Online video ad network LiveRail (our profile) has just released a 'State Of The Industry Report' for Q3 2008. It reports that video ad spending currently only represents 2.36% of all online advertising, but that it is expected to grow over 55% next year. Right now only 20.95% of internet video streams are being monetized. LiveRail also noted that NBC's online Olympics coverage failed to monetize well, however Hulu.com is doing good business. Indeed LiveRail states that Hulu will be a more successful business than YouTube, because of its ability to sell advertising across 100% of its inventory - compared to just 3% for YouTube.

In July we reported that Hulu is set to earn $90m in its first year. After paying off their content partners, Hulu's net revenue will probably be between $12.5 million and $25 million. This seems like a success, surely, but we had some doubts. "As Hulu grows in popularity," we wrote, "their bandwidth, marketing costs, and overhead will increase as well, and it will remain a struggle for the company to earn revenue."

YouTube launched Adsense for videos back in August. YouTube's estimated worldwide revenue for 2008 is $200 million, with approximately half of that being US based. So according to LiveRail, "given that Hulu caters almost exclusively to a US audience, both YouTube and Hulu could see roughly the same revenues in the U.S. this year."




LiveRail claims that "despite still being substantially smaller than YouTube, with 88 million videos served compared to YouTube's 4.2 billion", Hulu is more successful because it has the ability to sell out its inventory.

LiveRail suggests that this is due to Hulu's less 'risky' content. Hulu's "policy of only serving high-quality original content, and securing licensing deals from content owners, rather than allowing users to upload the content themselves [...] has removed the risk of copyright infringing content, or content of questionable quality; risk factors that most advertisers are anxious to avoid being associated with."

The one caveat appears to be Hulu's ability to sell out all its ads. We're also not entirely convinced about the argument that YouTube's UGC (user generated content) is inherently less able to monetize. As Google proved with Adsense for webpages, UGC content is able to be monetized on bulk despite its 'risks'. The same could yet prove true for user generated video content.

There is more interesting data in the report, which ReadWriteWeb readers can download here (pdf) thanks to LiveRail.

Changing the publishing model

Last week, Jay Cross hosted a discussion on the un-book and several people discussed the concept of self-publishing on the Web, given services like Lulu. The question was asked by Dave Gray, “Why publish and then get feedback?”. Also, with self-publishing the author stays in control of the process. The publishing world is changing.

Eric Frank from Flatworld Knowledge spoke about his new venture, which is set to go live in 2009, but already has 26 universities involved in testing the concept. Flatworld’s business model:

Our books are free online. We offer convenient, low-cost choices for students – print, audio, by-the-chapter, and more. Our books are open for instructors to mix, mash, and make their own. Our books are the hub of a social learning network where students learn from the book and each other.

Eric mentioned that they work with established authors/experts; use a Creative Commons license; and allow textbooks to be re-purposed for each user and/or the adopting faculty member. Revenue is generated on the add-ons such as print, audio, PDF’s, and later on the Kindle. All of this is designed to give faculty more control over content. The service includes the ability to make private/public notes and comments as well as text chat and later some social networking.

It’s a new business model but doesn’t push things too far, which should make it viable. The professors remain in control, which should get buy-in, and the service will not be disruptive to the teaching model in higher education. Lowering the cost of text books will be positive for students as well. The key will be in getting a critical mass of text books and it looks like this is proceeding well. Self-publishing, or at least publishing without the middle-man, appears to be hitting the mainstream and this should be good for anyone in the learning field.

via Harold Jarche

It's been an enjoyable day out of the office today attending a David Gurteen Knowledge Cafe masterclass. Basically a blueprint for running knowledge cafe's of one's own.

I took part in one these Knowledge cafes a year or two ago and found it to be a throughly enjoyable and highly effective means of learning, collaboration and spawned much new thinking. I've often wondered how it might be possible to replicate the experience and today David lent us his years of experience and guided us (around 25 or so) around the formats and issues.

Actually, in true knowledge cafe style, David had the appearance of leading while not leading – a rare skill and allowed us to freely discuss how and why a knowledge cafe format might work in enoruaging knowledge sharing and collaboration. Many of theinsights and how-tos came from the floor and fellow delegate's experiences. Very inspiring if truth be told.

The hard bit starts now I guess; how can I take this idea of very informal, conversation led meetings with little overt structure and place it into the business and see what happens?

I think there's an appetite for this – my internal talk on web 2.0 was heavily oversubscribed which I take to mean as a real desire to learn more and more about many of the technology, economic and management and sector issues from each other and to integrate it all into respective world views. Our business is increasingly cross-disciplinarian and these cafe's might be a good way to bridge those gaps. I hope so. I let you know.

An interesting and relevent piece found on ReadWriteWeb.com. Wonder how this trend will inform our own web strategies? It's kinda along the lines i talked about at a recent web 2.0 talk and publishing and the overwhelming amount of choice out there now compared to 10 years ago, so it's timely too. Will watch with interest...

You are not the center of the universe, especially on the internet. That's the lesson that even the biggest web brands are learning fast, and we expect to see widespread cultural changes occur right along side their learning.

One week after we wrote about the leaked screenshots that have since been confirmed as the forthcoming home page design of AOL.com, where 3rd party content and functionality is now welcome to come on in through the front door, now Yahoo! is telling the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. The era of the walled garden is over.

What's Coming to Yahoo.com

Yahoo told the AP this morning that it will soon roll out the first major redesign of its home page in two years. That redesign will host a wide variety of widgets from rival services like movie links from Netflix, music from iTunes and Amazon. It will be something like the Facebook platform, but with more prominent placement for 3rd party services than even Facebook offers. Yahoo has talked about this plan before, but now is making a media push in preparation for action.

Left: The awesome logo for this week's Yahoo Hack Day

Just Like AOL.com, and Everyone Else On Top of Their Game

Yahoo's plans are similar to what AOL appears to be planning, where activity updates 3rd party social networks and possibly an on-site RSS reader will bring new functionality to AOL users.

As we wrote last week about AOL's strategy:

Aggregation of content from around the web is quite likely a key part of the future for almost all successful websites; the web is too large to pretend you're an island any more, even if your network is sprawling it just can't compete with the options offered by the web at large. While mainstream users used to think that AOL was the internet for years, they are not so naive any more.

This is an Important Trend

We've written here about the new class of powerhouse sites that specialize in bricolage, the art of assembling found objects. (Think BoingBoing and Neatorama). We've also written about why online noise is good for you. We don't expect the big portals to go as far with this strategy at first as the edge publishers have, but just like Google's indexing the open web blew the Yahoo! directory out of the water in search - so too is a new paradigm in aggregate publishing out-competing brand-selected, human edited portals.

Right: Hugh MacLeod puts it frankly.

It's an exciting time. We look forward to seeing how the rest of the world changes as the leading sources of information online turn towards a model of intelligent collecting and sharing, as opposed to a closed, self-facing broadcast model.

Here in Berlin for the Dublin Core and Metadata applications conference 2008. This stuff has, for some reason, been imprenetrable to me for years so I hope by being here and attending some of the pre-conference workshops this might change. It's not a promising start.

Pete Johnston of Eduserve is trying to describe the Dublin Core Abstract Model and, frankly, it ain't working for me. I'm convinced there's something important going on here, but like algebra classes all those years ago, it's passing me by in a series of superdense explanations, no visuals just a monotous diatribe about things relating to things via surrogate URL, identifiers and other stuff. I'm way past the point when I used to believe I couldn't get this stuff 'cos I was thick (though I'm not ruling it out entirely) but I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one sitting here completely confused – and this workshop was supposed to dispel that!

Why oh why are academics so bloody rubbish at explaining stuff?

Mikeal Nilson is up now talking about other types of Metadata and how DC relates to those schemes. Much better than this morning's sessions and some if it I even get.

This is important stuff and it infuriates me that the people charged with explaining it to others are so poor at communciations – this is wht the IT function is so poorly understood and under-appreciated.

Yesterday was a day of pre-conference workshops designed to get newbies (like me) up to speed on some of the background, context and practical issues of DC. In that they failed may or may not be down to my innocence of the subject but I was a little unsure as to how today would go and whether or not it would go straight over my head.

Pleasingly, the opening talks from Kurt Melhorn (Max Plank Society) and Makx Deckers (DCMI) have been lucid, informative and very useful. This is important stuff – the objectives are ambitious and laudable and there's a real international feel to the whole effort and examples of adoption and real world implementation that I was yearning for yesterday. Still kinda unclear how a publisher might take a role in this development or even whether or not a publisher has a role here, but I suspect there is.

Signing off to hear Jennifer Trant talk about Social tags and folksonomies.

I happened to visit Facebook's Business Solutions page, and was struck by how, at least on the surface, these advertising formats seem like exactly the kind of innovation that should be helping Facebook achieve Goolge-style revenue — which is of course what Facebook's $15 billion valuation assumes will happen.

And yet with 100 MILLION users, Facebook's 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million. (The number may higher, haven't seen, but it would be big news if it was much higher.)

Can you imagine a traditional media company with 100 MILLION viewers/readers/subscribers and only $300 million in revenue?

Which leads to the question that should be on the mind of every media executive, from startups to big legacy players:

Why isn't Facebook making more money?

Thinking about that question, I went over to Google's Advertising Solutions page to compare the way AdWords is described to the way Facebook's offerings are described.

So let's compare Google's value proposition with Facebook's:

Google says:

Reach people actively looking for information about your products and services online

Facebook says:

Promote your website or Facebook Page with highly-targeted advertising. Make your ads even more effective by attaching them to News Feed stories about the users' friends.

Allow your customers to share with their friends the actions they take on your website.

Connect with your customers on Facebook similar to the way they connect with their friends.

With Google you can reach people who are looking for precisely what you have to offer.

With Facebook you can insert your ad into news about peoples' friends. You can let people share their shopping habits with their friends. And you can, as a company/brand, be "friends" with your consumers.

What's the key difference between Google's value proposition and Facebook's?

With Google, the value to users and the value to advertisers is perfectly aligned. Everybody wins.

With Facebook, if you read between the lines, it's really the same value proposition as traditional advertising — advertisers forcing themselves on users, in a way that creates little or no value for the users.

How many Facebook users have a burning need to find ads in their friends' newsfeeds? Or share their shopping habits? Or make friends with brands?

On Google, when you search for something, the adds are a form of search result — i.e. something you asked for, that you opted in to receive.

On Facebook, the ads, despite all the innovation, still aren't something users are really asking for.

Is it possible on the web to have a more perfect alignment between advertiser and user value than search advertising?

I don't know, but it seems a pretty safe bet that Facebook's ad formats aren't it.

(And pre-roll video advertising sure as heck ain't it.  Could there be anything more antithetical to the fundamental web experience in the broadband era than having to wait 15 seconds to access the content you're trying to load?)

If you're in media in the web era, you'd better be working on a business model that creates huge value for users. Either that, or be content to have a small business by traditional media standards.

via Publishing 2.0

Deep into the afternoon and we've had a number of papers exploring tagging, concept representation and the value of semantic web in supporting knowledge and information exchange of records.

I think I need to talk to experts back in the office to get a better feel for how we currently serve the metadata needs of our librarian customers.

My feeling is that there is much in DCAM and other aspects of DC that, when used with other technologies such as Rdfa, and SKOS, could be used as the basis for a semantically improved Emerald library of content and allow for the seamless integration and easy discovery of our content by intelligent agents, engines and other content discovery tools.

I wonder if there's any value in pursuing this line of thought with an external partner? Any librarians out there willing to work with us to refine our thinking on the development DC and Semantic Web services?

DC2008, the international conference for Dublin Core Metadata and applications ends this coming Friday; I have to leave today however and can't be here for the final 2 days. Although this is a shame in many ways, I think for me it's already a case of mission accomplished.

I arrived on Monday for the pre-conference workshops on DC hoping to learn a little more about what it is, what it is for, how it fits into the grand scheme of things and all with the idea of trying to understand if there's anything I really need to be aware of as we begin to prepare and lay down some foundations for Semantic Web. It's probably true that my own back ground in software engineering, learning technologies and digital publishing mitigates against a really deep appreciation of the finer points of DC and metadata generally but I think it helps too. Thanks to the keynotes and opening presentations yesterday morning and this morning I think I have a better appreciation of the aims of DC and the in particular the moves toward what is referred to as the Abstract Model. I suspected that this development was important and so it was a frustrating Monday to have a day of in-depth and I must impenetrable workshops on DC, with little relation to real world examples or practice. Yesterday and today have in large part corrected that sense of frustration and to those speakers I'm grateful.

Still, I leave with nagging sense of an opportunity missed here, that there's something just on the horizon I'm not getting. Either that our it's a doubt that DC really is the way forward that the DC Metadata Iniative people would have me believe. Let me explain. In science, maths and engineering there is an almost constant search for elegance in proposed solutions to stated problems. I can speak to this from days as a software designer/engineer. The clunky, inelegant solutions to problems were invariably unsustainable and mostly short terms fixes until something else came along. Given time, resources and some space most software designers would carry on refining their algorithms, theories and designs until something quite simple, in many cases childishly simple, was arrived at. I believe the same goes for maths, physics and other theoretical pursuits. DC and the DC Abstract Model doesn't feel elegant. It feels clunky and witnessing some of the Homeric efforts to organise and crosswalk data and metadata kind of reinforces this sense of inelegance rather than clarifies it, at least for me, and leaves me with the feeling something else is needed and will emerge as a result of the work going on here – directly or indirectly.

I'm prepared to admit I could be totally missing the point here and if there's are DC specialists out there who'd like to put me straight , call me or add your comments. In the meantime I'll continue to look into how I can help develop protocols, systems and services that help our library customers and if DC is part of that requirement, particularly for future interoperability projects, then so be it.

I picked this up from Harold Jarche this morning and it's worth a repeating and push forward I think. InTouch is built upon the Elgg platform and it's very pleasing to learn that this open source software is beginning to get some proper recognition. I've been a fan for some time. InTouch will. I'm sure mature as Elgg matures and if you're looking to tip your own toe in the water to build a social media/ networking site of your own I can't think of anything more versatile. Sure, as Harold points out there's Ning and as he also points out - your locked in. I've been able to rebuild and extend Elgg to meet the very specific needs of our Journals and learning communities (internal and external). Perhaps joomla, Drupal or Plone could have done the same job - but with one guy, in a few months, with not much PHP scripting expertise? hmm...

Launch and Learn

Jay Cross is currently focusing on the ROI of organisational learning initiatives and debunking some of the myths and metrics. His notes from the CLO Symposium include this:

Jayne Johnson, director of Leader Development for GE at Crotonville, delivered the final keynote presentation. Someone asked how she measured the on-going effectiveness of Crotonville; she doesn’t. As for cost-justification in advance, no, GE believes in “launch and learn.” Experiment a lot, and keep what works.

The notion of launch and learn reminds me of the cynefin approach to complex environments:

The cynefin framework looks at five domains (the 5th is Disorder) and it shows how our reliance on backward-looking tools, such as best practices, is not a suitable strategy for complex environments:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

Probe-Sense-Respond (P-S-R) is similar to GE’s Launch-Learn approach. When no one can understand the vagaries of your situation in a changing, complex environment then the only thing to do is try out new things based on your best judgement then watch, learn and keep trying new things out. Effective organisational practices will emerge by doing things.

This is the big challenge for Web 2.0 for learning professionals as well. There are no best practices or even good practices. There are things that work for some people, some of the time. As learning professionals, our job is to understand our organisation or client’s situation and look outside to see what others are doing. We have to try things out and see how they work. If we wait for the best practices, we will be too late. This is life in continual Beta (change) and the natural world provides some good examples.

via Harold Jarche

I can't tell you how pleased I am to find this TEDtalk on YouTube. I had the pleasure of listening to this same talk at Online Educa last year and it was one of the most powerful and startling presentations I've ever seen. 

Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiments, where an internet connected PC is embedded into the wall and uneducated indian street kids are left to stumble across it, figure out how it works and share that with each other is, simply, uplifting beyond words.