Google Adds Monetize Button to Blogger

I noticed that Google has silently added a "Monetize" button to Blogger's interface.

Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization

On the next panel, Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization, the panelists are Dave McClure (500 Hats), Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg / KISSmetrics), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.), Albert Lai (Kontagent) and Roy Pereira (Refresh). Dave McClure is moderating the panel.

Why would I use third party analytics solution?
HS: It boils down to resources (experience, scaling problems) and insights.

IS: Resources, relationships and partnerships that developers can't build on their own.

RP: Launched on May 1. App developers should focus on core making it viral and as successful as possible.

AL: We develop viral analytics. Most customers tell him that customers don't have bandwidth (time, retention etc).

Are you shipping currently?
AL: Private beta shipping to select customers. Currently not releasing customers. 80% of our time goes into scaling, building infrastructure.

RP: already launched. Their target is application networks (companies that have lots of applications) and ad networks.

IS: Launched in January this year. Currently doing 15 million daily unique active users. He is from Userplane. They have a long tail. 90% facebook, 8% myspace and 2% spread across other networks.

HS: Several large customers lined up. Shipping next week as private beta. Less focused on monetization and more focused on engagement and growth.

Are you currently charging?
RP: Free model right now. Plan on introducing value added functionality in coming months. Fundamental functionality will always be free.

IS: free product. last week launched a social ad platform. They have some premium services. Kind of like atlas or DART but for social space.

HS: base analytics will be free but subscription services will cost some.

AL: I am going to pay million dollars to everyone for using :)

How is your product better than say Google Analytics?
AL: We are focused on viral channels, enagament and allow easier access to A/B testing methodologies like big guys (Slide etc) do.

What are the risks are going forward and what keeps you awake at night?

HS: Social networks control us and the developers. That's what keeps us up at night.

RP: Social networks changing APIs etc.

Specific example of viral analytics?
AL: Very very quickly adapting to traffic that's coming in. Providing the ability to forecast virality based on changes. Framework that allows to test various changes.

HS: Viral growth factor number and equation that's getting standardized. Related to invitations and engaging users. The equation is called k-factor.

Why are you better than other guys?
IS: make money
HS: great insight. use all analytics you can.

Another great session at the Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM & Mobile Devices

Last session of the day is a panel discussion. Panelists include Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.

BJ: Spent last 8 years in Asia (4 years in Japan, 3 in Korea and 1 in China).

Information Arbitrage: Identifying most successful best practices.

Some history: Mobile SNS (Social network services) are not new. ImaHima ("are you free now"). In 2001, they had 250,000 users.

What changed? numbers and speed of data access. Also, what you can do with phone. Mindset of people using mobile has changed.

It works: Japan is #2 economy, #1 mobile society. 80% penetration of 3G. China is #1 mobile and Internet population. QQ has 500 million users. Cyworld has 35 million and mixi has 90 million compared to 200 million Facebook users.

Mobile users: 50mln for QQ, 3 mln for facebook, cyworld 45 mln,

Revenue: fb: (50 mln), QQ 250 mln

FB is focused on profile page, IM and groups. QQ has avatars, paid games also.

Sticky feature: FB (applications.
QQ: IM digital currency, pmt system.
Cyworld: real friends, digital currency , pmt systems
mixi (footprints)

Business models: FB: ads, QQ (digital goods, paid games, mobile VAS)
cyworld (brand pages, digital goods.

Revenue mix (ARFU: avg revenue from users):
fb: 0%?
QQ 87%
cyworld: 80%
mixi: 5%

Mixi has more page views on mobile than PC. Mobile CPM is half the price of PC.

Community and Social networks are turning into full-fledged media. Cyworld is the nicest mobile application in social networks.
These top mobile SNS in Asia won't "invade us" as they are busy in home markets and they lock cross cultural expertise. Cyworld started and closed operation in Europe.

Myspace has started operation in China, Japan and Korea but so far has failed to gain traction revenue wise.

How to make mobile social networks work:
1. high speed network and flat fee: (No one from large mobile network present in the audience.)
2. Proper payment systems: seems a low hanging fruit.
3. Girls: it's not rocket science.
4. Companies and Schools: Because employees and students spend so much time on it that their computer access is blocked and so they turn to using mobile services.

benjamin at plus8star.com

Panel Introduction:

Ben Keighran (BK) ben at bluepulse-inc.com
Launched in December 2006. built world's largest social messaging platform.

Gregory Cypes (GC): gregory.cypes at corp.aol.com
QQ is trying to break into US market. GC is tech lead for open AIM. Big component of open AIM is mobile. AIM does over a billion IMs a day with 80 million users.

Craig Dalton (CD) (craig.dalton at hookmobile.com)
Hookmobile in mobile development for last years. Now in multimedia messaging. Created a platform to integrate messaging with social networks that takes away complexities such as device recognition. Just launched platform in April.

Chris Butler (cbutler at dash.net):
They do crowd sourcing. People can do Yahoo! mobile search from their car. Twitter from the car :). Working on facebook apps.


What's view on social network on mobile in US?

CD: XHTML is going to die.

BK: Browser is rapidly getting faster and is faster than it was ever before. iPhones, Android and Safari are fast. Create it as a browser based application.

GC: Every application needs SMS strategy.

BK: SMS gives you a huge touch point and advantage but times are changing.

How do you think operators are positioned? Do they hinder or support initiatives.

Careers are changing, they are opening up more. Interest around the browser is very great as it allows companies to come together and create standards.

Google has made cost of information really low.

Social Graphs, Data Portability and Monetization

Andrew Chen writes a thought provoking blog post about portability of social graphs and data in a social networking context at Inside Facebook:

“ * One potential issue that makes social networks resist data portability is the monetizability of the data
* Not all user data is created equal, there’s interest versus intent
* Social networks generally produce lots of low-value interest data, which has weak ROI attached to it
* Search engines, review sites, comparison shopping, etc all produce high-value intent data
* Even if you have the data, you have to worry about whether or not you have enough of it to matter - although ad networks and exchanges have started to alleviate that”

Internet Trends

A Morgan Stanley team consisting of "Queen of the Net" Mary Meeker, David Joseph and Anand Thaker recently did a presenation on Internet Trends.

The presentation focused on the topics of usage patterns, social networking, widgetization and componentization, measurability and transparency, customer satisfaction, video, monetization, mobile, emerging markets and last but not least, recession.

According to the presentation, consumer IP traffic will surpass business IP traffic in 2008 as consumers use more than 5,000,000 TB of data per month. Since 2005E, there has been a 58% CAGR in IP traffic.

Just this week, AT&T revealed that without significant investment, the Internet's infrastructure will reach it's capacity in 2010. No wonder, some are calling it the d-day of the Internet. Jim Cicconi, SEVP of External and Legislative affairs for AT&T warned:

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today. In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

If that's hard to believe, keep in mind that Apple recently announced that it will start offering DVDs throught iTunes on their release date.

Consumer Information Technology (CIT) Advancing Faster than Enterprise

No surprise here, really, thanks to Web 2.0 and media intensive applications.

Google's ex CIO, Douglas Merrill, who has since then left Google to join EMI Digital as President, is quoted in the presentation:

"Fifteen years ago, enterprise technology was higher-quality than consumer technology. That's not true anymore. It used to be that you used enterprise technology because you wanted uptime, security and speed. None of those things are as good in enterprise software anymore (as they are in some consumer software). The biggest thing to ask is, 'When consumer software is useful, how can I use it to get costs out of my environment?'"

Douglas originally gave this quote in a WSJ interview while answering the question, "What's driving the "consumerization" of tech in the enterprise, where companies are borrowing tech ideas from the consumer Internet?"

Massive Transition in Available Ad Units
This part of the presentation shows massive decline in the number of page views Yahoo! used to enjoy since 2002. At the same time the Alexa graph comparing Yahoo!'s page views to Google, Facebook and Youtube shows interesting patterns. Specifically YouTube's rapid rise to become the #2 destination on the Internet. This slide also touches on an important point that Supply of ad units is now greater than demand. An important thing to note is that Alexa changed their ranking algorithm recently. The latest Alexa graph for these sites doesn't go back to 2002, however it tells a slightly different story:

- Page views wise, Yahoo! is still number 1, followed by YouTube, Google and Facebook.
- Reach wise, Google is number 1 followed by Yahoo!

Social Networking Characteristics - Fast Growth and Low Penetration

Next slide has a graph from from comScore's "Digital World: State Of The Internet" report which highlights growth in Emerging Internet Markets. The graph shows very fast growth for social networking sites but at the cost of low penetration. In contrast, the online search sector showed very high penetration but low levels of growth. Online personals, retail movies and Retail music industries depicted significant decrease in growth. Multimedia, on the other hand, shows decent growth but much higher penetration than social networks. Visitors growth to community focused sites that aren't social networks also decreased although these sites still have a strong penetration (even stronger than social networks).

Some other interesting findings from the comScore report that weren't in the Morgan Stanley presentation:

• more than 300 million Internet users from Asia Pacific region, 15 years of age or older, were online in January 2008. This shows an increase of 14 percent over 2007 numbers (compare this to 10.4% increase in worldwide users). According to comScore, this increase "makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions"
• Latin America and Middle East-Africa are two other regions that have also experienced "above average audience growth" since 2007. Latin America experienced 16.6% growth where Middle East-Africa experienced 20.2% growth, the highest percentage of growth among five worldwide regions.
• US online audience now only represents 21% of worldwide Internet users.
• Visits to social networking sites by global Internet users increased 34%
• approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users now visit a social network site with total visitors to social networking sites exceeding 530 million
• MySpace and Facebook both now attract more than 100 million visitors per month
• YouTube leads the way in online entertainment. Video is now the "dominant online entertainment format." More than 250 million visitors visited YouTube in January alone.
  

Social Networking Sites Gaining Significant Share of Online Traffic
The next presentation slide highlights new entrants in the top-10 list of Alexa as well as top-10 sites of 2005 that have lost significant traffic. The sites that lost their top-10 ranking since 2005 include ebay.com, amazon.com, microsoft.com (not counting Microsoft Passport), google.co.uk, aol.com and go.com.

The new entrants in the top-10 list as of 2008 (based on old Alexa ranking model) included youtube.com, live.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, wikipedia.org and orkut.com. If the ranking list was a top-15 list, my employer would have been included at number 13.

How People Worldwide Spend Their Time Online

• 22% time is spent in online communication
• 16% time is spent in social communication. The presentation makes a note that this category didn't exist 3 years ago.
• 8% time is spent in online shopping activities
• 14% time is spent in entertainment and leisure activities
• 6% time is spent in work, business and education activities
  

Another interesting point made by the presentation, although no surprise, is that younger users (aged 15-24) tend to communicate more via Facebook whereas older Internet users (aged 44+) tend to use Yahoo! Mail more to communicate. The presentation raises the question whether email is becoming more archaic.

Comparison of popular sites

Facebook (#4 in global minutes) has experienced most growth (305%) since last year reaching 101 million members according to comScore. YouTube (#3 in global minutes) had the second highest growth (94%) with a total of 258 million users. Other two sites mentioned are PayPal and Skype, both eBay properties.

Two interesting facts about YouTube that I didn't know: A very high number of YouTube visitors (51%) visit the site weekly and half of the users "watch all videos to the end"

What is the most important source of Information?

Citing a study titled "Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World?" conducted by Annenberg School for Communication , the presentation makes an important point: personal and online sources are two most important sources of information, and together they are the "essecnce of a social network."

The original report by digitalcenter.org also says that "online communities are a catalyst for connection and activism" and that "involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community." The original report also states that online activism is making online users get involved "in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet" and that "more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities."

Another interesting point is that according to the Digital Future Project, Internet users 17 years of age or older trust Internet more (80%) than personal source (73%)

Some other important findings from USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project's report:

• 64.9 percent are involved in new causes
• 43.7 percent now participate more in social activism
• 56.6 percent log in to their community once a day
• 70.4 percent of community members "sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in"
• 7.4 percent of American Internet users maintain a blog
• 23.6 percent of Internet users now post photos online. Previously only 11 percent were posting photos online.
• 12.5 percent of users now maintain their own website.
• Internet users meet an average of 4.65 "friends online whom they have never met in person" and 1.6 "friends met in person whom they originally met online"
  

Facebook growth

Next, there are some metrics from Facebook's growth. Some highlights

• as of 03/08 there were more than 14 million photo uploads a day being uploaded to Facebook and 6 million active user groups on Facebook.
• there are 55,000 total networks (partitions?/shards? :) ) and 50% of the networks are outside of college. I wonder how many networks are location based?
• Segment of users who are 25 years or older are the fastest growing segment. No surprise for me as my mother in law just joined Facebook.
• There are more than 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007.
• There are more than 859 million installations of 20,000 applications
• Super Wall by Rock You! is the most popular application with 28 million installs on Facebook followed by Top Friends (26 million installs) and Fun Wall (25 million), both by Slide
• Both Slide and Rock You! have 3 applications each in top 10 applications.
• Facebook's own Video application is ranked #7.
  

Reasons for Facebook growing faster than MySpace

• advertising that is considered less intrusive
• news feed that is personalized
• UI that is cleaner
• friends section that receives more prominence
• ads that are more personalized
• more applications
• more mobile friendly
• facebook focusing more on monetizing word-of-mouth and conversations
  

The presentation titled Internet Trends is available on Slide Share, thanks to Tech Crunch.

Other Sources:

• Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World
• Digital World: State of the Internet
• Alexa Ranking Algorithm Changed
  

Google tests Ajax AdSense Ads

Today, I noticed something very interesting on my MySQL blog. Google has started using AJAX functionality in their AdSense ad units.

Notice the two blue arrows on bottom-left? Clicking on these buttons does an in-page refresh of ads so you can see more Google's ads. An excellent addition from publisher's point of view. However, as far as I am concerned, Google's attempt will be of no use to me. Are they serious? Do I browse so I can go from site to site clicking on these buttons to keep seeing an endless supply of ads just so Google can make more money.

So, let me ask you a question. Do you think you will be clicking on these buttons the next time you see them? Will they help publishers monetize better?