Q&A: VideoEgg Exec Claims YouTube Ads Are Nothing New
5447
YouTube announces that it will begin carrying ads on its videos. But the chief marketing officer says the ads are just like the ones VideoEgg has been running for more than a year -- and that the company has patents pending on them.
308734
Recruiters, get your popcorn. The YouTube generation is discovering the video r&#201;sum&#201;
651536
Only A Moron Would Buy YouTube Is YouTube the darling success story of Bubble 2.0 or a legal train wreck waiting to happen? Mark Cuban spoke about the uber-popular video uploading and sharing destination yesterday with a group of advertisers in New York. Here are some snippets from a Reuters story on Mark&#8217;s comments: &#8220;They are just breaking [...]
207000
Blog: The video is safe, but the download mod it advertises is not.
477747
Sponsored-links attack 'incomprehensible' After accusing Google of misleading web users with its money-making sponsored links, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been accused of saying things that don't make sense.â¦
20248
US traffic growing strongly When Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube many questioned what the site's business model was and if it could continue to grow its audience.â¦
276107
"New and Improved" is a tried-and-true corporate cliche. If Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards are a success, perhaps "Complete and Total Reinvention" will become the new buzz packaging.
275821
A slick and well-timed YouTube attack ad against Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee again raises issues of transparency and accountability in the 2008 campaign for president.
543385
Bill Gates's prediction this weekend that the Internet will revolutionize television within the next five years was hardly anything earth-shattering. The infrastructure powering the Internet is becoming increasingly powerful, as is the capability of sites such as YouTube to broadcast video to a mass audience.   Gates and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley predict that the transition to the Internet as a distribution medium for television will carry a profound effect on television advertising. Hurley suggests that the Internet will empower television advertisers to deliver targeted ads depending on who is watching.
340882
Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
430542
(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. sold advertising to two men who allegedly marketed an application designed to find and download pirated movies online, a business relationship that has angered big movie and TV studios, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The extent of Google's involvement with this allegedly rogue operation has been detailed in sworn depositions taken as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit major Hollywood studios filed against these two men in October 2005. The defendants said under oath that Google assigned them account representatives who assisted them with their Google ad campaigns, including offering them credit and suggesting they use keywords like "bootleg movie download" and "pirated" to promote their Web sites, the Journal reported. A Google employee "largely" backed up the statements from defendants Brandon Drury and Luke Sample, both residents of Missouri, the Journal reported, quoting anonymous sources familiar with the case, in which some depositions have been sealed. EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com generated US$1.1 million in revenue between 2003 and 2005, and Google received $809,000 for advertising, the Journal reported. Upon learning that the defendants used Google to market their software, the plaintiffs, which include News Corp., Viacom International Inc., Sony Corp., NBC Universal, Time Warner Inc. and The Walt Disney Co., complained to the search engine company, according to the Journal. Google responded by holding a conference call with the media companies on Friday in which it pledged to remove certain ads the companies object to, create a list of approved advertisers and stop selling keywords meant to drive traffic to pirated material, the Journal reported. Google also committed to monitor keywords more closely and to train its ad sales team on avoiding selling those types of ads. The flap comes at a time when Google is trying to negotiate with large media companies over the use of their material on YouTube's video uploading and sharing site, which Google acquired last year for $1.65 billion. Those negotiations are proving tough, as evidenced by fiascoes like this month's decision by Viacom to demand that Google remove over 100,000 of its video clips from YouTube. Viacom, whose properties include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, gave up afterÂ months of negotiations, saying Google and YouTube proved "unwilling to come to a fair market agreement." EasyDownloadCenter.com and TheDownloadPlace.com, which are no longer operational, didn't host any movies. Instead, they sold an application for $29.95 designed to allegedly help users search for and download pirated movies from P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file sharing networks. The defendants dispute the allegations that they induced and facilitated piracy and are thus guilty of copyright infringement and unfair competition. Asked to comment about the Journal's report, a Google spokesman said via e-mail that Google forbids advertisers from using its ad platform to promote the sale of copyright infringing materials. "We are continually improving our systems to screen out ads that violate these policies," he wrote. Â
633421
Although Google&#39;s non-search engine products, like its Google Apps Web hosted collaboration and communication software suite, get much attention, search technology and its companion ad system and network still generate most of the company&#39;s revenue.At last week&#39;s&#160;Web 2.0 Summit, IDG News Service caught up with Marissa Mayer, Google Inc.&#39;s vice president of Search Products &amp; User Experience, to chat about video search, semantic versus keyword search, Google&#39;s universal search effort, and the challenge of indexing the &quot;deep Web.&quot;What follows is an edited transcript of the interview:IDGNS: There are different technology approaches to video search. Blinkx, for example, maintains it does it better than Google because it indexes the text of what is said in videos with speech recognition technology. Where is Google with video search today?Mayer: Google Video has had an interesting evolution. When we first launched it, it was based on closed captions, so literally a transcription of the program, but interestingly, you couldn&#39;t play video. So we changed it so that you could play video, and now we&#39;re searching the meta content. That said, one of the future elements of what&#39;s likely to happen in search is around speech recognition.You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so when you call up or we&#39;re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.IDGNS: What about non-speech content in videos -- the action in the clip?Mayer: That&#39;s going to be particularly hard, given that most of Google&#39;s approaches are based on text right now. So we really do need the text, which is why our inclination is to build a great speech-to-text model and pull the text out.... That said, there are a lot instances of humor, context, things that happen in frame that don&#39;t necessarily have words, but for that we&#39;re going to have to rely on the community to do things like tagging.There is some very early research happening around recognizing faces in videos, recognizing particular objects, understanding that hey, there&#39;s a ball in the frame right now, but it&#39;s very early and not at all ready to be deployed in a commercial application.IDGNS: Some people criticize Google because its query-analysis technology is mostly based on keywords as opposed to understanding natural language, like full sentences.Mayer: Right now Google is really good with keywords, and that&#39;s a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time. People should be able to ask questions, and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions -- not about what words will appear on the page but more like &quot;what is this about?&quot; A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that. But what we&#39;re seeing actually is that with a lot of data, you ultimately see things that seem intelligent even though they&#39;re done through brute force.When you type in &quot;GM&quot; into Google, we know it&#39;s &quot;General Motors.&quot; If you type in &quot;GM foods&quot; we answer with &quot;genetically-modified foods.&quot; Because we&#39;re processing so much data, we have a lot of context around things like acronyms. Suddenly, the search engine seems smart like it achieved that semantic understanding, but it hasn&#39;t really. It has to do with brute force. That said, I think the best algorithm for search is a mix of both brute-force computation and sheer comprehensiveness and also the qualitative human component.IDGNS: Where is the universal search effort at Google?Mayer: It is early stage and we&#39;re working on more radical things now. The team launched [universal search] in May ... Books, images, news, video, and local information have now been blended in [with general Web search]. The team is now devoting its time and energy to three different pieces. They&#39;re working really hard to internationalize universal and bring it to all of our different countries and languages because it&#39;s English-only and largely in the U.S. They&#39;re working on bringing in [other vertical engines] like blog search, patents, scholar. And they&#39;re also looking at how to do more radical things in terms of overall ranking and relevance and user presentation, the user interface piece.The reason why universal search was such a big change for us was that there were three [key] pieces [to adapt]. We had to change the entire infrastructure to make the thing cost effective. Then there&#39;s the ranking piece: Now that you have all these results, how do you order them? And the final piece was the user interface.Now the infrastructure is in place and the engineers can finally get to have fun thinking about what they can do in terms of relevance, ranking, and user interface. With that third [user interface] piece, we&#39;re doing a lot of experimentation building a bunch of interesting prototypes of how universal search could play out this year or two or three years out.IDGNS: Is the ultimate goal to fold all these vertical tabs of news, image, video, book search, and so on into the general Web search query box?Mayer: We want people to think of the search box as one query box. That said, we do acknowledge that there are times when you know you want an image or a news story, so obviously we&#39;ll still have links to those independent indices. But you shouldn&#39;t have to use those if you&#39;re not an expert and you don&#39;t know what&#39;s there [in all our specialty search engines] ... we&#39;d like all of those [secondary indices] to be integrated into the main [Web] search engine.IDGNS: What&#39;s Google&#39;s take on all the so-called &quot;deep Web&quot; content search engines can&#39;t get to for a variety of technical reasons?Mayer: The issue on &quot;deep Web&quot; content is that it&#39;s usually in databases and [Web] crawling isn&#39;t a great way of getting at a database. ... So we&#39;ve been doing things like Google Base. Most databases allow people to do an XML feed off of them so you can do an XML output of your database and you can upload that database to Google and Google Base.IDGNS: Are you making progress with that approach?Mayer: Yes, literally hundreds of millions of items have been uploaded into Google Base. So we&#39;re making progress indexing that data, but we&#39;re not doing a good enough job surfacing that data in the search results. So we have it, and if you go to Google Base, you can find it but it&#39;s hard to figure out, from the universal search aspect, when it should be blended into the main search results.IDGNS: From an engineer&#39;s point of view, is working on search engine technology still &quot;cool&quot; and professionally stimulating?Mayer: Search is still very much an unsolved problem.... We&#39;re like six years into what&#39;s going to become a 500-year discipline. It&#39;s still very compelling, and we have people joining Google every day who are really excited to work on search.IDGNS: Three or four years ago, people were saying, &#39;Google is great, it&#39;s a cash cow, but for people to switch to another search engine, there&#39;s no cost in terms of effort or inconvenience.&#39; But it turns out this hasn&#39;t happened. What&#39;s Google&#39;s view into this issue?Mayer: There are two non-obvious outcomes around the stickiness question. One is that it&#39;s true: If someone builds a better search, users will probably move over [to that competing engine.] That keeps our employees, especially our engineers, really well motivated to make sure no one has better search.... We have to prove to our users every day that we still have the best search.The other non-obvious observation is that search is much stickier than most people realize. Intuitively, you know you can go to [other search engines] ... but people have a source they trust, and it takes them a long time to feel like they&#39;re not giving anything up [by using another search engine.]When you find a long lost friend or information about a medical condition that is hard to diagnose or [you experience] that &quot;I&#39;m feeling lucky&quot; moment when this amazing Web site turns up first on Google, each of those moments stays in your mind. There&#39;s an attachment, a trust there that this tool really brought me what I needed. So the switching cost for search is a lot higher [than people think.]IDGNS: Where do the carriers come in for mobile search? I guess you can bypass them if the user has a mobile browser. Or else you can choose to partner with the carriers for better integration of your services.Mayer: Certainly [mobile] Web browsers do work. That said, the deeper integration is much more advantageous. We&#39;ve seen that right away with the [Google] Maps [service] being embedded into the iPhone.That said, downloadable applications like Google Maps for Mobile or Gmail for Mobile often do sidestep some of the limitations of the particular software that may come preinstalled with the phone. That&#39;s a good strategy to help people who have capable phones use those products. So you can partner with the carriers to get it embedded in the phone when it ships or you can have an application that people can download later.IDGNS: I imagine there are all sorts of business dealings and arrangements that need to be worked out.Mayer: The mobile space is very complicated. We&#39;ve got some very successful mobile partnerships in a number of countries ... so we&#39;ve been working with [telecom] partners, but we&#39;ve also been pursuing an alternate downloadable-application path.
427580
Bloomberg is running an article which quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt&#8217;s stance on media companies and their reluctance to upload content on YouTube, despite its popularity and demand by YouTube users to view copyrighted content. &#8220;Eventually all of the copyrighted content will be available on virtually all of the sites,'&#8217; said Schmidt, who is tussling over [...]
358599
Volkswagen files a subpoena for the identity of a YouTube user who posted a Nazi-themed parody of a recent VW Golf commercial. The move highlights the privacy risks for users of video-sharing and social-networking sites, and no law requires the sites need to notify users of those subpoenas.
144842
Shrink-wrapped catch-22 YouTubers have Christopher "Jedi" Knight. And eBayers have Tim "Happy Hour" Vernor.â¦
15107
Online retailers have begun capitalizing on the YouTube craze, offering a video platform for product demonstrations, rants and raves, and just plain bizarre behavior.
401922
(InfoWorld) - ViacomÂ has sued Google, alleging copyright infringement from video-sharing site YouTube and seeking $1 billion in damages. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, follows a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requestÂ Viacom sent to Google last monthÂ related to the unauthorized posting of Viacom videos to YouTube. At the time,Â Viacom demanded that GoogleÂ remove more than 100,000 of its clipsÂ from YouTube, which Google acquired last year for $1.65 billion. Google said it would comply with the request. In escalating its battle with YouTube with this lawsuit, Viacom reiterates that YouTube has allowed and benefitted from "massive intentional" copyright violations of Viacom videos. In addition to $1 billion inÂ damages, Viacom is asking the court for an injunction barring Google and YouTube from continuing the alleged infringement, Viacom said Tuesday in a statement. Google stands ready to fight the allegations and is confident that "YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders," a Google spokesman said via e-mail. "We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic, and build a stronger community," he wrote. Almost 160,000 Viacom video clips have been uploaded to YouTube without permission and have been viewed over 1.5 billion times, Viacom alleges. "YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom charged in the statement. Google and YouTube illegally profit from the traffic that the unauthorized videos draw to their sites by selling advertising, according to Viacom, which added that YouTube has been lax in its attempts to stop its users from uploading copyrighted videos without permission. Viacom decided to sue Google after negotiations and other measures failed to halt the alleged copyright infringement in YouTube, Viacom said. Viacom is a media conglomerate whose properties include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, and Paramount Pictures. The case is unlikely to result in a total shutdown of YouTube because legitimate uses of the site exist beyond the potentially illegal activities Viacom is objecting to, said Sheldon Klein, an attorney specializing in intellectual-property matters and a partner at Arent Fox LLP in Washington, D.C. However, Google may find itself liable to the infringement claims if Viacom proves that Google and YouTube didn't do all that was possible to prevent users from uploading copyrighted videos without permission, especially after being served with the DMCA notice last month, Klein said. Specifically, if YouTube and Google haven't implemented available technology that would allow them to do a better job of filtering out infringing videos, Viacom could have a legitimate argument in saying they're not trying hard enough, he said. A check of YouTube at noon Eastern time showed multiple instances of Viacom-owned videos, including clips from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and from Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants." One of the "SpongeBob" clips found, for example, has been on YouTube since Feb. 5 of this year, while one of "The Daily Show" clips was uploaded in October of last year. Google executives have said the company is developing technology to address the issue of infringing downloads on YouTube and have promised to deliver it in the near future. Google didn't immediately provide an explanation of what, if any, filtering and detection technology exists in YouTube today. In the meantime, competitorsÂ such asÂ News Corp.'s MySpace, which also lets users upload videos to its site, have licensed third-party systems for detecting infringing videos. There are a number of companies that make this type of software, including Audible Magic, the one chosen by MySpace.