One Hundred Million Views

It’s been recently revleaed that YouTube officially surpassed the 100 million viewer mark just in the USA during January, which highlights the massive growth in demand for online video.

ComScore figures suggest that US viewers consume almost 15 billion videos a month across a wide range of media sites, the majority of which comes through YouTube.

Google, who has owned the site since 2006, when it was bought for £883m, ranks as the most popular video provider in the US. Around 6.4 billion of its videos were viewed in January, reflecting 43% of the online video market.

Interestingly, although Google competitively runs Google Video, YouTube.com accounts for 99% of its video traffic. (I’m not certain if this includes the Google Video traffic that’s viewing aggregated YT videos.)

I’m just curious to know what  makes YT so popular. Perhaps it’s for the same brand-name reasons that Google is the most widely used search engine… A case of having a snappy name and being in the right place, at the right time, with the right stategy and understanding of how the online landscape is evolving? (I do realise this is a simplistic way of looking at things, but it’s Friday afternoon and my brain has fallen out of my ears).

… Like Wildfire

Google Australia’s blog highlights how the terrible fires in the country are permeating every walk of life.

Quite simply, they’ve built a Flash Map, which contains the latest up-to-date information about fire locations and their status from the Country Fire Authority.

Although nothing good can be said about this ongoing tragedy, Google’s reaction is an example of how offline can support online in a more humanised sense, away from ad-campaigns and ideas of marketing ROI. Equally, Google’s power online means that it’s making information more accessible to those who need it, as well as taking the strain away from other websites that are close to collapsing under massive volumes of traffic.

With an increase of recent catastophes, wars and events all being mapped through the internet, it genuinely seems to me that the internet really can call itself a global community… It will be interesting to see which direction this takes in the near future.

Google Water

In case anyone missed it, Google have released their new Earth offering, Google Ocean.

Included in the 5.0 version, it allows users to “swim” around the seven seas, without even getting wet or eaten by sharks.

Nice.

Yahoo’s Mixed Finances

Right, so Yahoo beat the analyst expectations (GOOD!), but still posted a fourth quarter loss of some £212m (BAD!).

That’s a lot of money to lose, especially considering Google contiues to lead the pack – Last week they also defied analyst predictions, but still made a profits of £266m. Impressive amounts, but rather worringly for them, it’s a drop of 68% year-on-year.

Returning to Yahoo though, it’s even more depressing. Profits fell by 34% compared to the same period last year. Although they’ve got a new CEO at the helm, (Carol Bartz), who I’m sure actually do a great job in turning the company around, I’m not entirely convinced that her $19m YEARLY salary is going to help improve the revenue streams of the business.

Post-Christmas Frenzy

According to most national newspapers, everyone and anyone was shopping online during Christmas Day, hitting the sales in search of a bargain; especially as the likes of Marks and Spencers started their online sale at 12:01am that day, and John Lewis began theirs at 6pm on xmas eve.

Whilst brick ‘n mortar shops are panicking and feel they need to carry out this sort of crazy behaviour, in reality, internet shopping was fairly quiet over these two days.

Plusnet did a quick web-survey and found that the number one site on Christmas Day was Google, as usual. But a close second was Facebook, steadily increasing in numbers as the day wore on (and the boredom set in). Incidentally, did anyone leave a message on the Queens Facebook page following the Christmas speech?

Boxing Day saw the biggest boost: Amazon, iTunes and Play.com all saw massive amounts of traffic over the 24hr period. Even eBay proved very popular – perhaps as people needed to get rid of unwanted gifts without offending anyone?

Google-xmas

Seems the guys at Google have got all festive suddenly!

Has anyone else noticed the images alongside the paid search results?

They only appear under seasonal search terms, such as “Christmas”, and are no doubt doing wonders for improving the CTR.

As the data shows us, despite the credit crunch, online is doing well: people are spending like mad! Although despite showing us all a little bit of festive spirit, this could also be a ploy be Google to make their ads stand out even more. But at least it feels like Christmas when you’re online!

Social Integration

Love Twitter AND Google?

Well, now your Christmas has come early, as the micro-blogging site is about to be integrated with Google Friend Connect.

Basically, this means that when you join a friend-connected site, you can choose to use your Twitter profile and discover who you might know has also joined. You can also Tweet to the world about what’s going on.

Friend Connect lets webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks. Announced in May, it was launched this month, but isn’t a particularly new idea, as Facebook and MySpace have been running this for a while. (Facebook Connect and MySpaceID).

Interestingly, MySpaceID went live in the early half of the same month that Google annouced it’s Friend Connect concept. And Twitter was a partner with MSID. Even more confusing, Google partnered with MySpace to challenge Facebook.

Confused yet? This is like some social version of the whole Google-Yahoo-Microsoft saga earlier this year…

Hot off the press

So now it seems Google is bringing back old magazines through it’s Book Search.

Or at least according to one of their software engineers… And it’s pretty cool. I always liked their Book Search, and now it seems we’re soon going to have access to a huge variety of magazines – including the New York Magazine. But how long until we get some British stuff?

Wiki-Searching

Anything Google says, you sometimes have to take with a pinch of salt.

However, in the wake of yesterdays blog about Yahoo Glue, Google has announced its SearchWiki, the new application that will let users customise their search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting as to whatever suits their needs.

To quote the release on the Google Blog;

“With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page……The changes you make only affect your own searches.”

Cool.

 

Stuck like Glue

Right, well, Yahoo users in the US might have glimpsed the new offering, Glue.

At the moment, it’s only running as a trial and has a small amount of content available, but looks pretty cool. Think Google’s Universal Search, but displayed a bit more aesthetically… It pulls together search content content from all over the internet onto one single page, including image results, Youtube videos, news and blogs.

As I said, it’s fairly limited at the moment, with only a handful of topics available to users – ranging from Kylie Minogue, through to Cupcake Recipies. Suprisingly, it’s been previously tested in India, so go figure. Perhaps the orders for this came from Mr Yang – people in power always go a little nuts – which is why he finally quit?

Who knows, but I do sincerely hope we’ll soon be seeing Glue up and running in full – despite the fact that Yahoo really shouldn’t be playing too much with search and needs to focus on a different business model.