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Does Technology Connect or Disconnect Us From Others?

Top 20 Web 2.0 - Canada

Why Google Chrome?

Elgg

QuarkBase

Wisdom Is In Managing Crowds?

Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovation 2008

Online Video Advertising: State Of The Industry - Q3 2008

Highlights

• Online Video Advertising Spend To Grow >55% Next Year
• US Online video advertising spending expected to hit $962m in 2009
• Confusing array of technology and ad-unit standards constraining current growth rates
• Video ad spending still represents just 2.36% of all online advertising
• Average In-Stream CPMs reach $15.8
• In-Stream (pre/mid/post roll) still representing 88% of all video ads
• 20.95% of internet video streams being monetized
• Video Publishers generating an effective monetization rate of $4.05 per thousand streams

Industry News Round Up

Mixed Success For NBC’s Olympic Strategy

Despite significant market buzz, and a special Silverlight-powered site, industry analysts are suggesting that NBC’s web coverage of the Olympics was a very mixed success. NBCOlympics.com streamed 72 million videos and generated 1.2 billion page views, put into perspective; Yahoo Sports (which had no video) achieved an average of 4.7 million visitors a day versus NBC’s 4.3 million (source: Nielsen Online). eMarketer have suggested that NBC’s Olympics video ad revenue only amounted to $5.75 million. The eMarketer estimate does not include banner-ad revenue generated by NBC’s 1.2 billion page views, which we estimate would have generated an additional $12 million. However its still a very small proportion of the $1bn NBC generated by their coverage overall. Given that NBC paid $900m for exclusive video rights to the Olympics, meaning that its profits will be about $100 million, it seems a shame that they were not able to monetize the event more successfully online. We put this down to two major factors:

• First, their decision to limit the availability of content so as to avoid cannibalizing TV viewership (surveys of viewer usage and preferences have suggested this fear is substantially unfounded)
• and secondly, their decision to use a Silverlight-based player. Silverlight despite being technologically promising, is still poorly distributed, with a very small install base relative to industry leader Adobe Flash.

The Rise and Rise of Hulu

Despite still being substantially smaller than YouTube, with 88 million videos served compared to YouTube’s 4.2 billion, analysts are now beginning to suggest that Hulu will be the more successful business, thanks to its ability to sell advertising across 100% of its inventory, compared to just 3% for YouTube. This is thanks to its policy of only serving high-quality original content, and securing licensing deals from content owners, rather than allowing users to upload the content themselves. This has removed the risk of copyright infringing content, or content of questionable quality; risk factors that most advertisers are anxious to avoid being associated with. According to one estimate, Hulu could enjoy $90 million in revenue in its first year. YouTube’s estimated worldwide revenue total for 2008 is $200 million this year, but is estimated to be approximately half that domestically. Given that Hulu caters almost exclusively to a US audience, both YouTube and Hulu could see roughly the same revenues in the U.S. this year.

IAB Announces Vast

In July, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) released its first public draft of its “Digital Video Ad Serving Template” (VAST). VAST is intended to provide standardized communication protocol between video players and ad servers, allowing technology providers to build players and ad servers that are more easily compatible and interchangeable. Publishers who use the standard will be able to plug into multiple third-party digital video ad servers and networks without additional development. The current lack of standards for ad-server integrations within media players has created a significant hurdle to adoption of new platforms for many publishers and the complexities of having to reintegrate with new vendors has created an artificial barrier preventing a fluid market in the technology sector. The public comment period will last until September 10, 2008, after which feedback will be collated, reviewed and a final version of the document released shortly after. We expect broad industry adoption of VAST to take between 9-18 months from the date of release and feel confident that the importance of standardized integrations is such that most vendors will adopt a VAST-compliant platform strategy in this time-frame.

Liverail Junction

In August, LiveRail announced Junction, a new publisher tool to facilitate the complex task of managing relationships with multiple ad sources. Junction gives publishers the flexibility to request and display ads from any ad-source, ad-network or ad-server without having to make adjustments to their media player or technology back end, reducing the lead time to going live with a new ad partners, minimizing unfilled inventory and maximizing revenue. Junction also takes care of the complex process of distributing available inventory among partners and content owners; allowing publishers to divide available inventory according to rights, and track revenue share accordingly. It is seen as an important tool not just to help minimize the technical difficulties of working with multiple partners, but also to manage the problem of making online video a viable business.

eMarketer Revises Online Video Ad Spend Numbers

eMarketer again revised their estimates for the size of online video advertising spending in the US in August. Estimates for 2008 were revised down to $505m, with 2009 being taken to $750m and the industry expected to cross the billion dollar mark in 2010 to a total of $1.15bn.

Industry Challenges

1) No True 3rd Party Ad Serving

Almost all video ad servers require that campaigns be manually booked within their own system, and in many cases that the publisher is integrated directly with that platform. There is still no ubiquitous technology analogous to “ad tags” from the display advertising world.

2) Reporting Discrepancies

Publishers are continuing to experience confusion and frustration as publishing platforms and ad-servers deliver different measurements on performance.

3) Confusing Array Of Ad Formats

From “linear video interactive ad with companion ads” to “non-linear non-overlay ads” the industry has succeeded in developing a proliferation of formats, however the abundance of options (and confusing terminology) has created difficulties for advertisers in terms of purchasing decisions, delivery of creative and measuring engagement, delivery and ROI.

4) Non-Standard Integrations

Video players and ad-servers do not have a standard protocol for the request, response and display of advertising. Publishers who wish to receive ads from one partner may find that they need to undertake a totally new technical integration in order to receive ads from another; this has prevented fluidity in the market for technology and among ad networks.

5) Inconsistent Terminology

Although the IAB has tried to set standard definitions for metrics and units, the industry has still failed to adopt a consistent lexicon for the description of both units and metrics.

6) Measuring Effectiveness

Whereas direct response advertising can easily be shown to be effective or not, brand advertisers using online video have difficulty proving the effectiveness of their campaigns. Technology to measure metrics like “brand lift” will help prove the usefulness of video advertising improving ROI and enhancing optimization.

Volumes And Values

Overlays

• Average Overlay Click Through Rates are: 1.1%
• Click through rates from overlay ads to websites: 10.6%
• Close out rates for overlays are 81%
• Click Through rates for standard overlays: 0.8%
• Animated overlay click through rates are: 4.2%
• Completion rate for video ads launched as a result of clicking on an overlay are: 90%
• Average CPMs for overlay ad campaigns are $18.4
• Current size of the market for overlays: $70m
• We estimate that overlays (and other non-instream ads) represent 12% of video ads served

In Stream (pre/mid/post roll)

• Average Completion rate of 79% for 15 second pre-rolls,
• Average Completion rates are 84% for 30 second pre-rolls.
• Click through rates from in-stream ads (to advertiser’s websites) are: 11.5%
• Average CPMs for In-Stream are $15.8
• We estimate that In Stream Ads represent 88% of video ads served
• Current size of market for In-stream $550m approx

Industry Wide

• 153 billion US video streams projected for calender 2008
• Estimated calendar 2008 US online video advertising of $619m
• At these volumes, video publishers are achieving an effective monetization rate (EMR) of $4.05 per thousand streams. This figure is calculated by dividing the total dollar amount spent on US video advertising by the total number of US streams, which represents the average CPM for videos diluted by the fill rate
• Given our overlay and in-stream ad unit data, and assuming each monetized video asset contains 1.2 billable ad units, we estimate the average monetized video asset nets an eCPM of $19.33
• At this rate, we find that only 20.95% of video streams are currently being monetized, with four fifths of video streams going without any in-video advertising.

Forecasts

Key Video Advertising Estimates
US Online Video Ad Spend ()

Interview With Paul Edmondson - CEO and Founder of YieldBuild

Intro

What is Yieldbuild?

Easier Ads On Your Site

A Solution For Publishers

Overcoming Competitors

Placement Does Matter

A Worthy Dish

Introduction to Google Chrome - Screencast

Here it is! The new Google Chrome browser is finally here, available in a number of languages from Filipino to Catalan. Is all there. So choose your proper language and download it. It's ready now for Windows XP or Vista only. No Mac, sorry guys, but is a very very cool new browser. Let me show you in 4 minutes only what are the key things you should expect to find inside Google Chrome. First of all, as you can see the navigation controls are very very simple. There's no more top menu, but there are a bunch of traditional tabs that now occupy the very top part of your screen. This tabs act as individual applications. If one of them crashes not the rest of the browser will follow along. If you're running through long-loading pages, javascript loaded once that seems to slow down everything, only that browser window or tab will be influenced by that. The rest will function just fine. The second interesting thing is now you can use the address bar also as a search bar indeed. You can say that you're looking for screencasting tools and this will act as a search engine. Is now searching inside Google Italy because I'm based in Italy and this is the first time that I'm using the browser, but I've already found out that inside the wrench tool here, which groups together some of the key commands, you can certainly go inside options and go to basics and select your default Google search. It can be one of this Italian search engines, so the fantastic p2p Faroo or you decide what engine you wanna use there. You set Google.com. I will need to restart Google Chrome altogether to get this to work, I guess. Other features available trough the options are pretty much the ones you would expect to find there. Some minor tweaks, where you download things, if passwords are on or off and this is the more technical stuff with proxy settings, cookies, security protection from phishing and malware and so on. You find all of these stuff inside the wrench here where you can also discover about a new way to display the history which is trough a browser window, which I find very handy and the same approach is used for the download right there. These are the tricky things new in the menu. The other interesting menu here is the one represented by this paper clip and inside it the first interesting thing to point at is the new incognito window, which allows you to browse anonymously without leaving any trace of your destination page you've been or any traces of the cookies and other stuff you may get along your browsing journey. The second very very interesting thing (and probably this is a premiere one for all the browsers out there), is the ability to create for any tab a shortcut on your desktop or inside your start menu. Let's say you've got the e-mail and want to access it. This is more straightful without calling the browser and going to a proper Gmail window. You can say "create applications shortcut" and this is gonna ask you where do you want it. On desktop, on the start menu, on the quick launch bar. You can select the ones you want and when you say ok, you're gonna get an icon on your desktop actually with your Gmail right here. There it is. When I double click it I'm gonna get a browser window just with my Gmail. Right there. These are the key new things for this fantastic browser. It's light and fast and is the fastest javascript engine that is out there. If you have a side you contain several applications or tools you use, you should find Google Chrome to be very fast. From Rome, Italy this is Robin Good with the introduction of Google Chrome (Beta) for Windows. Go download it yourself. Ciao!

Ten Features of Google Chrome

Learn 10 quick tips about using Google Chrome:

• One box for everything To navigate the web or do a search, start typing into the address bar. It will suggest popular sites, searches and even pages you've already visited that contain your search terms.
• New Tab Page To view most frequented websites simply open a new tab. Google Chrome will automatically display your most visited pages and search engines as well as recent bookmarks and closed tabs.
• Application shortcuts To launch a web application in its own Google Chrome window, click the page menu and select "create application shortcuts". A shortcut for this app will appear on your desktop. Click the icon to launch this app in a Google Chrome window.
• Dynamic tabs To open a new tab, hit the plus icon next to an open tab. You can also click and drag the top of a tab to change the order or even pull a tab in its own window. Then put it back again.
• Crash control To see how much of your computer's resources each of your open webpages is using, right-click the tab of the Google Chrome window and select "task manager". You'll see memories per tab and plugins like flash appear separately. You can also close tags that are misbehaving by clicking "end process" from inside the task manager.
• Incognito mode To browse the web without storing the record on your computer, click the page menu and select "new incognito window". A new window will open in incognito mode. Websites can still collect personal information about you, but nothing from the session will be used in Google Chrome after you close the window.
• Secure browsing To help you browse the web more securely, Google Chrome will show warning message before you visit a site that's suspected of having malware or phishing.
• Instant bookmarks To save your favorite pages, just click the star next to the address bar. Then select bookmarks bar to add the selected link to the bookmarks bar.
• Import settings To import your settings after you've installed Google Chrome, click the wrench menu and select "Import bookmarks & settings". Select the browser and then select any item you don't want to add. Then click import.
• Simpler downloads To download a file, click on the link to start the download. You'll see the download progress at the bottom of the Google Chrome window. When it's finished, you can drag the file to copy it to your desktop, click on the button to open it or click on the arrow for more options.

One Box for Everything

To navigate the web or do a search, start typing into the address bar. It will suggest popular sites, searches and even pages you've already visited that contain your search terms.

Safe Browsing

To help you browse the web more securely, Google Chrome will show warning message before you visit a site that's suspected of having malware or phishing.

The Story Behind Google Chrome

• Why is Google building a browser For how much the web has evolved, the browser as a platform, haven't evolved that much. What we are trying to do with Chrome is to make sure the browsers are really evolving along with the web so that the web can evolve to the next level. Browsers had to get better because they were designed for an era when webpages were doing completely different things.
Today most of what we use on a day-to-day basis applications and not webpages. People are watching videos, they're uploading videos, they're chatting with each other, they're playing games on the web. All these things certainly never existed back when the first browsers were created, when the first web was created. Wouldn't it be great to start from scratch and design something based on the needs of today's application, today's webmasters.
• Speed. V8 and Webkit With Google Chrome we wanted to make sure that we improved browsers along. So speed, stability and security. Speed is always very important to Google. We want to make sure that Chrome executes as fast as possible everything from the Javascript engine to the renderer. We decided for V8 which allows us to execute JavaScript really fast. Javascript is the language that is used everywhere on the web. It was performing too slow so we decided to to make it faster. The team that worked on that did an amazing job. We're all stunned by how fast that works. We saw a big opportunity to try to make it a fresh start and to use a different rendering entering webkit something that we spent a long time evaluating and webkit is the underlying rendering engine for Chrome because it's very fast, it's very lightweight, it's very small and easy-to-maintain code base.
• Stability We've worked really hard to keep the browser very fast, especially when it's accessing these very powerful sites and also to keep it very stable. For instance if you're playing a game in one browser tab and it suddenly slows down a lot because suddenly you have 50 monsters on the screen you have to kill you're next tab over that's running your e-mail isn't gonna be slowed down by that.
We came up with this system whereby each web app would be run in its own environment. Isolated from the others. Other browsers what might have on this is the entire browser would crash. so you lose your online banking session, you lose the document that you were editing, you lose everything. In Google Chrome, if one tab goes down the other tab would still stay up.
• Security In building Chrome we were very concerned about security. One of the thing that gives us a lot of is just the multi-process architecture of Chrome. Each render runs in a separate process on your computer. That means they're isolated from each other so one can't talk to the other and steal information. What we do is we essentially give each webpage its own little playground, its own sandbox. If you got online banking running in one tab you got your search results, your gmail and another tab, the two can't talk to each other and if something bad happen in one sandbox, maybe a giant flood or it starts to rain, the other sandboxes are gonna stay nice and dry, nice and happy. Your tab is going to be isolated from the other tabs.
• The invisible browser In the engineering browser essence in Chrome is the user interface itself. it's stuff around outside of the window. The buttons of the toolbar, that kind of stuff. Hand-in-hand with that was this design philosophy that we took because we wanted to maximize content and minimize Chrome. In designing Chrome we felt that we had to make it invisible. people shouldn't have to think about Google Chrome, people should have to think about their applications. In this process they've taken a very minimalistic approach just like Google.com. If you think of the white page and Google.com we've tried to do the same with the browser. from top to bottom we designed the interface to make sure that it was as efficient and clean as possible, in every single pixel of the chrome of chrome to be sure that was nothing wasted.
• The code is yours Google Chrome is a fully open source browser. We wanna release this in a way in which others adopt good idea from us like we wanna adopt good ideas from other folks. and help the browser get better. People should be apt to dig into that, people should be apt to learn from that. People should be apt to contribute. We really want the work that we do to sort raised the bar for browser. We want browsers free so everyone can make the capabilities better. We wanna be able to allow better web applications to be delivered. Even if Google Chrome itself isn't used by everyone on the web, as long as it makes the web better, we've achieved that goal.

Google Chrome In-Depth Analysis from Mashable

Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins of Mashable takes a quick tour around the functions and features of Google Chrome: Hello there Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins here. Going to do a quick screencast for the Mashable! readers on brand new Google Chrome. Really good stuff. Last night I did a quick blog post indicating that I wasn't going to be particularly excited to see this, but I would be try it out as soon as it came out. Google Chrome. First thing i wanna start with there's a memory manager here. I've got three tabs open here. First thing I notice if you look at the task list, you get a lot of processes that open up. One that seems to open up for every tab and sometimes they seems to even spawn others in a row looking process. I found out when I compared it to FireFox is a 8% less memory usage tab for tab. At this point I've had this browser opened for about 2 hours and there's no blotch. This one gone up is my gmail. Is 33MB memory item and had gone up about 4 MB and just drop back down when I started using it again. Interesting. Is very memory efficient and it shows in how rapidly stuffs pops up. I've preloaded tabs here because with the screencast running it slows down my machine quite considerably, but as you can see I'm switching between new stories here and it's no delay unlike the delay which exist in Safari, which is also based off a web-page code base. There's one little quirk with Gmail. This is strange that it happens here but I found that with some of the keyboard shortcut there's a bit of delay of the screen. You put some keyboard shortcuts and it scrolls the whole screen, not text, but like the whole applications got along off screen and that would duplicate yet but it seems to happen whenever I try to open windows. This is awesome