Make Money Online

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

We announced last week that we now have over 1,000 partners using our content identification and management tools to control how and where their videos are distributed on YouTube. Every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio and music label is using Content ID to identify user-uploaded versions of their videos, and decide whether they to want block, track or make money from them. As Content ID is proving to be an effective way for media companies to control, promote and monetize their content on our site, we’re always thinking about how we can make these tools even more valuable for content owners of all kinds.

Today, we’re excited to integrate Content ID with YouTube Insight. Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label’s 8th most popular video on YouTube.

In addition to rankings, you can also learn about demographics, discovery sources and other metrics for videos that you’ve claimed, and then compare them to your own uploads. Do the audience demographics of a claimed video differ from those of the official version? What websites or search terms drive the most traffic to user uploaded versions of your content? We think integrating Content ID and Insight can help answer questions like these and will be very helpful as you think about distributing, marketing and making money from your content online.

If you’re a Content ID partner, you can find this new information in the Reporting section of your CMS (Content Management System) account.

Posted by Martin Landers, Insight Software Engineer and Walter Lee, Content ID Product Manager

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More insight into claimed content on YouTube

For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a “search snippet.” Recently, we’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.

Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to a your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search?

That’s where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you’re looking for. Imagine, for example, that we’re researching trans fats and cholesterol, and their effects on the body. If we start with a generic query like [trans fats], Google returns several results with lots of information about trans fats in general, including this result from Wikipedia:

Now, included with the snippet are links to specific sections within the page, covering different subtopics of trans fats. Since we’re particularly interested in what’s healthy and what’s not, “Nutritional guidelines” is probably where the most relevant information is. Clicking this link will take you directly to that section, midway down the page.

Now imagine we’re particularly interested in learning about good cholesterol and what levels of it are healthy, so we try a more specific query, [good cholesterol level]. The top result is from the American Heart Association and has tons of information about cholesterol levels. The specific information about good (HDL) cholesterol, however, is contained in one section titled “Your HDL (good) cholesterol level”‎. Since the query was more specific, the snippet for this result now provides the option to “jump to” just this section of the website.

Clicking on “Jump to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level‎” takes you directly to the most relevant information on the page:

Clicking on the title of the snippet (“What Your Cholesterol Levels Mean”) still takes you to the top of the page, as always.

If you’re a webmaster and would like to have these links appear for your webpages, take a look at the Google Webmaster Central Blog for info on some of the things you can do. And in the meantime, we hope these enhancements help you find the information you’re looking for faster.

Posted by Chris Kern, Snippets Team

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Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets

I recently wrote about the fact that reviewing is becoming the new advertising. I made the point that reviewing is part of a trend towards transparency: these days consumers want to know all about companies and their products and consumers are anything but shy when it comes to providing their input and feedback.

Well, the ultimate prize for feedback was awarded on September 21, when Netflix gave a group of seven people $1 million for a crowdsourced solution that beat the performance of Cinematch, the company’s own customer recommendation engine. Three years ago, Netflix launched the contest, offering the generous prize to the winner who could beat Cinematch by at least 10 percent. In late June, according to The New York Times,
a multinational team of seven data wonks calling themselves “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” surpassed the 10 percent goal.

Why should we care? Because Netflix, instead of wearing “Not Invented Here” blinders, solicited its users and offered to pay handsomely for a better mousetrap. In essence, Netflix bought a major product development project from an outside group of users. They gained valuable insight from their base, and Netflix will now reap the rewards and directly impact the customer experience.

As The Times story points out:

“The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set – 100 million movie ratings – and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

The way the teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges.”

Until now, crowdsourcing has been limited to relatively minor commercial ventures, such as designers submitting logos or t-shirt designs. But the Netflix experience moves crowdsourcing up into the stratosphere. Netflix is so happy with the results of their first crowdsourced solution that the company is launching another contest.

Today, reviewing may be the new advertising, but tomorrow, crowdsourcing could be the new product development. Reviewing, crowdsourcing, whatever it is… In the end, it represents the ultimate in consumer empowerment.

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From Reviewing to Crowdsourcing

Google announced Place Pages on Google Maps, which makes Google Maps even more enhanced than it already is. Using Place Pages, you can now get more information about a place, such as restaurants, retail stores, and other businesses. Place Pages show general information about a place, as well as photos, reviews, web pages and user content.

For someone who is researching the 5th Avenue Apple Store that has never been there, they can already view photos and know how to get there using public transportation, as well as discover that it is open 24/7.

You can even view subway schedules and see what trains run at what station, which could be useful, and avoid an additional step to the MTA website:

If a place page lacks information, it can always be added through community edits or Google Map Maker.

See more here:
Google Introduces Place Pages on Google Maps

Online coupons are hot these days and people are looking to save money from coupons and deals more than ever.

This trend should be continuing into Q4 of this year. If you are an online retailer and are not presently offering coupons through your affiliate program, you can lose out during this holiday season as consumers are expected to hunt for more bargains and discounts.

Coupon websites are seeing double to triple growth this year which is worth noting as it tells us that there is a huge demand for it. A blog post in GrowFromHere.com brings a good point up about the environment benefits for offering online coupons;

Using the internet to distribute online coupons for some retailers has led to a reduction in catalogue production/distribution, saving both the consumer & the supplier money, not to mention lowering environmental impact by reducing paper waste…

While creating coupon codes, make sure to have codes that are easy to remember, have a clear call to action along with an expiry date.

Go here to read the rest:
2009: Year Of Online Coupon Boom

Google Maps is a great tool for exploring places — you can pan around the map, zoom in and see nearby places, look around in Street View and search for whatever you want. But what I always wanted to do is be able to get a clear understanding of what a place is all about. Instead of doing the research all over the web, wouldn’t it be great to see all the information about one place in…one place?

Starting today, you can do that on Place Pages for Google Maps. A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

You can get to a Place Page by clicking on “more info” in search results, or by clicking “more info” in the mini-bubble. Now, instead of just getting a slightly bigger bubble, you’ll get an entire page of rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.

Here are some of my favorite places, and what you can discover about them using Place Pages:

Tartine Bakery: My favorite bakery in the world. The “Place Summary” section compiles voices from all over the web praising the desserts but warning you about the lines. The “Details” section aggregates material from over 500 authoritative sources; for example, you can find the menu from Zagat.com. The “Related Maps” sections shows user-created maps that include this bakery, such as this delicious California dessert map.

Yoda statue: One of my childhood heroes in real size! The “User Content” section shows excerpts from all over the web describing this hidden little gem; “Nearby Transit” helps you find the best way to get there by public transport; and there’s even some useful local ads in case you want to get one of these at home.

Tokyo: I’ve spent a lot of time here lately as it’s home to part of the Place Page team. On the city’s Place Page, you can find out the most popular hotels, parks and major landmarks in Tokyo, browse local photos and videos, see what other people are searching for and access maps about the city from all over the web.

Zurich Hauptbahnhof: I’ve traveled through the central train station in Zurich several times over the last year, visiting the local team that made Place Pages possible. Place pages for transit stations are particularly useful because they’ll show you a list of all the lines serving that station, as well as provide a timetable of upcoming departures. 

As the Beatles’ song in this post’s title suggests, we want to make it easy to remember places: pages will come with a friendly URL that is easy to remember and link to under google.com/places. For example, the San Francisco Place Page will be found at google.com/places/us/california/san-francisco-city. Right now we include cities and most businesses, but we’re working hard on bringing this to all Place Pages.

We want there to be a Place Page for every place in the world, but we might be missing a few places here and there. If you’re a business owner, you can add or update your business details through the Local Business Center. This allows you to make sure your Place Page reflects the most accurate, authoritative and recent information about your business. And if you don’t have a business, but you discover a place that doesn’t have a Place Page, you can add it through community edits or Google Map Maker, depending on the country you’re in.

Whether you’re searching for a great local florist or planning a trip across the globe, we hope Place Page for Google Maps makes your explorations easier and happier.

Posted by Lior Ron, Senior Product Manager, Place Page team

Excerpt from:
Place Pages for Google Maps: There are places we remember!

We’re really excited to announce that Share Results is participating in this year’s CIBC Run for the Cure, taking place Sunday October 4th in Montreal. The 5k run is an international annual event that helps raise money and awareness for breast cancer research.

Over the next couple of weeks our team is working hard to gather as many donations as possible to support this important cause. Almost all of us have a mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend or colleague who has been affected by breast cancer and the objective of the run is to raise funds for breast cancer research, and education and awareness programs. You can make a donation online, all amounts are both welcome and greatly appreciated.

We’re recruited 15 members to our team already, and are always looking for more! If you happen to live in the Montreal area and would also like to participate, please email me and I’ll send you all the details. To get an idea of how serious we are about this, check out Alberto’s Training Exploits on Twitter, and read Lesley’s touching personal account of why this cause means so much to her: Bishin Speaks.

We’ll be posting pictures and highlights from the event, along with how our fundraising campaigns went. If you have any stories to share about this event, please feel free to share!

The rest is here:
Share Results participating in Run for the Cure!

Late last year we announced Project 10^100, a call for ideas to help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life with a total of $10 million. We hoped to capture the imagination of people around the world and offer a way to bring their best ideas to fruition. We were overwhelmed by the response — you sent us more than 150,000 ideas (approximately 10^5.2) in more than 25 languages and it took more than 3,000 Googlers in offices around the world to review the submissions. (The review process took us much longer than we expected and we appreciate your patience!)

Some ideas we received suggested broad areas of investment, others were very specific technology or implementation proposals, and many of the ideas shared overlapping elements. So rather than posting individual idea submissions, we’ve decided to do something a little different. We’ve pooled similar ideas into a set of 16 top idea themes aimed at addressing some important common goals, from making government more transparent to driving innovation in public transport. Every theme has different possible implementations and we intend to consider all reasonable possibilities. But we need your help.

Over the next two weeks we’ll be gathering your votes to help inform an advisory board that will then choose up to five winning ideas that will receive funding. After that, we’ll present the finalists and ask for proposals from individuals or organizations that can implement these ideas.

It has been a long road for those of us who have worked on this from the beginning. Although it took a lot longer than we first planned, we’re pleased with the outcome. In the end, we followed the tried-and-true Google method of “launch and iterate.” We enjoyed going through so many interesting proposals and adapted to the massive volume of ideas. We are incredibly proud to be able to put these 16 ideas in front of you to see what you think. Let the voting begin!

Posted by the Project 10^100 Team

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Announcing Project 10^100 idea themes

Is hard as hell.

My hope is that when I emerge from this muck, profitable or not I’ll be able to share the obstacles I went through. Right now it’s been cramming 1 Excel spreadsheet for hours trying to make the numbers work. There is a lot to it people.

So if you’re an affiliate chilling on $1-10k+/day and you’re happy…stay happy for a while and consider what you’ll be getting yourself into. It’s not “Affiliates are making $40 they’re the middle man, step it up to be an advertiser and everything will be the same, only you’ll make $80/month instead of $40!”

Any guru that says, preaches, or teaches that -including myself because I’m sure I’ve said it before in the past- is a…ermm…gutard? This wasn’t really meant to be a post, just an update that wouldn’t appropriately fit on Twitter. It may take a while, but hopefully I’ll have an article series about all this soon.

Goober affiliate the goober gutard.

Excerpt from:
Being an Advertiser