

To be sure, statistics barely exist for video streaming and downloading. We rely on companies, like YouTube, to give us their internal numbers without really knowing what they're counting exactly. So, for now, we have to settle for video viewing stats that are decent at best, or entirely inaccurate at worst. The result: misguided conclusions.  For instance, MSN Video was the No. 1 video site ranked by unique visitors, followed by Video@AOL, YouTube and then Google Video. According to comScore, MSN Video had 14.9 million unique visitors in January 2006, or 5 times more than YouTube, with 2.7 million visitors. Yet over at Nielsen//NetRatings,

YouTube's audience figures were nearly twice as high, and MSN Video was doing worse. YouTube had 4.9 million unique visitors in January while MSN Video had 9.6 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. For those watching traffic data over the decade-long commercial life of the Internet, it's not a surprise that the numbers vary since the methodology at the research companies is different.The point remains that the imperfect data likely misstates the real activity of these self-produced, non-copyrighted videos.

While it's hard to be sure, I'd say there is a lot of overstating of true demand going on. That's because at least some of the activity at these video-sharing services can be attributed to spying (hundreds of rivals trying to find out just how video services are working), experimenting, pirating and double counting (the same video sent around and viewed on multiple sites or platforms). This is not the kind of activity one should extrapolate from; the Internet bust taught me that.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

Life is a stage

Pretty soon, our entire life will be a movie. Creating our own slide show and mini-movie just keeps getting easier. Next-generation photo/video-sharing services like One True Media  should help mainstream America move beyond static photo sharing to storytelling through video montages. I tested One True Media by uploading photos of my nieces and nephew, and a video of a friend and his son (see my examples to the left).  It took me about 20 minutes to navigate through the site, figure out which videos were compatible, select videos and photos, create a music video montage and  upload to my blog. Now that's quick.  The service is fairly straightforward. There's music to choose from to accompany your video montage, and you can upload with one-click. Another feature that's useful is that you can mail all your old video tapes - beta or VHS - and have OTM transfer them into a DVD. We've come a long way from the early days of photo sharing. One True Media's business model is subscription, the sale of hard goods, and soon it'll begin testing out advertising as well.

Wiki world

If you haven't noticed, Silicon Valley giants, like Google and Yahoo, and a host of two-man shops are attempting to fuse and apply the user-generated Wiki-model, the expert-driven About.com model and the social-networking News Corp's MySpace blog model. Whether all of this turns out to be the next growth engine for online advertising remains to be seen, but the end results are beginning to remind me of that most prosaic advertising vehicle, the brochure.

In some ways the collaboration involved in these efforts recalls the efforts needed to compile any reference work. In particular, it reminds me of Simon Winchester's two books: "The Professor

and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary" and "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary." I'm reminded of these books because in them we learn that it took hundreds of volunteers (including J.R.R. Tolkien) to contribute their knowledge to create this Bible for grammarians. In like vein, the Web services in development today - Google Co-op, Yahoo MyWeb (and other social media services), ShopWiki, Squidoo, JetEye, Plum, Kaboodle, WikiOutdoords, Wikia, WikiHow, WikiTravel, World66, to name a fraction of the ones that exist or are in the making -- expect contribution from passionate people who will share knowledge simply for the sake of sharing. But unlike that massive undertaking to publish one universal reference for words, today's Web efforts aren't a comprehensive dictionary so much as a tapestry of, well, online brochures.

Admittedly, the creation of brochures sounds absolutely boring. And any contribution to such promotional material seems far less noble than submissions to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. But it doesn't make these brochures less useful. They're big money generators too, though did you know that a 20-volume OED edition costs $1,600 a pop? Last year,

$31 billion was spent in direct marketing (which includes pamphlets, postcards and brochures), according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

 

Google's video exchange ambitions

Google is trying to get everyone -- and I mean everyone -- to create video advertisements.In fact, if you're a job candidate seeking to get hired by Google, you might consider creating a video ad about yourself and bid against other marketers to place your smiling face on those gazillion blogs and publications that write about Google. This idea was first mentioned to me by Ryan Money, who started HireVue.com. But Google's Gokul Rajaram seems to think the video resume idea will work on Google as well. My money is on HireVue.com since I believe Google will be too distracted to provide the contextual environment job seekers need. Plus, I don't believe job seekers will want to pay for everyone watching their video resume.

But I think there is a place for such pay-per-click video ads, partly because the inventory for news and entertaining video (where these ads typically are placed) is scarce. Advertisers are clamoring to place ads on rich media. I know since I've been creating online videos for MarketWatch since 1999. Google is creating liquidity for advertisers (with video ads) by giving them a cheap alternative ($5 to $12 per CMP) across the blogosphere, where there is inventory. And, when the supply of entertaining video increases, Google will have already amassed the inventory of video ads.

Publishers won't mind these video ads as long as the ads are relevant. And, I believe they have the potential to be relevant and entertaining. The possibilities of what video advertising will look like tomorrow, and who will be advertising are scary, exciting, on the verge of ridiculous, potentially profound, and almost limitless. 

Google's ad video project has had mixed reviews across the Web, with many skeptical about the viability of pay-to-click video commercials. For those who have any doubt about how much video advertising will be created and viewed, think again. Videos will come from people and places unimaginable.  Will Swedish nannies start creating ads about their services and target blogs that only attracts readers who can afford such luxuries? If the potential salary covers the cost of their ad spend for those clicks, which it might, why not? If I had property in Lake Tahoe, I might take my relatively cheap video camera and create a video to showcase the property and upload it onto Google and target lifestyle blogs. 

My Net Sense column - which includes the rest of my observations -- received a lot of responses. I hope those who responded to my column also post their observations here for others to read.

Read my Net Sense on MarketWatch