Website

Bag Borrow or Steal Inc., a self-described Netflix for handbags, used Google's free Website Optimizer service to try to enhance the amount of people signing up for a newsletter.

"For our company, that's the foundation for our leads that we'll market to," said Mark Belanger, director of direct marketing for Bag Borrow or Steal.

Website Optimizer allows Web designers test different components of pages, including different elements such as headlines, images and calls to action. The optimizer automatically makes different mixtures of those elements and serves up the variations live. It then tracks how each page does.

"You can test two to 10,000 combinations, it depends on how ambitious you want to get and how much traffic you get," said Tom Leung, product manager for Website Optimizer at Google.

Google developed the service precisely to remove such deduction from site design, Leung said. "The problem we're trying to solve is really to sort of take Web page development out of the dark ages," he said. Typically, designers and marketers work together to come up with pages, using a "lot of guessing and a lot of intuition, which is often wrong," he said.

Beta users for Google Website Optimizer ranged from the very small corporation to larger organizations, including PC World, said Leung.

IDG News Service

The Site not only present the cutting of film and television show, its also play the film and show for full time. News Corp Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin say, News Corp will own to access to almost all US Internet consumer in the moment of site launch. The television program that will presented in the site, for example Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. Others some newest film from 20th Century Fox also will come up, like The Devil Wears Prada and Borat. In this time Youtube considered as a threat for Media Company because have taken their audience, especially teenage segment.

Teenage all the world in this time more opting in front of the computer screen than watch television. Besides Youtube is also involved by a conflict with one media company, Viacom Inc. The company which direct MTV and Comedy Central claim the Youtube main company, Google Inc, equal to USD1 milliard with the accusation conduct the copyrights collision by presenting Viacom television program in the video sharing site.

For smoothly the way of launching plan, NBC Universal and News Corp also cooperate with Google three biggest competitor, Yahoo Inc, Microsoft Corp, and Time Warner Inc. Both media company will supply entertainment program to the third site. Beside cooperate with the big company, NBC And News Corp is also doing approach with the other Internet company.

According to Ballmer, this Google action is insane. "We are (Microsoft) walk from 24.000 becoming 75.000 employees in 27 year. That is a long year and very consistent. According to me, with them (Google) try to duplicate the number in one year, that's insane," comment of Ballmer from Softpedia, Sunday ( 18/3/2007).

Besides commenting about the growth of employees number, Ballmer also highlights the Google business which only focus at searching machine. " Google have build very good business. But they only have one main matter (that is search engine), the other only sweetener," said Ballmer.

Ballmer explicitly that his company, Microsoft, exactly reverse from the Google. There is experiencing multi business, start from desktop, server, online and entertainment.

Dr.Christ Steele, one of famous doctor in English reported have claimed Youtube to delete some video that displayed method of breast cancer and testicle prevention. Its reason, the video too expose stimulus parts. The Observer report, the video clip present kind of interesting tips around of breast and testicle cancer and also its prevention. Others, the video destined for 18 years old member.

" It's so ridiculous," said Steele in Softpedia.Com, Tuesday ( 20/3/2007). In Steele confession, he have seen the breast and testicle cancercous medication process in television before 9 PM. And now Youtube have to conduct the demarcation whom which may access the the cancer video.

" In this time a lot of young girl are interest in breast cancer because famous artist Kylie Minogue have experienced it, and also testicle cancer is attacking lot of young man. But posed at Youtube do not be sensible because continuous show the stimulate parts," say the Steele

Recently, Google which own the Youtube express to free its member to use the Youtube based on member purpose.

To known, pandemic video and medication non just this time available in Youtube. Times before, a woman which is struggling againts cancer decide to spread the life story video in Youtube with an purpose to advise people about the cancer disease. The video get reat feedback, visitor supporting the woman to struggle againts cancer. Visitor also ask she to tell the story around its disease healing.

In an agreement that analysts described as a key step for both the BBC and YouTube, the British broadcaster is offering three branded channels on the site, including one showing up to 30 news clips a day. The deal gives the BBC access to millions more viewers and gives YouTube the credibility of the venerable British broadcaster.

“It’s an easy win-win,” said Chris Lake, an editor at E-consultancy, an Internet marketing firm.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson said the broadcaster hopes to drive extra traffic to its own Web site and bring in commercial revenue to supplement the license fee levied on British taxpayers.

“It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these,” he said.

Datamonitor analyst Chris Khouri said that the move showed the BBC was becoming “a more commercially focused organization.” Lake added that the deal would provide the BBC with crucial information about viewer habits that it could then use on its own Web site. The BBC has already announced plans to set up its own video player on a new international portal.

One of the new YouTube channels, “BBC Worldwide,” will show clips from hit BBC programs including motor show “Top Gear,” spy drama “Spooks” and nature documentaries presented by David Attenborough.

A second entertainment channel, simply called “BBC,” will show clips like trailers and short features such as video diaries of actors on the popular “Dr. Who” TV series or blogs from reporters working abroad.

The third channel, “BBC News,” will show snippets from the BBC’s commercially operated international news channel of the same name.

The deal is also well-timed for YouTube and may ease the company’s prickly relationship with large entertainment companies that allege that YouTube violates their copyright.

The site is filled with film and music clips uploaded by individual members. Viacom Inc. recently forced the company to take down more than 100,000 video clips and instead set up a distribution arrangement with a new video service, Joost.

“As the BBC has acknowledged, I think it’s better to embrace it and jump in,” Lake said. “That way you can monitor the quality and the content.”

Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, said the BBC would not hunt down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members, but would reserve the right to swap poor-quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC’s brand.

“We don’t want to be overzealous,” he said. “A lot of the material on YouTube is good promotional content for us.”

But the arrangement is also likely to raise political concerns in Britain because two of the channels, BBC News and BBC Worldwide, will carry advertising. Advertising remains a thorny issue for the taxpayer-funded BBC, and the YouTube deal comes as the BBC Trust, the corporation’s new governance body, debates whether to allow the broadcaster to carry ads on its own international Web sites.

The BBC separates its commercial activities, such as its international broadcasting operations, from its domestic, license fee-funded services, but a series of government-commissioned reports have urged the corporation to separate those activities more clearly.

The BBC News channel will not be available to British viewers because of the commercials, but BBC Worldwide will be available in the United Kingdom, advertising and all.

The broadcaster insisted that was not a departure, pointing out that BBC magazines like “Top Gear,” and TV channels like “BBC World” and “UK Living” already carry advertising.

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Victoria, Australia's second most populous state, banned the popular video-sharing site from its 1,600 government schools after a gang of male school students videotaped their assault on a 17-year-old girl on the outskirts of Melbourne.

The assault, which is being investigated by police, was uploaded on YouTube late last year.

Education Services Minister Jacinta Allan said the schools and their Internet service providers already filtered the Web sites that were available to students, and YouTube had been added to a list of blocked sites.

The state government "has never tolerated bullying in schools and this zero tolerance approach extends to the online world," Allan said.

"All students have the right to learn in a safe and supportive learning environment — this includes making students' experience of the virtual world of learning as safe and productive as possible," she said.

YouTube is a free video-sharing site that lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

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A Google spokesman declined comment, saying the company's policy is not to respond to "rumor or speculation."

Video game industry analysts said the acquisition, if successful, could give a boost to the nascent in-game advertising market.

Adscape competes with advertising start-ups Double Fusion and IGA Worldwide, which have already inked deals with major publishers.

It also has a rival in Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), which last year paid $200 million for in-game ad company Massive Inc. -- lured by Massive's agreements to place ads in online games from UbiSoft Entertainment SA (UBIP.PA), THQ Inc. (Nasdaq:THQI - news) and Take- Two Interactive Software Inc. (Nasdaq:TTWO - news)

"My take on this probable deal is that it doesn't make a lot of difference to Google ... but it does provide significant credibility to the game marketing space," Forrester Research Inc. analyst Shar VanBoskirk told Reuters.

An Adscape spokeswoman previously told Reuters the company struck deals with video game publishers, but that for strategic reasons, is not revealing names or commenting on the Google acquisition speculation. A company representative was not immediately available for comment on Friday.

While Adscape is seeking deals with virtually all major publishers, its value is expected to be based largely on its team and its technology that places dynamic ads on billboards, or vending machines that appear in video games.

Adscape, which has received funding from HIG Ventures in Atlanta, is poised to be the big winner if a deal is struck because Google built its multibillion-dollar Web search advertising business with a huge roster of large and small marketers and now has a large, experienced ad sales staff.

Google is the king of search advertising, but its success in the video game advertising market is not guaranteed, said Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at Parks Associates.

"Whatever they have in terms of search expertise may not apply to video game advertising ... It's a different dynamic," said Cai.

He said Google's ad expertise may be a better fit for Web sites and game makers that focus on quick, skill-based casual games like "Solitaire," "Bejeweled" or "Diner Dash" than for more complex online and console games that bring in the lion's share of the $30 billion industry's revenue.

Through Microsoft, Massive has an in with the maker of the Xbox 360 video game console. Rival console makers Sony Corp. (6758.T)(NYSE:SNE - news) and Nintendo Co. Ltd. (7974.OS) have not outlined their in-game ad strategies.

Electronic Arts Inc. (Nasdaq:ERTS - news), Activision Inc. (Nasdaq:ATVI - news) and other large players in the global video game industry are eyeing in-game advertising with interest, but are cautious about setting expectations too high, too soon.

Parks Associates said 2005 revenue from dynamic in-game ads was $80 million in 2005 and forecasts it could grow to $605 million.

Right now, there is more space available for ads -- or inventory -- than advertisers willing to take a risk on the new genre, video game publishers said.

"Advertisers have been a little shy to try games as an advertising vehicle," said VanBoskirk.

But she said, having Microsoft and Google in the market should help convince hesitant marketers that video games are a viable advertising medium.

"Google's challenge (like everyone in the game marketing space) will be to show that games work for advertisers outside of the 'obvious' fits like those in the media and entertainment space," VanBoskirk said.

Lisa Baertlein
www.reuters.com

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares, valued at nearly 328 million dollars on Thursday. Hurley got another 41,242 shares of Google stock, valued at 19.5 million dollars, which were placed in a trust fund.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen received 625,366 shares valued at 295.5 million dollars and another 68,721 shares worth 32.47 million dollars that were placed in a trust fund, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Google's third founder, Jawed Karim, received 137,443 shares of Google stock with a market value of 64.9 million dollars.

Sequoia Capital, which financed YouTube to the tune of 11.5 million dollars, got a payoff of 941,027 shares worth 444.64 million dollars, the SEC filing indicated.

Chen and Hurley met in 1999, while working at PayPal, three years before the online financial transaction service was bought by Internet auction site eBay for 1.5 billion dollars.

Hurley left PayPal to work for himself as a consultant. Chen remained at PayPal and worked on the company's expansion into China.

The friends first discussed wanting an easy way to share home videos online while at a dinner with other former PayPal employees in January 2005.

Hurley, Chen and former PayPal colleague Karim launched YouTube in April 2005.

www.afp.com

Viacom said in a statement that after several months of talks with YouTube and its corporate parent, the online search leader Google Inc., "it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users."

Viacom said that YouTube and Google had failed to deliver on several "filtering tools" to control unauthorized video from appearing on the hugely popular site.

The company was now asking YouTube to take the clips down, but stopped short of filing a lawsuit.

Under federal copyright law, online services such as YouTube are generally immune from liability as long as it responds to takedown requests such as these, which YouTube often does. Less clear legally is what happens when another user posts the same video, something commonly done on the free video-sharing site.

YouTube said in a statement that it would comply with the request from Viacom and said it cooperates "with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are officially notified."

The company also said it was "unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from YouTube's passionate audience which has helped to promote many of Viacom's shows."

In November, YouTube agreed to delete nearly 30,000 files after the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers complained of copyright infringement.

Some media companies such as CBS Corp. and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal have made deals to allow YouTube to use video clips from their programming, but others have yet to agree with the site over ways to get compensated for the use of their copyrighted material.

Universal Music Group, a division of French telecommunications giant Vivendi SA, had threatened to sue YouTube for copyright infringement, saying it was a hub for pirated music videos, but later reached a licensing deal with them last year.

Despite Viacom's problems with YouTube, the company's MTV Networks division reached a licensing deal last year with Google that allows the search company's video service to use clips from MTV and its sibling networks under a revenue-sharing agreement.

SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer
www.ap.org

Links to web pages about Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva no longer pop up in searches in Portuguese for "drunken despot."

And Russian Internet users that type "enemy of the people" into Google are not directed to a biography of that nation's leader,
Vladimir Putin.

The Mountain View, California-based search colossus says it has finally defused such "Googlebombs," search term results rigged by clever outsiders to make comic or critical commentary.

"By improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs," Ryan Moulton and Kendra Carattini of Google wrote in a company weblog.

"Now, we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead."

Google described the programming change as "pretty small," saying there were fewer than 100 well-known Googlebombs, also referred to as "link bombs" because they provide links to unrelated websites under the guise of answering the query.

For example, a Google search for French military victories had prompted a replica of a search engine page and the question "Did you mean military defeats?" as though the searcher's original quest was in vain.

Searches for "failure," "fiasco," and "miserable" in various languages resulted in links to various countries' current or former leaders.

A search in Danish for "primitive troll" provided a link to an official page for that nation's prime minister, while the query "mouton insignificant" (unimportant sheep) led searchers to a biography for the premier of Quebec, Canada.

"Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven't been a very high priority for us," Moulton and Carattini explained in their blog.

"But over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That's not true."

Rather than deactivating Googlebombs by hand, Google engineers developed a search algorithm to neutralize them.

"Computers can process lots of data very fast, and robust algorithms often work well in many different languages," Moulton and Carattini wrote.

"That's what we did in this case, and the extra effort to find a good algorithm helps detect Googlebombs in many different languages."

Google ranks search results based on a mathematical model that factors in key words and popularity of websites.

While Google has known about link bombs for years, it had previously expressed reluctance to defuse them individually because it didn't want to tinker with the objectivity of its Internet search model.

Google cautioned that some link bombs will slip past the algorithm net, which will be tightened based on feedback from searchers.

Glenn Chapman
www.afp.com

"The stock is down because it wasn't a blow-out quarter as many of us expected," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Global Crown Capital. "They gained share relative to Yahoo in paid search revenue, but not by a wide margin."

Fourth-quarter net income nearly tripled to $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per share, from $372.2 million, or $1.22 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. That easily beat the average analyst estimate of $2.92 per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue, meanwhile, surged 67% to $3.21 billion, from $1.92 billion a year ago. Nearly two-thirds of Google's fourth-quarter revenue came from its own sites.

Google is venturing into new ad formats beyond its traditional pay-per-click text ad business, including radio, video, newspaper and corporate brand ads.

For the fiscal year, Google's revenue exceeded $10 billion, becoming the fastest dot-com public company to reach that mark, Pyykkonen says.

The Silicon Valley company has exceeded analysts' forecasts in all but one of its 10 quarters as a publicly held company.

The company's stock, which has been flirting with $500 a share, rose 9% in January, compared with a 1% increase for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index in the same period.

Google's market value of $153.5 billion is more than four times that of rival Yahoo. Web traffic to Google sites jumped 24% year-over-year, says Nielsen/NetRatings. About 3 billion searches were performed on the site in December - about twice as many as on Yahoo, says Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google's technology isn't considerably different from rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog. "They simply have a good brand," he says.

"Google's biggest concern is simply getting too big," Sullivan says. "Everybody thinks of them as those wacky kids in Mountain View (Calif.), but they're not. They're a 6,000-person company."

Jon Swartz, www.usatoday.com
Contributing: Michelle Kessler, Reuters

Google said it would distribute advertising alongside videos from Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group (NYSE:WMG - news) over its AdSense online ad system to Web site publishers in a four-week test now underway.

"Over the past few months, we have run tests to figure out how we work with our partners and advertisers to combine high quality video content with ads and then distribute them (over) the Google AdSense network," Google said in statement.

The test with the two music labels follows an earlier public trial of Google's video advertising system with Viacom's (NYSE:VIA - news) MTV Networks, which provided music videos to run on a select number of Web sites running Google ads.

As part of the test, advertisements would be billed on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model, the traditional billing method for mass market advertising as opposed to the pay-per-click billing model Google popularized with text ads.

Google has been pushing ahead in recent months to expand beyond its hugely successful text-advertising system into new advertising formats including video, radio and mobile phones.

As a example, Warner Music has defined multiple video channels along themes like "rock music" or featuring the "Divas of Pop Music." A Web site owner can select a video channel and embed it on a section of the site dedicated to running Google AdSense ads. Visitors then can click to watch ad-supported videos within the video channel on sites running the ads.

The Google advertising system splits the resulting revenue three ways to the video content owner, the Web site publisher and Google. The exact revenue splits were not disclosed.

Mountain View, California-based Google said in a statement on its AdSense customer blog that only a limited number of Web site publishers had been asked to participate.

"Over the next few weeks we'll be testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers," AdSense product manager Christian Oestlien said in his blog post.

Sony BMG is a joint venture of Japan's Sony Corp. (6758.T) and Germany's Bertelsmann (BERT.UL).

Shares of Google fell 1.8 percent to close at $480.84 on Nasdaq.

Eric Auchard
www.reuters.com