Tekbite viewership: Female?

So today I logged into YouTube and looked at the "insights" on the video posted a while back about Advertising Paradigms; and much to my astonishment we apparently have a user group of women who watched the video!
Surprising, but welcomed!

Textbook Hockey Stick Growth

The wonderful part about the internet is how quickly information can spread. This viral experience is almost breath taking, especially when a service/website goes from flying under the radar to getting HUGE attention.
A perfect example of this feat is the site known as "FML" (f*** my life). It's a site that I have found entertaining for well over a month, and when showing people here in college I always get the reaction of "Why haven't I heard of this before???". Once fmylife.com setup their fan page on Facebook, they have received a tremendously positive feedback from users and experienced a true textbook version of hockey stick growth and with this should come a plethora of active users. In this case more users means more content, more appeal, and even more users. In the past 24 hours they have gone from 200k to 300k to nearly 350k fans and growing rapidly. If only ALL web based startups could see this kind of growth we might not be in our current recession!


http://www.fmylife.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/FML/55821604168?ref=nf

Google's Personal Turk?

Google has the known muscle in the cpc territory as being an industry leader, and has helped define the new market economy for websites. This has also provided for viable business models centered around free content which has produced the websites, blogs, and videos that we all know and love.
So where has Google been lacking in the online advertising industry? Graphical Advertising.
Google knows that cpm advertising will be the golden handle for big businesses in the future and is trying to develop a more defined sense of the sector. So how do you target your advertising towards a new audience and learn about customer behavior? Why not just ask them!
Google has recently started asking for visitor input at sites like Arstechnica as to whether or not they have seen an ad from their larger name clients. In the case illustrated below, Google asks whether you have seen a particular GMC advertisement and if you have not it runs a dual ad space motion advertisement. If you select "yes and I don't like it" it will then prompt you for what product is being advertised, or "I don't know".
This is in essence Google's private mechanical Turk (amazon product) to give metrics to their advertisers and develop further insight into their cpm platform.

YouTube Goes Long

YouTube has recently formatted all of its video's into wide screen (granting side bars for 4:3 aspect videos... aka most videos) when viewed on YouTube's site. With the flurry of recent changes to the YouTube overall goals this change is not a huge surprise, however the timing of it is.

The recent cooperation with MGM for delivering full length films obviously pits itself against primary competitor Hulu, MGM has stated that we can expected for hits such as the Bond franchise to steer clear of these sites while DVD sales are still doing well.

In short, this basically means that we can expect to be offered poop on a platter (C list films) until the model of digital distribution no longer poses a real "threat" to physical media and that the advertising revenue is there to support such delivery.
However in my own personal opinion, delivering hit movies on YouTube at their "high quality" setting, but not HD and offering affiliate based links to purchasing their physical media through the major sources could prove as an amazing way of natural promotion for already hit titles.

New Live Brand: Kumo?

Microsoft loves online services. So much so that it just can't seem to figure out what the hell to call any of them! This with be the second rebranding experience that users will have to endure of rumors hold true of them renaming their Live Search as "Kumo".
While marketers for ages have used the trick of "rebranding" to help shake past stigma about a particular product/service or to reignite interest amongst users through a retro appeal, this Kumo rename just feels to groundless.

Let's take a look at the landscape for Microsoft right now. Vista = terrible rap, so I get why they are calling the next iteration Windows 7 when, in all reality, it is more like Vista 2nd Edition. However changing the brand of their search engine just doesn't seem like it would have the effectiveness that Microsoft is looking to use in order to break the market share stagnation that has overshadowed them. The real key to their success, especially if they are choosing to rebrand is not simply just a new name. It really needs to be the whole new product that a separate brand name leads you to assume.

They need to fix their results to react to users who are used to working with Google, so that when you use terms more suited for the Google brain, it makes for an easy transition of users to the new services.

The second major thing to drive market share is to upgrade the level of standardization and ease of use to their Live! Search Cash Back program that users have when setting up a free Hotmail account. This model of rewarding users for choosing particular retailers for a product is the sugar for our new advertising kool-aid. Once this can become a mindless task for users to save money by going through certain routines, you then have clients instead of just visitors.

The Open Source IPTV?

With heavyweights like Hulu slugging it out for online advertising dollars in the joint venture between NBC and Fox the quest for the ultimate consumer video portal is still on.
A lot of noise noise been made about the open source interface known as
Boxee which offers a mashup of all the big names (sans drm options) as well as local media including NAS support and nearly every codec under the sun. They are offering invite based rollouts each monday; however with the pent up demand for their product the wait list is gasping for air. So if you are looking for a clean interface on your mac, pc, Linux box or Apple TV head on over to Boxee to give it a whirl.

Boxee

Why Purely Digital Content is Stammering Around

If anybody plans on succeeding as a content provider with increasing customer demands, they are going to have to offer centralized content storage with a Sync between all the devices in that customers portfolio with varying qualities to match each offering. This would not only give the customer what they want (without the need to break the DRM that exists on much of today's most desirable content) but it would also help keep that customer for life in regards to buying your hardware if it links with your content management system better than anybody else. (a la Apple thus far)

What is seriously lacking, and why nobody has really taken off in the digital download space (HD video especially)is that consumers don't really have a central store to keep their content and be able to access it across all of their devices in a resolution that is fitting for each one.

For example, as a consumer I should be able to purchase a media "license" as to which I decided the highest quality variable when purchased (influenced by price) and should be able to stream the highest quality to my HDTV, a standard res to my desktop/laptop environment, as well as a lower resolution to my mobile/ipod device.

I should be able to select what types of media are physically on each device, as well as at least have the option of streaming content when I am on my own local network, if not stream my media over the web through something like Mobile Me. A great application of this would be if I am on a business trip and I would like to watch some fresh content that has downloaded to my home media server, I should be able to stream that via a web interface of some kind on my laptop given it has a fast enough connection.
This digital ownership of licenses would give way for license upgrades that would make for a much lower total cost of ownership for consumers and speed adoption rates when higher and higher quality options present themselves.

As it is right now, a customer who bought a new title on DVD for $20, the DVD player for $100 is now faced with the next medium of Blu-ray with media fetching $35, and players going for well over $200.

Imagine if you were able to consolidate this cost into a media server/Time Capsule type device and then manage your digital content lifestyle from one jumping point. Something like Time Capsule really presents itself as a candidate as if offer Draft N wireless (fast enough for higher resolution media), connected to the internet, and has expandable storage through high capacity external hard drives.

The problem here really lies with no content owner (Sony pictures etc.) wanting to give up control over their licensing rights and letting any single provider develop such a solution to completely deliver on customer needs. While Apple does dance around a Monopoly with their iTunes/iPod ecosystem, the reality is that it has WORKED for consumers, and that is why it has done so well. It is something reliable, and they have offered legal ways to upgrade your audio for those who purchased media through them before the higher fidelity was available, instead of forcing a straight rebuy for all of their customer base.

This type of solution is the ultimate successor to the physical medium (vhs, dvd, bluray...) and is what will ultimately be necessary in the coming age of digital downloads. If you have any additional thoughts, please feel free to voice them in the comments as I love hearing feedback from all of you!

Advertising Paradigm Video