Online video is a compelling way to draw and maintain traffic to your website. The social aspects allowing others to copy and paste the video into their own websites or blogs using the embedding code can dramatically increase the viewing of the video, and possibly garner greater traffic to your website.

Implementing videos needs to be done carefully however, as to not turn away clients, here are some things to consider when using videos on your homepage:

First, focus on the quality of the content over the quality of production. The messaging is most important. This video is your opportunity to connect with your audience, so the majority of time spent on creating the video should be put into what it is you are communicating. Certainly, it helps to have full HD, professional sound, lighting, acting, etc.. but always keep in mind that it’s the quality of the messaging that matters most.

Second and perhaps most important, is the length of time of your video. Keep in mind, this video is on your homepage, and not deep into your website, so most likely, these will be first time initial visitors to your website. You don’t want to scare them away, so keep the video short, sweet and to the point.

You might be intersted in knowing what the average visitors attention span is when watching online videos. It turns out that nearly 90% of visitors will only watch about 10 seconds worth of the video.  Approximately 46% of your audience wil stick around for the full minute, and only 10% will stay to watch 5 minutes worth of your video. So make it impracting

Lastly, when deciding what type of video to serve up, you need to weigh several factors, perhaps the most overlooked is the questions of, who is delivering the messaging. Is it authoritarian, such as a newscaster, a business professional, an authority figure who is giving you advice. Or is it more personal, and social in nature, like the spokesperson could be a friend or spouse. Research the demographics you want to target, and make sure you have the right spokesperson speaking to the right audience.

According to a 2010 AffStat Report, approximately 30% of affiliate marketers reported that they would be integrating video into their affiliate marketing plans. As creating and editing videos becomes easier, we would expect to see this number grow.

Source: http://blog.clickbooth.com/2010/06/15/videos-landing-page/

Perhaps the only thing changing faster than the landscape of Dubai is the Internet itself. Dubai is one of the seven Emirates comprising the UAE, United Arab Emirates. As an oil rich region, Dubai is one of the fastest growing areas on the planet, an ever changing coastal town positioning itself to be the major travel, business and tourism hub of the Middle East, just like Singapore is to South East Asia.
 
Situated in Dubai is a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm called Dubai First SEO, who help clients of all sizes get their website businesses discovered online, in Dubai, and in Arabic language.
 
Much like Dubai, the internet is an ever-changing landscape. New techniques and practices are called for to get a website business discovered online. Dubai First SEO provides those services. From assisting in getting your website recognized on www.google.ae, the UAE version of Google, to getting your website localized into Arabic, or Persian, Farsi, and getting listed on achieving strong SEO rank order for Farsi language in Iran, Dubai First SEO should be your first choice.

We at Quarkis sift through the world’s top SEO and SEM providers worldwide, continually searching out the top professionals with the most domain expertise in their field. We are therefore pleased to announce that we will be in exclusive partnership with Dubai First, to handle all of our Arabic, Persian, Farsi SEO and SEM services. We are certainl you will be satisified with the results they can produce for you also.

Video on Demand (VOD) utilizes technology available by a plethora of vendors from very large, such as Comcast, to the more botique operators such as Sunflower Broadband. And the industry will soon be reaching its first decade of implementation.

A key component to succesful VOD implementation lies in the ad management software, which allows for the most relevant ads given the broadcasted content. One such company, Black Arrow, produces such software, and is working with Comcast to bring it’s VOD ad insertion capabilities to use, they are currently in pilot trial rolling this functionality out throughout Jacksonville Florida.

With VOD availability growing and viewship expanding rapidly, there’s many advertisers lined up to take advantage of dynamic ad insertion (DIA). In fact, Sunflower says they routinely run out of ad inventory well in advance to the VOD deployment. Furthermore, they are able to charge roughly 10 to 50 times higher CPM’s than traditional linear TV ad formats.

The business model problem seems to kick in when the MSO is much larger and national ad dollars are on the line. In those situations, the problem is that there’s an ongoing argument about who gets the money for the ad placement.

There’s a relatively fixed number of ad spots (aka “avails”) in each program, usually fixed at 30 or 60 seconds. Programmers keep most of the avails in their programs, which they typically sell to national advertisers. The remaining slots go to the distributor / broadcast station or pay-TV system operator, which typically sells to local advertisers.
The question is now that we have addressable dynamic advertising in VOD, what’s it worth?” said Nick Troiano, president of BlackArrow. “TV is a broad-reach play; you reach 10, 15, 50 million. The issue is scarcity ” there are only so many slots at 9 p.m. on CBS. The challenge of online video is there’s no such thing as scarcity. VOD is a commingling of the two.

The entertainment industry has come to an uneasy accommodation when it comes to measuring audiences, with everyone agreeing to abide by allowing companies like Nielsen to aggregate viewing statistics for the initial showing of a network program, plus on-demand viewing during the subsequent three days and the shorthand for that measurement window is C3.

The value of advertising in C3 is well established, Troiano noted. “But what about after that, C4 through C7? We think that’s a unique advertising window for those who couldn’t afford $900,000 at 9 p.m. against “Heroes.”

Another issue is that there may be any number of avails; the length of the spots could be variable, and they have different levels of effectiveness under different circumstances.

For example, ads placed before the beginning of the requested program (a pre-roll) or in the middle (a mid) tend to be seen by significantly more people than those placed at the end (a post-roll), which tend to be skipped more frequently. But if an ad at the end is watched, it has attracted the attention of the viewer, and thus might be considered more effective.

All of which begs a ton of questions. Who gets to sell the avail, or avails? How much are they worth? If there’s a split on multiple avails, or a split on revenue generated, what’s the split?

“In North America, pre-rolls and postrolls and mids may have different ownership,” explained Malcolm Stanley, director of advertising product management at SeaChange. “The valuation of that, that’s what the discussion is all about.”

Another factor is that MSOs are understandably taking the position that since they are investing money to create the ability to dynamically insert ads in VOD streams, creating ad avails where none had previously existed, they ought to get paid more for those spots. Content owners apparently aren’t ready to concede that point.

With neither side backing down, the result is a standoff, meaning few largewww. CEDmagazine.comjune2010 25 scale rollouts of dynamic ad insertion in VOD until those issues get resolved.

The exception is Virgin Media in the U.K., where many of those issues have already been hashed out.

Source: http://www.cedmagazine.com/Article-VOD-advertising-business-060110.aspx

“Yandex” is an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.” and is the leading search engine in Russia. Their search engine automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs, and searches documents in the major Cyrillic languages — Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian — as well as in English, French, and German.

As of August 2008 Yandex had approximately 55% of the Russian search market, compared to Google’s 21%.  Yandex now allows visitors to limit searches to only foreign websites, meaning non-Russian websites.  This global search is also available at the company’s experimental Yandex.com portal launched for testing new search algorithms.

Another dissapointment is Failblog.org. A once funny and quick moving site is now painful to puruse. They should be paying US to surf through their website full of endless ads, popups and video ads. It seems suddenly that popup ads are making their way back, and many successful website businesses have found it acceptable once again to employ this tactic. I believe Failblog.org has hit their high water mark here with 750k visitors a day. Goodbye FailBlog, it was nice knowing you.

I was cheering on hi5.com for quite some time now. They were the underdogs to Facebook and Myspace, but have a very strong presence in Thailand. I liked their colorful interface and a lot of the features and tools they employed, which made it easy to interact with others and find new friends.

But now, they’ve destroyed their website by loading it with popup ads and self-running video ads. 2 minutes on the site feels like sitting through an infomercial for 30 minutes.

Their traffic has fallen from 8 to 6 million visitors daily, and I expect this number will continue to decline as long as they continue pushing ads in their members faces. Bye Bye, it was nice knowing you.

Twitter already stated earlier in the week that it was geting about 50 million tweets being sent out per day. New data released shows that approximately half of those tweets are in non-English language. Approximately 25 milion foreign languge tweets being sent out per day.
A lot of people are using Twitter in languages other than English, and those numbers are expected to grow, as Twitter recently has put out statements seeking help to crowdsource their platform into FIGS.

The number one language aside from English is Japanese, with approximately 14% of all tweets being sent out in Nihongo. Portuguese, Malay and Spanish closely behind.
 
Source: Techcrunch

The folks at MyGengo, a foreign language translation services company recently published a report covering the market conditions for the language learning industry.

Here some interesting facts revealed:

• Chinese, Spanish and English represent only 30% of the worlds spoken language by population. But these languages make up roughly 60% of the internet users.
• 52% of non-English language users only buy from websites where the information is presented in their native language.
• Since 2008, Russian and Arabic online audiences have grown over 1000%, which Chinese close behind.
• When looking at French and Japanese native language speakers, 60% of them only buy from websites where the product and service information is presented in their native language.
• 56.2% of forieng language speakers say that when making a purchasing decision, information written in their native language was more important than a low price.

Here is the whitepaper from the folks at MyGenga, a truly great report.. kudos.

The domain name calling out a website’s web address, also called a URL, is about to become multilingual as we first reported last week. AP writer Kelly Olsen reports that as early as November 16th 2009, we may start to see the use of non-latin scripts such as Korean, Chinese and Arabic.

The decision by the board’s 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO, said ahead of the vote.

 Kelly goes on to write:

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A-Z — as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

That has meant Internet users with little or no knowledge of English might still have to type in Latin characters to access Web pages in Chinese or Arabic. Although search engines can sometimes help users reach those sites, companies still need to include Latin characters on billboards and other advertisements.

Now, ICANN is allowing those same technical tricks to apply to the suffix as well, allowing the Internet to be truly multilingual.

Many of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters.

“This is absolutely delightful news,” said Edward Yu, CEO of Analysys International, an Internet research and consulting firm in Beijing.

The Internet would become more accessible to users with lower incomes and education, said Yu, who was speaking before the widely expected decision.

Countries can only request one suffix for each of their official languages, and the suffix must somehow reflect the name of the country or its abbreviation.

Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be permitted for at least a few more years as ICANN considers broader policy questions such as whether the incumbent operator of “.com” should automatically get a Chinese version, or whether that more properly goes to China, as its government insists.

ICANN also is initially prohibiting Latin suffixes that go beyond the 37 already-permitted characters. That means suffixes won’t be able to include tildes, accent marks and other special characters.

And software developers still have to make sure their applications work with the non-Latin scripts. Major Web browsers already support them, but not all e-mail programs do.

In China, Guo Liang, a researcher who studies Internet use for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the government’s top think tank, questioned whether all Chinese will embrace the new domains.

Although the move will reflect linguistic and cultural diversity, Guo said, “for some users it might even be easier to type domains in Latin alphabets than Chinese characters.”

China has already set up its own “.com” in Chinese within its borders, using techniques that aren’t compatible with Internet systems around the world.

Most Chinese and Japanese computer users write characters in their native scripts by typing phonetic versions on a standard English keyboard.

China is among a handful of countries that has pushed hardest for official non-Latin suffixes and could be one of the first to make one available, said Tina Dam, the ICANN senior director for internationalized domain names. The other countries, she said, are Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

About 50 such names are likely to be approved in the first few years.

This is one of the best presentations I’ve seen concerning the impact of viral factors in social games: