BURNFEED : )

The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week…

MySpace makes $30 million per month. Richard Greenfield, MySpace generates "in excess of $30 million" a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. Even more impressive, Greenfield estimates that this will double in the next twelve months to $60 million per month. It certainly pays off to be the number one social networking site in the US. Maybe Google CEO Eric Schmidt was right when he (allegedly) told Murdoch that the MySpace acquisition will prove to be the best deal of his life.

YouTube awards. And the winners are… According to the awards site, "2006 was a pioneering year for online video, user-created content and the YouTube community." I don't disagree, but still wonder why it took them three months to recognize the fact. Anything to do with that pending court appearance?

Lonelygirl15 accepting product placement. The popular "video blog" that turned out to be fiction has started experimenting with product placements. Acknowledging the risk of a viewer backlash, the show's producers were wise enough to consult the community first. According to co-creator, Greg Goodfried, of the 200 people who responded, 90 percent approved.

Wikipedia rival launches. Citizendium is a "citizens' compendium" of general knowledge, started by self-proclaimed Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. It works much like Wikipedia in that anyone can submit information, however, Citizendium requires users to register with their real names, and its articles are governed by an editorial board, in the hope that this will ensure the site has more authority. Right now to become a contributor requires having a non-free email address (so no Hotmail, Gmail and the like), ruling out participation for lots of people.

Copyright © 2007 Stakh SEO News (All about Ranking)

Targeted real-time ads reach downloaded content

YuMe Networks on Monday is launching what is believed to be the first advertising campaign that lets a marketer dynamically insert video advertising into content that has been downloaded onto a viewer's PC, mobile device or TV. This will allow peer-to-peer networks and others that offer downloadable content to monetize it with advertising. Previously, such services had to offer the content for free or charge users on a per-download basis because the viewing of the ads could not be measured and tracked.

YuMe's technology reports how many people viewed the ad, how much of it they watched, the number of times they watched it, and whether they clicked on the ad.

Entertainment software publisher Eidos Interactive is using YuMe technology to launch an ad campaign to promote its upcoming video and PC game Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary. The ads will be shown on select video files from G4 TV and distributed on the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, which opened in February.

Unlike video content, which is downloaded and resides on a local hard drive, YuMe-delivered ads are streamed in real time when the viewer hits the "play" button, said Jayant Kadambi, chief executive and co-founder of Redwood City, Calif.-based YuMe. Marketers can select to show the ads before or after the video is played and can show two or more in a row if they like, as well as target the ads by geography, he said.

Copyright © 2007 Stakh SEO News (All about Ranking)

Spam experts at MIT lift curtain on search

Nothing is going to change while there is money to be made off things like AdSense, Google's service for ads, according to speakers and audience participants debating the issue. On the other hand, the search engine that does come up with a working solution will want to keep that trick out of its competitors' hands.

"If you can't solve search engine spam, and the other guy does, your search engine is done at this point," said Bill Yerazunis, chairman of the annual MIT Spam Conference.

The situation seems to have led to a clam-up in the spam research community.

"You've heard our lead speakers about blog spam and search engine spam and that's going to get more interesting, but here's the thing. I put out the call, but I am not getting a lot of papers on search engine spam because, independently, companies think they have a profit in the solution," Yerazunis said.

"Think of this. If you were Google and you came up with a solution to solve search engine spam, would you publish it? It's a race among the big three. If Microsoft has solved it, they are going to knock out Google. If Yahoo has it, they are going to knock Microsoft out. The stakes here are billions of dollars," he said.

Yerazunis suspects that even people in the academic realm are keeping a closed lid on solutions to search spam, because the payoff is huge. If someone in academia finds it before the private companies, he's sure they're going to sell it to the highest bidder.

Because no cure is evident in the foreseeable future, education is the key to eliminating a lot of spam because much of it is originating from legitimate brands and advertisers with bad practices, said Amanda Watlington, owner of consulting firm Searching for Profit, in a speech at the conference.

Black hats, true spammers, will not be stopped as long as there is an incentive to make money through things like Google's AdSense. But legitimate brands and advertisers should really be called gray hats, said Watlington, because a lot of them are still unintentionally creating what many in the field consider spam.

Watlington doesn't believe this is a case of feigned ignorance on the part of major brands and advertisers trying to get ahead in search marketing. She thinks it's real ignorance of people not from a technical background wanting to join what is now a major business.

"You have the advertisers who are in over their heads. They are drowning in this. They are marketers and Web designers in a tech field with no SEO (search engine optimization) training. They use old, discredited tactics that they often don't even know are wrong," said Watlington.

"Feed them info, tell them they are doing wrong, and guess what? The more they know, the less likely they are to do stupid things," said Watlington.

No company wants to be BMW, said Watlington, referring to the bad press the company got when BMW's German site was blacklisted from Google for nefarious search ranking tactics.

But as more new tools are offered, companies are getting more confused.

In November, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo came together around site maps agreeing that they would be crawled. But Watlington said that her clients had no idea on how to utilize the indexing service properly. One client went to her wanting to know why he had an indexing problem. He had been feeding 400,000 pages.

"I had to explain to him how much it takes a site obeying a polite crawl to index those pages. Look, find your high margin and put those in your site map, OK?

Copyright © 2007 Stakh SEO News (All about Ranking)

ICANN rejects .xxx domain registry

ICANN on Friday voted 9-5 to deny an application from ICM Registry, which for the past several years has sought to be the registry for adult-content Web sites.

ICANN, which oversees domain names and Internet addresses, decided that ICM's proposal raised too many public-policy concerns and ultimately could change the role of the nonprofit organization.

"ICM's response does not address (the ICANN Government Advisory Committee's) concern for offensive content and similarly avoids the GAC's concern for the protection of vulnerable members of the community," ICANN stated in the meeting. "The board does not believe these public-policy concerns can be credibly resolved with the mechanisms proposed by the applicant."

ICANN also noted that ICM's proposal could raise significant compliance issues with law enforcement agencies around the globe, many of which have different laws governing pornography.

"There are credible scenarios that lead to circumstances in which ICANN would be forced to assume an ongoing management and oversight role regarding Internet content, which is inconsistent with its technical mandate," ICANN stated in the meeting.

This is not the first time that ICANN has rejected an application from ICM, which has been submitting proposals for a top-level .xxx domain since 2000. Nonetheless, this time, the board was again somewhat divided on the issue.

Susan Crawford, an ICANN director, said she believes ICM's revised proposal addressed the Government Advisory Committee's concerns.

""We asked applicants to demonstrate that the community is precisely defined so it can readily be determined which persons or entities make up that community, and also to state that the community was comprised of persons that have needs and interests in common, but which are differentiated from those of the general global Internet community," according to Crawford's comments in transcripts of the meeting.. "It seems to me that the applicant here has identified a sponsored community for .xxx as a self-identified group of adult Webmasters who wish to work together to implement industry best practices in a specific and easily identifiable marketplace."

She added that members of the adult pornography community who support ICM's proposal are aiming to create a forum to develop and enforce best industry practices, largely because they find that one doesn't currently exist elsewhere.

ICM's proposal, however, has faced opposition not only from various conservative groups but also from within the pornography community. Some members of the community have dropped their support of ICM's proposal, citing fears that it would create a "red-light district" and derail the efforts to become more of a mainstream industry.

Copyright © 2007 Stakh SEO News (All about Ranking)