Kaiyzen Group

Netflix with two big announcements and launches today.., first they are going to start streaming video from Starz.  This is a pretty significant deal as if it is successfull Netflix could be a few strategic moves away from becoming the ultimate ondemand provider.  They already have other providers in CBS and Disney and cut a deal with LG to support Netflix streaming to a new up and coming LG Blu Ray player.

Second, and a piece of news I am enjoying more is that they have opened up their system with a new API and the launch of their developer site.  This is great for any service based around entertainment whether it be TV or movies.  This should provide for some nice passive traffic and audience gains and in the longrun make it a good datasource competitor to IMDB.

CBS has been running into some issues regarding their CBSEyeMobile site.

This is a user generated news content site driven by an iPhone application that they released.

AdMob who was running the ads for the mobile app released a statement (from AdAge):


Jason Spero, VP-Marketing, AdMob, in a statement said: “CBS notified AdMob of an inappropriate piece of content on this application and we worked with CBS to immediately remove all ads from this application until it is fixed. AdMob has a clear and consistent policy against running ads on mobile sites or applications with inappropriate content. CBS has clear guidelines around user generated content and immediately removed the content and banned the user that uploaded it from any future use of the application.”


Also mentioned in the story is another sighting of Google using AdMob to push its services.., mostly mobile search.

This is a perfect example of why user generated content can be dangerous and all users in the general public cannot fully be trusted especially when you have a time trusted news brand of CBS.

Lots o buzz around tech news sites starting last night through this morning regarding information about Googles Knol project.

Knol is planning to provide infrastructure for people who are experts, or very knowledgeable, in certain topics to provide content on their topic of choice.  Google will be rolling this into their search results, placing ads along side the content, and providing a cut to the content producer if they are so inclined to accept ads on their content.

As much hype as people are trying add to this news it is hardly a “game changer”.  It IS big news just because it Google announcing this and their reach is freakishly large now.

I have talked with people in the tech industry for some time now about this idea aggregating and distributing content with a revenue share back to the producers.  Even though I have my passionate disliking for them as an organization, I like the fact the Google is pushing things forward with this kind of play, it will make people think harder about content distribution and the monetization models of the future.

Back to some Google bashing.., About.com has long been the OG site for “experts” to spit their game on the web.  Purchased by the NY Times for $410 million About.com was the leading commercial pre-cursor to Wikipedia.

Google has to be sick of Wikipedia stealing lots of links from their search results and having the gaul to not put Adsense on their site…, how dare they.  In the past 12-18 months I have noticed the steady rise of Wikipedia entries in search results, appearing at the top of most general topics.

The big question is going to be, Is Knol going to be another Google Maps, or a Google Answers?  Of course I am hoping for the Answers results, but we will have to wait and see.  Google seems to think that just throwing it out their that you can make some money by helping out their content collection will make people flock to this new service.  Wikipedia, and early YouTube just shows that there is a select group of people out there in internetland that love to be involved and provide content and their opinion.

One of the biggest initial issues I see is how to verify copyright, very similar to the YouTube paying its users a cut of posted videos.  Who is to say that I can just go to Wikipedia, copy/paste, or programatically suck data out of it, then re-post on knol.  Now Wikipedia content is free for use, so this type of poaching is technically allowed, but I am not sold yet on whether Google can steal the audience from Wikipedia.

Anick Jesdanun of the Washington Post has written a piece regarding publishers stepping up their push to have tighter control over the ways search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and others crawl and index their sites.

Anick does a good job of briefly giving a high level descriptions for the un-educated of how search engines crawl the web in their hunt to consume all web content.  For detailed description of web crawlers you can read this wikipedia entry.

The search engines have always tried to hide behind the “fair use” provisions of copyright laws when it comes to using and monetizing third party content.  Their initial claim was that by indexing third party content they are actually doing publishers a favor and getting their content out there and providing more traffic.

This may be true in certain scenarios and stories but ultimately the search engines are the ones with the “stickiness” and publishers are making them get their practices in check.  Publishers are crying fowl as the online advertising industry has exploded in recent years and they feel like they need more of a cut OR, greater control.

All of the major search engine and their news sites now have partnerships where they pay to receive syndicated content from the large news sources such as the Associated Press.  Google was the last major one to cave in after having to settle a lawsuit with Agence France-Presse.

The fact remains that content is king.  As the big four/five players have grown their online operations there are times where they but up against, or cross the line of being content owners/producers.

There is the every growing assumption that eventually, with their desire to have direct control over their services, and not give away a slice of their pie, the big tech players will use their deep pockets to acquire their way into content.  Jon Fine wrote an article in businessweek about his views on Google wanting…, and ultimately needing to become content owners.

Until their hand is forced either legally, or from a competitive perspective search engines and other tech players will always do as they please.., and just deal with complaints and legal issues as they come up.  This is pretty evident as we have seen with Google over the past couple years the primary example being their battle with the all of the book publishers and Googles book scanning project.

I would like to see a more pro-active approach to these sort of partnerships and distribution practices.  There needs to be an approach/solution where it is extremely easy for publishers to syndicate their content and when their content drives traffic, which ultimately drives revenue, they get a cut. 

Adobe and Yahoo! are extending their commercial relationship into a new program that will bring advertising to PDF’s.

This will be an interesting next step into the monitization of content through advertising instead of directly paying for content.  This space is still in its infancy and I think can go a long way to create models and frameworks where content producers can get their content out there with minimal to no cost while also providing some income to support their work.

Whereas slapping adsense on your site and throwing up some pages this will be a next step.  One feature I would like to see would be some way of programatically being able to tell if there is advertising in the PDF.  Nowadays with all the search engines indexing PDF’s it would be nice to allow them to detect if their is advertising and flag it and show some icon to let the user know that its ad-supported content before they download.

Yahoo! and Adobe say this is initially a trial and will act as just another advertising channel in Yahoo!’s current offering.  The program is supposed to be expanded over the next year.