The recent announcement that YouTube will share advertising revenues with members who contribute their work to YouTube is yet another marker is the steady march towards dissembling the structure and dynamics of the traditional broadcast media industry.
The other service cited in the article has been sharing revenue for a while, but is not the Web 2.0 darling status acquired by YouTube based on it's acquisition by Google.
Qumana's business model has since the beginning been based on sharing advertising revenue with users who use the Q-Ads service to attach relevant advertising to their social media content.
The bulk of social media sharing (the 'social' in the term social media, tho' there's more to it than that) still happens on and in blogging networks, and IMO this is unlikely to change in the near future.
As advertising gets more and more relevant to niche markets, and gets easier to identify, pull and place into or alongside media-born work created by personal publishers, we believe that Qumana's value proposition will get stronger and stronger.
Joe Eigo, a martial arts expert in Toronto, used to pay hundreds of dollars a month for computer and hosting services to distribute his own acrobatic and martial arts videos on the Web, in the hope of raising his profile in the TV and film industry.
Today, not only is he able to distribute his content to millions of people at no cost using a popular online video-sharing site, he has also been paid nearly $26,000 (U.S.) by the site owner.
Welcome to the new world of user-generated content on the Internet. What some people consider quirky material at best, companies are increasingly starting to view as a valuable asset. So valuable, in fact, they're willing to pay for it.
Metacafe, a private firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv, has been paying thousands of dollars to participants for over a year.
Every video on Metacafe that is watched more than 20,000 times, and is rated 3 out of 5 or higher by viewers, starts earning the producer $5 for each subsequent 1,000 visitors.
Metacafe rates Mr. Eigo as its top earner. One of his clips has been viewed more than five million times and has helped him attract the attention of several producers and film companies, he said.
“It's an amazing opportunity for anyone who wants to produce their own material now. The Internet has become more popular than television,” he said.
We consider Performancing to be a competitor for both Qumana and Q-Ads, and we have noted in the past that they offer a fine blogging editor for Firefox and have or had a good concept for an advertising network.
Personally speaking, I hope things over at Performancing get sorted out .. they are or were helping with progress in this space.
Apparently Wilson, who says he still owns 35% of the business, isn’t happy about the closing of Performancing’s ad network. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have known it was happening. On his personal blog, he writes:
"I don’t know what the communication problem between Performancing management is, but there appears to have been some decision making without the benefit of having all the facts.
When I resigned from the company and passed the reigns to Chris, the situation needed a lot of work, but was OK - we had a couple of options on the table for moving forward including picking up talks with one prominent blog player re the aquisition of PFF, or ScribeFire as it’s now known.
I’ve emailed Chris and Patrick, though at the time I’ve no idea if Patrick will still be playing an active role as him and Bill, from Text Link Ads need to dump their shares in Performancing this year due to non-competes after their MediaWhizz aquisition.
January 16, 2007 – Vancouver, B.C.: Qumana Software Inc. (Qumana) is pleased to announce it has released a version of the Q-Ads tool for IE 7, Microsoft’s newest version of its flagship browser. The new Q-Ads tool for IE 7 can be downloaded at the Qumana web site (http://www.qumana.com/qads)
The Q-Ads tool for IE 7 helps users who have upgraded to MS IE 7 choose and place text-based advertising into content that they have created. It provides an easy-to-use and innovative way to add advertising to the content people are creating for the Web.
Q-Ads for IE 7 complements the existing versions of the Q-Ads tool, which work with IE 6 and with Firefox 1.0 and 2.0.The Q-Ads program is designed for personal publishers who want to add advertising to content they create, and for social media and web properties who want to offer their users ways to create and share advertising-based revenue.
Qumana also offers the Q-Ads tool for MS LiveWriter and the leading Qumana offline blogging editor Qumana 3.0, designed specifically for bloggers and others who assemble and remix content from the Web.
Content attracts attention ... attention drives advertising. Use Qumana’s Q-Ads to place effective text-based advertising directly into your content … like online direct mail advertising meeting your readers’ attention.
About Qumana
Qumana Software Inc. is an advertising and web services company that provides web properties and personal publishers with market-leading methods for delivering and adding advertising to online content. Qumana’s mission is to make blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers globally. Qumana is run by Internet industry veterans, hardcore bloggers, software purists, and world-class designers committed to keeping things simple. For more information, visit http://www.qumana.com/
For more Info: Fred Fabro - CEO and President, Qumana Software Inc.
Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid, arguably an important voice in marketing philosophy and practices in the blogospere, if not Web 2.0, points to Christoper Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto and accompanies it with a provocative cartoon.
* I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.
* I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.
* I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.
* I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)
* I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.
* I want to know your selling process.
* I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.
* I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
* I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?
The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.
"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."
Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.
"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."
Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.
Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.
At leat two of them are pertinent for users of Qumana, and those who may have heard of Qumana and Q-Ads but have yet to try the tools and service, or are wondering about why and how to integrate them into their work flows.
3. Blog advertising will become the hot ad medium of the year and ad agencies will screw up big-time as they learn the ropes.
Savvy advertisers have already learned that it is possible to have outrageously high click through and conversion rates through obscenely cheap and highly targeted blog advertising.
Bloggers won’t tolerate invasive, annoying, flashing, heavy-handed ads, and agencies will stumble as they try to understand the type of advertising that can beat any traditional medium, hands down, when properly executed. I have consistently achieved click thru rates as high as .857%, and averaging .268% with niche-focused blog ads.
People who read blogs are looking for specialized, high-touch information from experts in particular areas. The right ads directed to those niche audiences can work wonders.
4. Widgets in new Mac and PC operating systems will introduce millions to truly customizing their online experience.
The age of invasive advertising is over and companies will have an enormous branding experience if they provide/sponsor the information people need and want to see every day in widgets.
Essentially, widgets are a way to provide RSS feeds in a frame the user loads onto the page or site of their choice. They allow people to use stupidly named RSS feeds without understanding that they are transferring code.
By lightly branding widgets, companies that provide information consumers want to keep on their desktop or home page have the enormous opportunity to have their brand name in front of customers every day in a positive, almost subliminal way.
Brilliant synthesis and summary of what we all know is going on ...
Random excerpt:
"Part 1: Protecting A sharing economy ..
Part 2 is something we've just begun; a new way to use metadata in the infrastructure to link the sharing and the commercial economies ... to produce the opportunity for people to live in a sort of a hybrid space ... where for the sharing economy their stuff is free, and if their creative work is to be used in a commercial space there's a simple way to clear and understand what the permissions are for that to work
For example .. MySpace, Gary NewVision artist .. what's really creative is the way he's begun to deploy his rights .."
Detecting click fraud collaboratively and in real time should be quite a feat. I suppose it would mean much less relative arbitrary auditing, and probably much more transparency about why any given click would be approved or not.
If it succeeds, it should make quite a difference.
Just in case the Googles of the world ain't paying attention:
This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will provide a commercial solution to click fraud identification and prevention. The current existing solutions can not detect the so-called software click. This STTR project proposes a real time collaborative click fraud detection and prevention system to detect these software clicks. The approach draws on data mining techniques for fraud identification using detailed user activities. An accurate and efficient classification method based on association rule mining and data stream mining will be formulated to identify the click frauds.
The system will protect Pay-Per-Click advertisers from click fraud and improve their return on investment. The new data mining techniques discovered during the course of this research will be applied in multiple fields related to online business marketing, user analysis and other fraud identification processes.
The Guardian (UK) has put out a new list (and commentary) on the 100 Most Useful Web Sites. I might argue about some of their choices, but I am not really mainstream ... I am pretty much immersed in several areas of what is sometimes called Web 2.0.
Scrolling down the list, it is considerably more Web 2.0-ish than in previous years, meaning that the list is crammed full of web sites where users interact, participate, and either (or both) take content to remix and publish or upload content for others to use.
While many people have complained about the term, the Web is clearly becoming a vast arena for copious amounts of "user-generated content".
And while content has long been considered "king" (it's what attracts the mainstream metric of eyeballs), this relatively new report from Bear Sterns (The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment) concentrated on television / video suggests that increasingly context and the aggregation of material will play critical roles. Thus, Bear Sterns concludes that a key part of creating value is how content is packaged (Slide # 29) ... for distribution and use (use being a term that covers many forms of what people do with content).
Anyway, back to the 100 Most Useful Web sites. i think that this is an irreversible trend pointing us to an environment where people will eventually move back and forth seamlessly between two worlds, and in many cases sites like those on the list play an essential role in many peoples' daily activities (if they don't already).
Two years ago most Britons didn't have broadband and Web 2.0 was barely a twinkle in a developer's eye. Things have changed - as our cream of the crop for 2006 shows
In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn't have broadband. That's changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine. So we've revisited the "cream of the crop" that we brought you two years ago.
Some of the crop is brand new; some has stood the test of time. As before, we have 100 sites in 20 categories.
It's becoming increasingly popular to use a video clip as an integral part of a blog post, and usually to help "anchor" a post's focus and meaning.
Its also becoming clear that advertising can be shaped to fit the ambient or direct subject area of a blog post, and that paradoxically using keywords to choose and place ads gives you more control over the advertising strategy for your blog.
Here's Joe Q. Public, talking about getting paid to blog about a product or a service using PayPerPost.
Re: the video clip ... I surfed over to YouTube, ran a quick search, found this and viewed it. Then, it took me one click to save the embed code, one click to open the Insert HTML function, and one click to say OK ... then finally one more click to publish the blog post.
Content in circulation in various social networks where people are sharing ... video clips, songs, recipes, recommendations ... is what advertisers are after. They are seeking better ways to reach increasingly harder-to-reach niche markets.
Put the tools into the hands of the people who are making and growing the networks, and who are "using" other people's content and mashing it together with their own.
Offer Qumana and Q-Ads to your audiences ... use them to reach into and "shake hands" with your readers, advertising-wise.
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES INCLUDING MYSPACE and Facebook are driving a bigger portion of traffic to retail sites than a year ago, according to new research by Hitwise. Social sites are driving more than 6% of retail traffic, up from 2.9% in 2005. MySpace alone accounted for about one-third of that traffic.
The increase in retail traffic reflects social sites increasingly becoming a starting point for Web users. "What we're seeing is a trend among social networking sites, particularly MySpace, becoming a home base for Internet users," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. That trend in turn generates more traffic from social sites to online retailers.
While we're working on making Qumana compatible with the new Blogger, I'm wondering about other features. New features. I use Qumana all the time. Couldn't live without it really. I have to, on occasion, use our competitors products for specific blogs and for testing, but I always come back to Q. But I was thinking today that we're due for a new feature. Something bloggers want and need. I'm not talking about a built-in egg timer or something to remind you it's time to blog, I'm talking about something really useful.
I'm open to suggestions. Of course we can't put everything in. We want to keep Q simple and easy.
Ok .. so we've rearranged our priority list to move to the head of the list making Qumana 3.0 operate smoothly once again with the newest version of the Blogger platform.
None of us here use the Blogger platform.
Would any of you out there who used to use Qumana with Blogger (and hopefully still use it if you operate blogs on other platforms) mind giving us a hand by helping us zero in on what doesn't work, what Qumana does poorly, rudely, or not at all when attempting to publish to Blogger using it ?
Your help will be invaluable .. we want to modify / repair Qumana as quickly as possible.
... for bloggers not to download and try the new Q-Ads tool and service, other than a blogger exercising a complete ban on advertising.
There are many many bloggers who put up Google advertising on their blogs and then basically forget about it ... or if they are really serious about advertising on their blog will expend a lot of effort creating interesting content but just leave the delivery to Google without any means of controlling what they receive as advertising, since Google's algorithm's deliver what they are designed to deliver.
Using categorized keywords tailored to your audience(s) is an effective way to begin developing an advertising strategy and tactics for your blogging that allows you to control what advertising you choose to expose to your readers, and this ability to choose and control advertising has always been at the heart of Qumana's tools' ability to insert advertising with the selection of a keyword and a click.
2. Signing up for a Q-Ads account is free, and only takes 5 minutes
3. The Q-Ads revenue-sharing program is generous and fair.
4. There is a powerful and easy-to-use ad design function available in both the Q-Ads tool and the Qumana editor. We intend to add templates and other ad formats just as soon as humanly possible.
WE WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE AND DELIVER MORE INNOVATIONS SOONER IF WE GET MORE AND MORE USERS ... IN OTHER WORDS, HELP A FRIEND OR THREE TO DOWNLOAD AND TRY QUMANA AND THE Q-ADS TOOLS.
5. Once signed up, you don't HAVE to use advertising all the time, or in every blog post .. it's completely up to you as to how often you insert an advertisement.
6. If you download the Qumana editor, you can choose to advertise or not .. if you don't want to, just don't use the Insert Ad function. You still get to use a powerful, feature rich and versatile blog editor, whether you blog using a Mac or a PC.
