Valleywag
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YouTube
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don't be evil
cleantech
Google wants you to show plug-in hybrids some YouTube love
RechargeIT, the plug-in hybrid publicity program sponsored by Google.org, the search giant's relatively poorly funded do-gooder initiative run by Larry Brilliant, is running a YouTube contest. The company wants anyone who has a plug-in electric hybrid, or wishes they did, to upload a video describing their obsession. The contest isn't official yet, but Earth2Tech found a submission page which doesn't list exactly what you might win by entering. A new car would be nice, but I'm guessing it'll be more along the lines of sitting through a press conference, a free meal at the cafeteria and maybe a test drive.
once you're lucky, twice you're good
B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
Few people outside Silicon Valley have heard of Roelof Botha. But the former CFO of PayPal is famous here. His two claims to fame: negotiating that company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay, and later, as a partner at Sequoia Capital, investing in YouTube and quickly flipping the startup to Google for $1.65 billion. Is it a coincidence that that figure is 10 percent higher than his PayPal score? Few insiders think so. Botha gets four pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good — more than Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Other figures who appear on the second page of her Web 2.0 book's index: John Battelle, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook board member Jim Breyer, blog blowhard Jason Calacanis, and YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, whom Botha made quite wealthy. More »
six apart
Is Six Apart cofounder Mena Trott already getting bored with the tribulations of new motherhood? She took a break from raising future superblogger Penelope Trott, who surely coded Movable Type templates in the womb, to create a video imagining what she would have done had YouTube been around when she was 16. Having met Mena, née Grabowski, when she was an actual teenager, I can say this for her skills as a self-documentarian: two thumbs up for accuracy.
Mena Trott revisits her lost youth on YouTube
Is Six Apart cofounder Mena Trott already getting bored with the tribulations of new motherhood? She took a break from raising future superblogger Penelope Trott, who surely coded Movable Type templates in the womb, to create a video imagining what she would have done had YouTube been around when she was 16. Having met Mena, née Grabowski, when she was an actual teenager, I can say this for her skills as a self-documentarian: two thumbs up for accuracy.
youtube
Google needs to stop being nice and start charging advertisers for distribution
In comments to CNBC's Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared that "advertising itself has value" in YouTube's efforts to achieve profitability. By which he likely means that a well-placed ad can, on occasion, actually help a potential customer find what they're looking for. But you know what else has value? Distribution. Never mind sophisticated ad-targeting technology — YouTube is subsidizing distribution of commercials, and if the company wants to profit, Schmidt might want to think about charging for it instead. More »
12:00 PM on Thu May 1 2008
By Jackson West
374 views,
1 comment
Latest by Magister: Ah... Come on, Jackson... You know that whenever we're watching an episode of Monk or Grey's Anatomy, whenever that commercial for the cruise line plays, we all "look over there", even though there's no "over there" on a full screen. more »
online video
YouTube hosting Playboy's 55th Anniversary Playmate casting call
Hoary softcore porn peddler Playboy is asking women interested in being the Playmate of the Year to submit video auditions through YouTube. Of course, you're not allowed to disrobe on the popular video-sharing site, so according to the contest rules, no nudity is allowed — but two-piece swimsuits are encouraged. Four lucky ladies will get plane tickets to Hollywood were they will be photographed au naturel, visit the Playboy mansion and presumably have a chance to be fondled by Viagra-fueled nonagenarian Hugh Hefner. All the entrants sign over rights to their videos to Playboy. "Cyber Girl" Dana Dicillo demonstrates exactly how wannabes should "highlight their assets" after the jump. More »
jackpot
Metacafe founders take their $5 million and go
Metacafe cofounders Arik Czerniak and Ofer Adler — neither involved with the company's day-to-day operations — will walk away from the company with $2.5 million each, according to TheMarker. If $5 million seems like a lot, remember that YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each cleared $326.2 million selling out to Google and that Czerniak and Adler might have turned down a $200 million to $700 million offer from Yahoo. All of which makes it even more fun to watch the video embedded below, recorded just weeks after Google purchased YouTube, where Czerniak tries to convince Bambi Francisco that Metacafe is "the largest, most popular video site." More »
nerdspotting
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and YouTubers party with Pussycat Dolls in Vegas
YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen partied in Las Vegas over weekend, taking to the VIP sections at Caesar's Palace and the Luxor, a nerdspotter tells us. At Caesar's Hurley, Chen and a crew of about 25 YouTubers — early employees, we hear — lounged around Club Pure, taking in a Pussycat Dolls show (an example in the clip below). Our tipster tells us the group partied not like rock stars, but "cool nerds." Anyone have a visual explanation of what that looks like? Send in your cameraphone spy clips of Chen & Co., or better yet, post them to YouTube. More »
clips
The five racist cartoons Google wants you to see, but no one else does
Google's YouTube hosts 11 Warner Bros. cartoons banned since 1968 for their racist content, New York Times reports. Google flack Ricardo Reyes told the paper it is up to users to flag offensive content and up to copyright holders to notify Google when infringing content is uploaded. "The cartoons are despicable," the NAACP's Richard McIntire told the Times. "We encourage the films' owners to maintain them as they are — that is, locked away in their vaults." But hiding the videos goes against Google's mission to organize all the world's information, including — it seems — records of our hateful past. Should the five racially offensive cartoons embedded below be so easy to share? Google never asked. More »
online advertising
You'd think that after all that time he spent at Linden Lab as the worst nightmare of virtual pedophiles in Second Life, Valleywag mascot Chadrick Baker would know to think of the children. By embedding a Heineken commercial on his blog, Baker may innocently believe he was just acknowledging a friend's creativity, but no — he's unwittingly aiding multinational alcohol purveyors in their efforts to stamp booze brands in young minds early and often. More »
YouTube's complicity in marketing booze to kids exposed by Valleywag mascot
You'd think that after all that time he spent at Linden Lab as the worst nightmare of virtual pedophiles in Second Life, Valleywag mascot Chadrick Baker would know to think of the children. By embedding a Heineken commercial on his blog, Baker may innocently believe he was just acknowledging a friend's creativity, but no — he's unwittingly aiding multinational alcohol purveyors in their efforts to stamp booze brands in young minds early and often. More »
online advertising
Google helps Scientology get out its message of total freedom and truth
The dollar's sinking value wasn't the only reason Google crushed Wall Street's expectations for the company's first quarter. The Church of Scientology helped, in its own small way. The church paid for advertising space on YouTube to convey its message that "you are an immortal spiritual being. Your capabilities are unlimited." That is, if you can stomach the olive oil shots and spare a little cash. We're surprised Google's human filters didn't catch the ad. We've heard they're plenty familiar with the way an organization can use crafty words to create false expectations in order to lure warm bodies.
online video
Google Video gets facelift, still mostly returns results from YouTube
Google Video, which became
journalist math
Watch this YouTube video 1,000 times, and its creator will earn 80 cents
After Yuri Baranovski's Web TV series Break a Leg reached two million views on YouTube, Google cut him a $1,600 check. In advertising math, that translates to an $0.80 CPM, or cost per thousand views. Taking what NewTeeVee knows about YouTube's partner program, disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget suggests that YouTube charges advertisers a CPM between $1 and $3.20 and gets to keep between $0.25 and $2.40. The equation's solution: On 3.4 billion YouTube views in January, Google grossed between $850,000 and $2.72 million. Taking the higher estimate, YouTube will have paid back Google for its $1.65 billion acquisition price in another 607 months.
politics
Google indexing "child porn" so the feds don't have to
Manually indexing 5 million child porn images a year is hard work, says the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So Google has stepped in to customize image-search software originally developed for YouTube to the task. The Wall Street Journal has disputed NCMEC's stats on the huge badness of the so-called child porn industry, and Salon.com pulled Debbie Nathan's article defending the public's right to know how much child porn is really online. With Google coming in to assist, accurate data may even emerge. Not that anyone there will be using their 20 percent time to look at the results.
online video
YouTube's U.S. video share now bigger than Google's search share, but profit eludes it
The latest data from Hitwise shows YouTube claiming over 73 percent of the online video market in the United States — a larger share in its home market than even its parent compan, Google, enjoys in search. That figure is up 18 percentage points over March of last year, when YouTube had 55 percent of the market. Problem is, these numbers represent significant growth in viewership, but not growth in advertising sales or revenue, leaving Google on the hook for ever-expanding bandwidth costs.
online video
Cheerleader's mom blames YouTube, MySpace for her daughter's beating
Police say six teenagers trapped 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay in a house and then beat her until she lost consciousness. Their evidence? Video, which authorities say the girls planned to upload to MySpace and YouTube. Lindsay's mother told Good Morning America she in part blames the site for the attacks. "I don't understand it" Lindsay says in the clip above. "I don't understand how our society has gotten through peer pressure to our kids that's its OK to act in violence and then want to post it on MySpace or YouTube or anywhere else, just for entertainment and a laugh." Ah, whimpering and weeping, the stuff of pure ROFLMAO.
online advertising
How CBS sells the video ads YouTube can't
One reason that YouTube isn't making their overlords at Google happy is because the video site is having a tough time selling advertising inventory. The new solution? Letting content partners do the work for them, says Google director Jordan Hoffner in an interview with TV Week's Daisy Whitney. CBS is among a number of companies which have been granted license to sell their own ads. That move could allay advertisers' fears that their ads will end up next to potty humor clips. They can also show off the new graphs and maps YouTube generates to show where clips — and hence ads — are viewed. The only problem is that those stats are pretty easily gamed, and if there's anything advertisers like less than off-brand placement, it's fraudulent reporting. Full video of the Hoffner and Whitney interview after the jump. More »
great moments in pr
