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Paid subscriptions have doubled to four million in past year
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/30/hulu-plus/
Hulu’s future ownership may be in question, but the video streaming site is apparently doing fairly brisk business on the paid subscription front. During an advertiser event this morning, the site announced that it has managed to double its Hulu Plus accounts in the past year, up to four million. The site’s revenue also hit a record for the first quarter of the year, though Hulu’s not giving out any numbers. As with rivals Netflix and Amazon, the company’s making a big bet on original programming, with a number of exclusive series, including the animated The Awesomes and western Quick Draw.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Hulu Blog
Roku passes 5 million players sold in the US, shows off with a few more stats
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/10/roku-5-million-sold/
Five years after the original Roku launched and just weeks after the release of the Roku 3, the company has announced lifetime US sales of 5 million units. The proclamation comes attached to a detailed infographic (linked below) that breaks down its last five years of progress, plus stats like where it’s most popular (Lexington, KY) and the most minutes streamed by one player in one week (10,080.) That’s quite a marathon session — Lost plus House of Cards doesn’t even get you halfway — but its stats claim 25 percent of players stream more than 35 hours per week.
The last time we checked in on Roku sales, it was chasing the million unit mark alongside Apple’s hobby. The Apple TV has since risen to 5 million sold in the last fiscal year, buoyed by the AirPlay feature that makes it an attractive accessory for the company’s other devices. To Roku’s favor, it claims 43 percent of owners say it’s their preferred source of video for their TV. It’s come a long way from its start as a Netflix Player with more than 750 channels available including Time Warner Cable and HBO Go, which makes CEO Anthony Wood’s claim that the “future of TV is streaming” look closer than ever.
Fil ed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Roku Blog, Roku 5 Million
Pinterest unveils web analytics, offers insight into visitor pinning behavior
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/13/pinterest-web-analytics/
If you’ve wanted to know just which adorable puppy picture on your website got the most pins on Pinterest, you’re in luck. The internet pinboard folks just unveiled a new web analytics tool for businesses and site owners that’ll track which content receives the most attention in terms of clicks, pins and repins, and how recently those items were selected. Verify your website with Pinterest, and you’ll be able to check out your visitors’ pinning behavior starting today. Hmm, maybe now we’ll get to see which one of our editors is the most popular.
Filed under: Internet
Via: LA Times
Source: Pinterest blog
Pinterest Takes Huge Step Toward Finally Making Money With New Analytics Tool
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-takes-a-huge-step-toward-making-money-2013-3
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Online scrapbook Pinterest is rolling out new tools that will show businesses the number of visitors it delivers to their websites, part of the fast-growing start-up’s efforts to forge closer ties to companies and build a base for the introduction of money-making features.
The latest offering — known as Pinterest Web Analytics — will give site owners insights into how people are interacting with “pins” that originate from their websites. The start-up company will announce the free offering on its blog on Tuesday.
Read more at the link above.
YouTube partners with vendors for paid translation service
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/21/youtube-partners-with-vendors-for-paid-translation-service/
Last year, Google began offering a “request translation” option for YouTube, letting you or others muddle your way through video caption creation. If you don’t want to leave it up to strangers or the vagaries of machine translation, Mountain View’s now offering paid, professional services through two outfits, Gengo and Translated.net, in 36 languages. Once you’ve created your video and added a caption track, you’ll be able to see an estimated price and create an order, after which your vendor of choice will send the translation directly to YouTube. Once approved, it’ll be live on the site, ensuring no misunderstandings of your latest opus.
Source: Creator’s blog
The Truth About Marissa Mayer’s Surprise Deal With Google (GOOG, YHOO, MSFT)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-truth-about-marissa-mayers-surprise-deal-with-google-2013-2
A couple weeks ago, Marissa Mayer surprised a lot of people in the industry when the company she runs now, Yahoo, announced plans to outsource some of its ad sales to the company that made her famous and she quit in July, Google.
In a note on its corporate blog, Yahoo said it had signed “a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.”
The news was surprising for a couple reasons.
- When Mayer quit Google in July for the job at Yahoo, she didn’t do it in the friendliest way.
Quora Just Launched A Major Salvo At Google With Its Plan To Become The Internet’s ‘Library Of Alexandria’ (GOOG)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/quora-internet-library-of-alexandria-2012-12
Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo is nothing if not ambitious.
He just announced plans to dramatically expand the site’s goals beyond just asking and answering questions, declaring in a blog post that he hoped to build “an Internet-scale Library of Alexandria.”
That’s an implicit challenge to Google, which has long declared its mission to be “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
But D’Angelo noted in his post that the
Facebook ‘experiment’ lets select users pay to have messages routed directly to a stranger’s inbox
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/20/facebook-experiment-pay-messages-routing-email/
Get ready to have your preconceived notions of email destroyed. In a Facebook blog post today, the company has gone to great lengths to bury the lede — which, essentially, says that it’s experimenting with the idea of letting non-connected users pay in order to have a message routed to one’s inbox instead of that ill-fated “Other” folder. According to the company, it’s being dubbed a “small experiment” to “test the usefulness of economic signals to determine relevance.” As an excuse, Facebook has evidently consulted with “several commentators and researchers,” which “have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.”
Bitterness aside, there is some value in being able to directly ping a stranger you heard speak at an event, or you want to really show your interest in a job opportunity, but it still destroys the level playing field that we’ve all come to know and respect as it relates to digital communication. This message routing feature is only for personal messages between individuals in the United States, and if there’s a silver lining to be found, we’re told that the number of messages a person can have routed from their Other folder to their Inbox will be limited to a maximum of one per week. It’s unclear how the service will evolve once the testing ends, but perhaps it depends on how much blowback occurs compared to the whole Instagate thi! ng.< /p>
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Source: Facebook
Your Instagram Data Is Now Officially Facebook Data
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5969001/your-instagram-data-is-now-officially-facebook-data
A new Instagram privacy policy goes into effect on January 16th, 2013. The service will now be sharing your data with its new owner Facebook. Get used to it.
Basically, Instagram has updated a few of the subhead sections of its policy to reflect the fact that it is a part of Facebook now. Instagram can now share information like cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data,with “with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of.” According to the Instagram blog, it’s a wonderful thing for you:
Our updated privacy policy helps Instagram function more easily as part of Facebook by being able to share info between the two groups. This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used.
Less spam? Great! Of course, this also means that Instagram is heaping its data over with the privacy nightmare that’s Facebook. The data will definitely be used to target better advertising at you on Facebook, and to serve you advertisements on Instagram whenever that starts happening. Here is the relevant section from the new policy:
Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including by providing analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including by providing you with better and more relevant experiences).
This was inevitable, but at least now it’s official. [Instagram via TechCrunch]
These Were The 20 Most Popular Ads On YouTube In 2012
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/youtubes-20-most-popular-ads-of-2012-2012-12
There are the ads you have to watch — and the ads you actually want to watch.
From Snoop Dogg/Lion rapping about Hot Pockets to a Nike Football spot that got 20 million-plus hits in less than seven months, YouTube compiled a list of 2012′s best-of-the-best: The 20 ads that people actually chose to see, sometimes over and over again.
According to its blog, “The 2012 YouTube Ads Leaderboard celebrates the U.S. ads that most moved audiences through a winning combination of promotion (paid ads) and popularity (organic views). And with over 200 million combined views, it’s proof that if you make it great, they will come.”
While some agencies showed its endless ability to make viewing gold — Wieden + Kennedy had seven ads on the list including the top spot and four Old Spice ads — there were other smaller shops that also cracked the viral code.
20. Old Spice’s “Vending Machine” ad was viewed 3,885,113 times.
Creative agency: Wieden+Kennedy
Media agency: Wieden+Kennedy
Uploaded 2/1/12
19. Old Spice’s “Bed” ad was viewed 4,245,346 times.
Creative agency: Wieden+Kennedy
Media agency: Wieden+Kennedy
Uploade! d 9/22/1 2
18. Fiat’s “House Arrest” ad starring Charlie Sheen was viewed 4,271,297 times.
Creative agency: Doner
Media agency: Universal McCann
Uploaded 3/1/12
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights. 
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