[Inside AdSense] An effective pairing of AdSense and e-commerce

Imineo.com is a French video-on-demand site offering a wide variety of videos in different formats. In 2005, the site's owners decided to use Google AdWords to drive qualified traffic to their site. After setting up their first campaigns, they implemented conversion tracking to evaluate their overall return on investment. More recently, the company added AdSense to their site. As co-owner Jean-Baptiste Sers told us, "Our business model is not based on advertising revenue -- but in order to increase our AdWords spend, we wanted to use AdSense."

For an e-commerce advertiser, this might seem risky. Some might think that integrating AdSense could have resulted in a sales drop because of users clicking on the ads instead of buying one of the videos. But as Imineo team implemented AdSense, they noticed that qualified visitors came to the site with the intention to buy the videos and did not click on the sponsored links, while other visitors usually clicked on one of the relevant ads.

Imineo's strategy highlights how e-commerce sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that usually exits the site using the URL address bar. Overall, the use of AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Jean-Baptiste put it, "AdSense has helped us monetize the visits of these other visitors and therefore increase the overall revenue/client ratio."

If you own an e-commerce site, here are a couple of suggestions.

• Try testing AdSense first on your exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your sales.
  
  
• If, like Imineo, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not affect your conversions, we encourage you to increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. The additional revenue coming from AdSense can help you generate more qualified traffic and therefore increase your overall sales.
  

You Must Be Streaming

In a sudden reversal of fortune, newspapers have taken to online video and might just beat TV news at its own game.

Illustration by Ateliér 444

W e think we know that the professional news media, especially newspapers, are obsolete, that the future is all about (excuse the expression) you—media created by amateurs. But such PowerPoint distillation tends to overlook the fact that mainstream media are not all simply shriveling and dying but in some instances actually evolving. And in evolution, there are always fascinating transitional iterations along the way. Such as newspapers’ suddenly proliferating forays into online video. (And now magazines: Time Inc. just announced a new “studio” to develop Web video.)

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense. One of the Times’s new Web-video stars, David Carr (as the jolly-noir, movie-tasked Carpetbagger), recalls that when the Times’ video operation started fifteen months ago, his bosses said, “ ‘Let’s give it a whirl.’ Which is the exact opposite of the Times’ usual DNA. ‘Let’s give it a whirl’—that’s not something that comes up a lot.”

At their best, the newspapers’ online videos are, minute for minute, superior to TV news. As I write, CNN is airing a live press conference by Anna Nicole Smith’s lawyer and a loop of Smith vamping, while a significant breaking news story—the U.S. claim that Muqtada al-Sadr has left Iraq for Iran—is running in tiny type across the bottom of the screen. Given the dumb-and-dumber choices, I can easily imagine newspapers’ Web-video portals becoming the TV-journalism destinations of choice for smart people—that is, in the 21st century, the dominant nineteenth-century journalistic institution, newspapers, might beat the dominant twentieth-century institution, TV, at the premium part of its own game.

The medium is too new and unsettled to have anything like a best-practices rule book. Everyone is making it up as they go along. And a few of the on-the-fly inventions are awesome. The most attention-getting MSM Web video so far was the very meta one posted last month by the Times about a Washington Post columnist—the slickly produced, thirteen-minute-long “Hi—I’m Art Buchwald and I just died” obituary.

The Times’ and the Post’s strikingly different Web-video paths are illustrative of this flux moment. At the Times, the strategy is to merge operations with the regular newsroom, and convert as many of its journalists as possible to part-time videography. But the Post and washingtonpost.com remain distinct entities—a sore point for some people on the Web side. The Times highlights its several fresh daily videos prominently on the home page; the Post hides them beneath a tiny, generic “Photos & Videos” button.

The quality, of course, is all over the map. An amateur spirit is exciting, but amateurism in action is … not necessarily so. I get no added value from watching A. O. Scott and Ben Brantley deliver abridged versions of their written-for-print reviews. Washingtonpost.com’s extemporaneous version, a nervous editor interviewing wooden film critics, could be a public-access cable clip. Often, the Times reporters’ videos are like tentative, so-so versions of TV-news spots, unremarkable sound bites interlarded with scripted blah-blah boilerplate.

The lessons seem obvious: Don’t do Web video if you don’t have anything interesting to show, and don’t compete with TV unless you can do something they can’t or won’t. In other words, use the medium.

The Times’ fashion-show coverage worked well because hearing and watching designers gives one instant tastes of the various flavors of gay Seventh Avenue affect, which Times prose won’t convey. On the op-ed page, I mostly skip Nicholas Kristof’s columns about sexual slaves in Asia and genocide in Darfur; watching his video pieces shot in Cambodia and Sudan, I was riveted. Online video can also exploit the “long tail” in ways TV can’t. There may not be many of us who want to watch a hep Romanian mayor justify prejudice against Gypsies (the Post), or Sarah Vowell’s illustrated ode to the architect Louis Sullivan (the Times), but I adored both. If documentaries are hard to get shown in theaters and on TV, imagine the obstacles faced by serious shorts. But now, in the online archives of U.S. papers are thousands of videos, among them dozens of exceptional short docs, more like miniature Frontlines or public-radio-with-pictures than like network-news segments, available anytime. This is video-journalism-on-demand years ahead of digital television: Because I elect to watch a story, then see it on a computer screen eighteen inches from my face, I focus in a way TV doesn’t require.

At the Times, with its more TV-esque model (the video unit morphed out of Times Television), on-camera talent is king. Among the best is technology columnist David Pogue. He cheerfully performs: In a piece on the Apple iPhone, he’s frank about his excitement, and uses the medium well to demonstrate how to zoom in on pictures by physically pinching them. “There are people in this building,” Carr says, “that are really good at video and others who aren’t. Is it just the hambone gene

Measuring simultaneous internet viewers P2

its no surprise that those who own or sell advertising on internet video sites didnt respond favorably to my last post. Its far more profitable for them to sell 1k views an hour for 24 hours than to have to deliver 24k viewers in an hour or even worse, at the same time.

The number of simultaneous viewers should be the ONLY number that matters to advertisers when selecting where to place an internet video ad. Why ?

It shows the max number of users that a show can have at a point in time , which advertisers will evolve to in buying time critical ads (movie buys on Thursdays before opening on Friday). If an advertiser for Shrek 19 or Saw XX needs to reach 10mm people online before their movies open the next day, knowing the maximum and average number of simultaneous viewers for the content you are buying gives you the proper constraints required to do the math on the buy.

The number of simultaneous viewers a site can support also tells you what happens to your ad if something unique happens. Its hurricane season. Lets say there is amazing footage from a hurricane or some other event, maybe a Paris Hilton prison break and one site has the capacity to handle 1mm simultaneous viewers, the other 100k. If your ad is on one, you might be ok. If its on the other, you might be out of luck. Your ad is delivered at a snails pace if at all, with users seeing more buffering then ad.

Then there is the issue of cheating. its easy to cheat on views. Youtubers game their views all the time, as they do on all video sites. To advertisers, each site defines a view differently. is it when an ad is viewed for 1 second, 10 seconds, to its entirety, to its entirety without buffering ?

If you buy an average of 1k simultaneous viewers, thats a much more difficult number to cheat. The advertiser can get a link into the serving of their ads and monitor how many people are watching at any point in time which is something they can learn from. Which of course scares the hell out of web video hosts. If an advertiser were to see that at 9pm EST only 17 people were watching their ad on the site. Thats not so good compared to TV.

The number of simultaneous viewers also tells the "intensity" or heat of an ad or content. 1mm simultaneous viewers has a completely different impact than 100k per day for 10 days which is different from 1k per day for 1k days. Tracking the number of simultaneous viewers gives you the true feel of the viral nature of the content and it smooths out much of the cheating by video uploaders

Finally, the number of simuls give you a reference point to TV . what is the maximum number of simultaneous viewers that Youtube, or AOL , Yahoo, MSN or ??/ VIdeo have supported in aggregate across all their content ? What is the maximum number of simultaneous viewers that any given piece of content or advertising has achieved ? Thats a number thats easily comparable to a TV rating. The number of views isnt.

Back in 1999, when we broadcast the Cubs during the day, a 6k audio stream could get 25k plus simultaneous listeners and often peaked past 40k. Telling an advertiser that they could reach 40k people at once was powerful. Far more powerful than the number of views or listens content had.

its time we start to use average and maximum number of simultaneous viewers as the benchmark for video .

Danielson/Animal Collective @ South Street Seaport, NYC 6/1/07

For most who made the trip way downtown for the River To River / Seaport Music Festival kick-off show, it was the official start to NYC's summer concert season. And you couldn't do better, opening with the uniformed Danielson and his familyre sounds 'til dusk, and the extraordinary avant-everything strawberry jamming of Animal Collective. For free. Love NYC.

Friday night AC were a trio; Panda Bear, Avey Tare, and the Geologist graced the Seaport stage, while Deakin did not. Well not technically; after moving around to a rear-view of the performance platform, friends pointed out Deakin sitting behind the PA system, on stage but out of sight to the crowd, just watching. We're told that he's not on this tour, but this has us pretty confused. Which is to say, we were at an Animal Collective show.

The set was dedicated to Sung Tongs and the forthcoming Domino-released LP; after a fantastic jaunt through "Who Could Win A Rabbit," Avey announced they'd be playing "some new songs." With a crowd pleaser and the slowly setting sun out of the way, the Seaport got its first taste of Strawberry Jam, sitting somewhere between Tongs' madcap bluster and Feels' inviting structure. Unlike their Webster show last year, which saw an already divisive band split its own fans into the frustrated and the fawning (the Geologist was "feeling it" that night, morphing every tune into a looping, abstrat sound collage), Friday's set rang true to most of the massive crowd gathered by the water.

To complete the set's Sungian symmetry, the Collective capped off the night with a perfectly spastic "We Tigers" (Geologist's whiplashing staredowns in full effect) and the classic, psychedelic vocal exercises of "Leaf House" -- but the trance-y calypso of new jam "Chores" ended up the night's post-show conversation piece. One of the year's best shows, easily, but being a free show, with one of the world's most creative bands, showing off excellent new material ... how could it not be? Lots of pics from both sets after the jump, plus a game of "Where's Deakin?" for your enjoyment.

DANIELSON

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

rcade Fire Stole My Basketball"

It's a crazy post-Stop Peter Bjorn & John world we're living in. Got a problem with an indie rocker? Start a blog about it! Dave writes in to tell us about a slow-brewing blog beef between some dude who claims to have had his basketball stolen by Win Butler (find him at arcadefirestolemybasketball.blogspot.com), and Butler-brother Will, who claims that, in fact, Arcade Fire didn't steal this dude's basketball (and you can find him at arcadefiredidntstealdudesbasketball.blogspot.com).

Given this is all entirely unsubstantiated internet hearsay, we'd like to add this fact to the controversy: In the recent Rolling Stone (P. 67, para 2, Issue 1027 -- Depp/Richards cover), Win told Gavin Edwards that "he tries to play basketball at least once a week, even on tour"! (Emphasis added for additional sensationalistic effect.)

Sounds like Win is totally guilty.

First Look: Microsoft Surfacing Computing!

18:15

About a year ago I gave a presentation to a group of journalists about gadgets of the future and showed a video about a theoretical multi-touch computing system. When asked when we would see something like that in the wild, I optimistically ballparked 5-7 years. You can imagine my surprise when I walked into a room at Microsoft and found a fully functioning Microsoft Surface Computer (more than one, actually.)

I played with it long after the shoot was over. It's incredible. And I know many of you have the same question I did; when am I going to have one of these in my house? Surface computers will start with Microsoft partners getting first shot at various public applications, you'll most likely see them in action in Las Vegas first. Eventually prices will come down and production will go up and I expect we'll all be waving through our playlists on our coffee table before we know it. You'll also see in this video that wifi on the Zune can be used for more than just bursting a song or picture to a stranger.

Captivity

Seems like only yesterday, the streets of Hollywood were filled with billboards depicting a grizzled old Samuel Jackson holding scantily-clad Christina Ricci on a big, chain leash. Little did we suspect from the controversial ad campaign that BLACK SNAKE MOAN was sappy Sundance fare to the core, more LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE than MANDINGO. Oh well, I’m sure those ubiquitous softcore billboards caused Dov Charney to run a few stop signs.

Time to make way for the latest sadomasochistic Hollywood ad campaign! Even by my depraved standards, the billboards for CAPTIVITY are way over the top! As reported in yesterday’s LA Times:

The ad consisted of four panels:

Abduction, in which a terrified young blond woman has either a gloved or black hand over her face, as if she’s being kidnapped.

Confinement, in which she’s behind a chain-link fence and appears to be poking a bloody thumb through the fence.

Torture, in which she is flat on her back, her face in a white cast, with red tubes that resemble jumper cables running into her nostrils.

And Termination, in which her head dangles over the edge of a table, the murder complete.

I wonder how the MPAA gave a pass to the CAPTIVITY billboards, but blocked last year’s much milder ROAD TO GUANTANAMO poster? Was it an act of political censorship? And what to make of the fact that CAPTIVITY is directed by leftist Roland Joffe (THE KILLING FIELDS) and scribed by Larry Cohen, the master of socially-relevant schlock? Willl CAPTIVITY have a Gitmo/Abu Ghraib subtext? Or will it be just another bad SAW clone?

Whatever the answer, Lionsgate has pissed off a lot of parents. The studio is scrambling to remove the offending billboards by tomorrow. So if you haven’t seen them yet, go out and take a gander at the most brazen marketing gimmick since Vincent Gallo got a hummer (little “h”) on Sunset Boulevard.

Perhaps it goes without saying that this poster for HOSTEL 2 doesn’t stand a chance of finding its way onto the bus shelters of Babylon.