Week of September 10, 2007

Revver Pays Out $1 Million To Users

Friday, September 14, 2007

Revver launched as a video aggregation site like YouTube only with an eye-opening promise: People who upload videos would get a share of the site's revenue. Well, how successful has that been? Over the past year, the company has paid out $1 million to video producers and affiliates who have generated traffic and content for Revver.

Metacafe is the only other major video aggregator paying out to content creators, offering $100 for every 20,000 video views. YouTube made a high profile announcement that it would pay content creators soon, but the details of that program have not been announced yet.

Netscape Abandons Digg clone

Thursday, September 13, 2007

One of the real stories of the Internet for 2007 has been the rise of social news sites--places where people submit news stories and the community votes them up or down with the top stories making the front page. The poster site for social news is Digg.com, which pushes so much traffic to sites featured on its front page that it has its own name, he "Digg Effect."

Digg and similar sites like Reddit.com led to larger companies take a hard look at social news, and the first to make a move was AOL's Netscape brand. Proving that cloning a concept is not all it takes to make something successful, Netscape has finally abandoned using social news for Netscape and will instead move it to a niche branded site called "Propeller."

Despite Netscape's failure to integrate social news with its brand, expect social news to continue to grow. Empowering consumers is a strategy that will never fail.

Amazon Prepares Music Download Service

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Pending the approval of CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon is preparing to launch its music download service. One of the key elements of the service is that it will feature only DRM-free music. As a result it will launch with music from EMI, some selected music from Universal, and indie artists. They are also looking at a variable pricing scheme, with details yet to be announced.

The key part of this prospective service is the DRM-free element. Even mass-appeal music stores like Walmart that are selling DRM-free music don't promote that fact very much. Amazon could gain some real traction quickly with its dedication to no DRM.

One of the things to look at is this impact on indie music storefront eMusic. The eMusic site is the second largest digital song store after iTunes, and sells more songs than Rhapsody, Napster, MSN Music, and Yahoo Music combined. If Amazon gets into the indie music game, the battle for this smaller but lucrative chunk of the music pie could get interesting.

Google, Amazon & the Search for a Hero

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Over the last 2 weeks one of the most riveting and sad stories in the news has been the search for adventurer Steve Fossett, whose plane went down somewhere in the Nevada desert. Now, the distributive power of the Internet is being harnessed to try to find him. Thousands of people have been enlisted to use simple Internet tools provided by Google and Amazon to help in the search.

While many Google Earth images are months or even years old, Google has enlisted the help of the companies that provide the images to take fresh images of the area in the dessert where Fossett's plane is estimated to have gone down. This is where the average citizens come in. Those who volunteer for the search are assigned specific images to review to try to find any sign of the plane. The images are said to capture anything larger than 2 or 3 feet in length. Administrators of Fossett's official website are doing a similar search using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service.

So far, unfortunately, none of the leads generated by either search have turned up any clue of what happened. But this episode shows how large numbers of passionate people, regardless of physical location, can be brought together for an important cause.

Mobile Social Networking

Monday, September 10, 2007

According to a recent survey from M:Metrics, over 12 million users in the US and Europe access social networks from their mobile phones in the month of June. The US was the biggest market, with 7.5 million users (3.5% of all users). #2 in terms of percent of users was Italy, with 2.8% of all users accessing social networking. However, Italians were more than twice as likely to answer "almost every day" to describe their usage of social networking via mobile as compared with any other country in the study. The top sites? No surprise that MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are 1, 2 and 3 in the US. In the UK, it's MySpace, Facebook then Bebo.