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Category: Contests & Games

Would You Advertise on YouTube?

Published July 31, 2006

This post contains language which may offend some.  You’ve been warned!

After a glorious week off in Cape Cod, I was catching up one morning on my RSS Feeds and came across this chart at Silicon Beat with the updated unique visitor stats on the hot Web 2.0 sites, YouTube, Facebook, Photobucket and MySpace.

Socialnetworkschartthumb

Two things struck me looking at these trends.  First, despite now being owned by “the man”, MySpace continues to grow incredibly.  Clearly the average user hasn’t figured out yet that Murdock didn’t lay down $600 Million so this property could continue to lose money.  Eventually the marketing push at the site will become noticeable and then we’ll see if the growth rates continue to sustain themselves.

My second observation is that YouTube has a faster growth rate than any of the other superstar Web 2.0 sites.  In a traditional portal space, this growth in regular users would naturally translate into the site being a magnet for advertising dollars. But I ask you, would you advertise your company’s brand on YouTube?

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Captcha – Don't Go Online Without It

Published July 27, 2006

Remember “those old American Express commercials”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=ABwy2nFh1Vo&search=american%20express created by “Ogilvy and Mather”:http://www.ogilvy.com, ‘Don’t leave home without it?’ Well the same could be said about those identity checkers you see on blogs and websites, otherwise known as captchas. Captcha? Did somebody sneeze?
In all seriousness, thanks to “Mitch Joel”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/mitch-joel for telling me the proper name. (It looks so much more professional when speaking to the IT department and saying ‘Please implement a captcha for our upcoming viral contest’ as opposed to ‘Can you put in one of those identity checker thing-a-majiggers into our online form.’)
Actually, “CAPTCHA”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
The short version is that it prevents hackers, scam artists and other filthy mcnasties out there from easily running bots or scripts on online services. Whether it be completing online registration forms for web-based emails so they can spam you later or targeting online contests so they can stack the odds of winning in their favour.
CAPTCHA
This CAPTCHA of “smwm” obscures its message from computer interpretation by twisting the letters and adding a background color gradient.

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