Google Lands CNN As Exclusive Adsense User

CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com.

The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers.

Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall experience on CNN.com.”

Although the deal might not initially sound all that exciting, CNN.com is a top 100 site online according to Alexa, making it one of the most popular media destinations online. That’s a lot of pages and ad inventory for Google to sell ads on, inventory that should pay handsomely for all involved.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, including the length of the agreement, which was described only as “multi-year.”

What Do You Get When You Ask Gmail Fans To Express Email Delivery?

Google asked the question, and found out:

Google received over 1,100 submissions for the collaborative effort.

It reminds me a little bit of Ze Frank’s (what ever happened to him BTW?) Video for Ray project earlier this year. The exercise just goes to prove that tapping into passionate users can deliver; over 1,000 people world wide took time out to video and upload their love of Gmail, with no incentive to do so other than perhaps a 2 second chance of fame. Cheap labor perhaps, but it’s a resource that can and is being tapped.

Windows Live Messaging Coming To Bebo

Bebo has announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will see the introduction of the Windows Live instant messaging service to Bebo’s social network.

The new service will allow Bebo users to chat to people outside of the Bebo network, from within Bebo itself. What makes the deal perhaps more interesting is that Bebo users will also now be recognized over the Windows Live platform; in effect the deal becomes a sort of merging of member databases. It’s also a first for Microsoft, who has remained somewhat distant from the growing social networking market to date.

Bebo continues to trail behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States in terms of traffic, but as confirmed by comScore August 15, is the most popular social networking site in the United Kingdom.

(via Reuters)

USAToday Says Traffic Way Up

Less than twelve hours after I posted that USAToday’s traffic appears to be going the wrong way, they issue a press release saying traffic is way up.

USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.

Much of the increase was attributed to the Simpson’s Movie (the site held a contest around it) and an exclusive interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental. I also received an email from Pluck CEO Dave Panos, who says that their social networking tools are doing very well on USAToday’s site. He says “The results that USA Today has received from our social media tools has been absolutely phenomenal and usage continues to skyrocket each and every month. I wish I was a liberty to give you the specific metrics — but they are staggering.”

Well, if the results are indeed “staggering,” (in a good way) the Comscore data must be pointing the wrong way. That’s good news for USAToday, and even better news for Pluck.

But the situation isn’t certain. The Comscore data I posted only went through June. The data released today is for July. A 24% traffic increase from June to July is too much of a jump, too. As they said in the press release, the Simpson’s contest and the Rowling interview probably helped drive most or all of the gains.

What would be ideal is if USAToday or Pluck published a case study on the results of the social network experiment to date.

A Peek At Didja.com: VeryFunnyAds Clone

Although “advertising as entertainment” site Didja.com is not launching until next year, the NYT has a sneak peak at what it will look like (screen shot below). The NBC Universal project is part of the yet unnamed News Corp/NBC Universal cooperative strategy against Youtube. However, New Co.’s second “major assult” on YouTube looks like more of the same, a clone of TBS’s VeryFunnyAds. It’s very similar to the TBS re-branding effort, letting users watch heaps of ads by search, ratings, and sort by various companies and countries.

That’d all make sense if New Co. was copying a successful site, but VeryFunnyAds doesn’t appear to be a resounding winner despite the 63 million clip views the site article says they delivered over the past year. That number of views suggests an average of 5 million videos streamed each month, but the viewership of the site doesn’t stack up.

After an initial bump on launch, VeryFunnyAds’ traffic has since tapered out at about 100,000 uniques per month, according to Comscore. Sixty-three million streams is a lot of traffic for an audience that size, especially since they don’t allow off-site video embeds. Heavy.com, whose network generated about 6 million streams in April has about 5.2 million uniques per month. If the numbers are true, it appears TBS’s site is at most attracting a small cadre of ad fanatics.

Contrary to the “advertainment” meme going around, it doesn’t look like it has legs.

Computer glitch fixed, LAX operations return to normal

Travelers contend with missed connections and tell of hours of misery stuck on runways. A faulty switch is blamed. A US Customs computer outage that stranded more than 17000 passengers at LAX was blamed Sunday on faulty hardware and an insufficient ...
Computer glitch strands thousands at LAX CNet News.com Blog
Computer glitch holds up 20000 at LAX Chicago Tribune
Long Beach Press-Telegram - Seattle Post Intelligencer - NEWS.com.au - Xinhua
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http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

Powerset Releases Growth Models To Public

New natural language search engine Powerset, still in pre-launch stealth mode, has had a ridiculous amount of press this year. And while some have said there is too much hype around this company (even me), you have to give them some credit. They are certainly open with their plans, and willing to experiment with new ideas.

An example: they announced Powerlabs, a sandbox for users to suggest and give feedback on future Powerset features. People who sign up for Powerlabs are also promised early news, at least an hour before it is posted on the Powerset blog.

Another example: In May Powerset COO Steve Newcomb talked about how the company was predicting future growth, and posted data on their model on the company blog. When readers bravely requested that Powerset release the model itself, Newcomb complied, saying it would be made available this summer. In a post on his personal blog he said the reason for sharing the models was to show that the company intends to be open and give users unfettered access to information:

As I mentioned before, opening up our modeling techniques is part of a larger goal to begin the process of changing our image of a secretive stealth startup to a completely open company that gives you unfettered access to our product(s), the ability to help us design them and to provide insight into the way we think inside of Powerset.

Today, Powerset published the first in a series of models, with a Flash interface. Company-specific baseline assumptions have been removed or altered, but most of the industry assumptions remain intact.

Neal Mueller (Powerset Product Manager) walked me through the models and how they work. This first set helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2. Assumptions about the size and refresh frequency of the index can be changed. Since the model is forward looking, it also makes assumptions about future server power and cost reductions from Moore’s Law.

All of the assumptions can be altered in the Flash interface, and the models can be embedded into other websites (although I could not get it to properly embed here).

Mueller says that at least two more dashboard models are coming - one for unique user forecasting and another one that they are not yet disclosing. The company is asking for feedback on the models, and will clearly take it seriously. Newcomb’s personal email is listed on the front page and he requests that feedback come directly to him.