Know You,Know Me!

After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn't obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below. Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks' Rob Glaser has been "at this" for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don't speak a common l...

Do you find yourself constantly emailing stuff to your iPhone just so you can have it when you leave your desk? I do: emails, links, addresses, phone numbers, photos. Well, now there is an app for that. It's called Pastefire , and it comes naturally enough from the app-sharing service Appsfire (which was co-founded by former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon). You can get the free app on iTunes here http://getap.ps/pastefire (if you click that link on your iPhone it will open up the App Store for you, and is another service AppsFire will launch soon which will combine short links for iPhone apps with analytics on conversions). Pastefire lets you send links, phone numbers, email addresses, videos, and photos to your iPhone, and then it figures out what to do with them automatically. For example, after you sign up, you just add a bookmarket to your browser or go to the Pastfire "Copy Zone" and paste a link. Then if you fire up the app on your iPhone, it will ope...

OneRiot's recently ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. A few weeks ago, the realtime search engine launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web. And today, after partnering with select iPhone Apps, Twitter Clients and Search Engines (Including UberTwitter and Digsby), OneRiot’s Realtime Ad Network, RiotWise, is now available to all developers. RiotWise’s ads are comprised of content that similar to within Google, are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed within the search engine. In the end, OneRiot's ambitions are to help the content producer improve click-through rates ...

Bing just keeps on gaining market share, and is now growing faster than ever before . In December, Microsoft's search engine gained another 0.4 percent to capture 10.7 percent of U.S. search queries, according to the latest comScore qSearch numbers. That makes five straight months of steady share gains for Bing since it launched—Bing's share is up 2.7 percent in total since May, 2009. Google gained only 0.2 percent to end the month with 65.7 percent market share. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost as much as Google gained (0.2 percent) to end the year at 17.3 percent (see table above, courtesy of Barclays Capital). What is even more interesting is if you look at year-over-year query growth rates for each search engine. Bing's growth is actually accelerating. Its growth rate in query volume was 49.4 percent in December, compared to 20.6 percent growth for Google (which was also above the average), and a 1.9 percent decline for Yahoo. Here are the year-over-year query growth ...

Amazon.com this morning announced that it is expanding its self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform worldwide, giving more authors and publishers the chance to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers around the world in the Kindle Store . Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Amazon says additional language options with DTP will be added in the coming months. Amazon.com this morning announced that it is expanding its self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform worldwide, giving more authors and publishers the chance to upload and sell books in English, German and French to customers around the world in the Kindle Store . Until today, DTP was only available to authors and publishers based in the United States. Amazon says additional language options with DTP will be added in the coming months. This is of course a logical expansion for Amazon to make, one that is bound to reinforce the notion that Kindle...