Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA
The latest video market share figures for September from Nielsen Online’s VideoCensus have been leaked to Beet.TV, and they show a huge 56 percent jump from Yahoo to 264 million videos streamed during the month. Yahoo’s share still pales next to YouTube’s 5.3 billion streams. But it pumped out 95 million more streams than in August, when Yahoo was trailing Fox (i.e., MySpace), MSN, and Nickelodeon, according to Nielsen Online. (Compare to comScore’s Video Metrix numbers from July, which had Yahoo in the fourth spot). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/yahoo-does-something-right-leapfrogs-to-no-2-spot-in-web-video 10/31)

There is nothing like a downturn to force a company focus on the bottom line, even a company like Google whose bottom line is still growing at a healthy pace. Continuing its recent efforts to juice advertising revenues wherever it can, Google is changing the way ads are placed on its search results pages. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/google-tweaks-adwords-again-to-reward-quality-and-juice-revenues 10/31)

Google has announced that it will now begin including scanned documents in its search results – a feat that requires an immense amount of processing power and advanced image recognition technology. Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/30/google-now-indexes-scanned-documents 10/30)

The prospects for a Web-advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo are dimming, with both sides said to be considering walking away from the deal. The two companies are believed to be unwilling to make compromises to address the U.S. Justice Department‘s objections. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122540817013886075.html 10/31)

Microblogging site Twitter is teaming up with the blog techPresident to provide a useful tool for voters this year. The Twitter Vote Report will compile reports from polls on election day to help spread the word about broken voting machines, long lines and other problems that have disenfranchised thousands of voters in years past. (Cynopsis 10/31)

Youth targeted community site MyFirstVote.tv launched a “Wake Up Call” service, offering to call first time registered voters on election day to make sure they don’t space going to the polls. (Cynopsis 10/31)

David Lynch is at work on a web series for On Networks based on his very Lynchian book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, per ReelPop. (Cynopsis 10/31)

Strong growth in display advertising on CNET, increasing from $35.9 million Q3 2007 to $140.7 million last quarter, was a bright spot for CBS during an otherwise challenging time. Combining the uniques of CBS and CNET put the company at the #7 spot in terms of web brands. Adjusted net Q3 earnings from continuing operations were $290.3 million for CBS overall, versus $357.8 million for the same quarter last year. (Cynopsis 10/31)

Internet-age users overwhelmingly back Barack Obama for U.S. president, according to a poll by News Corp.’s MySpace. Survey data collected during a year of “unprecedented” online political discourse shows that 60% of the millions of eligible voters on MySpace prefer Obama. (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20081031/tc_afp/usvoteitinternetcompanymyspace 10/31)5v556=5×5=6vx5

ESPN360.com has reached a new agreement with IMG Sports Media to stream Australia’s Hyundai A-League, delivering live coverage of up to 84 regular season matches as well as up to six playoff matches, including the Grand Final. ESPN will also stream select games on ESPN Mobile TV. (Cynopsis 10/31)

A collection of episodes from Gayborhood.tv’s web series The Box including the episode covering last year’s raucous West Hollywood Halloween Carnival will be featured tonight on Canadian LGBT network OUTtv. (Cynopsis 10/31)

Online ad company ValueClick reported a drop in net income of 88% during Q3 on revenues of $152.9 million, down from $156.9 million in Q3 2007. Income was impacted by a stock option tender offer and tax adjustments. (Cynopsis 10/31)

CBS trumpeted comScore Video Metrix rankings placing CBS.com first among TV websites for the second straight month in unique monthly viewers (6.1MM), video streams (44.4MM) and total minutes streamed (143 MM). CBS.com experienced double-digit growth in unique viewers month-over-month (16%) and year-over-year (60%), as well as triple-digit growth in streams over last year (107%). Separately a study by Magid Media Labs commissioned by CBS found that a typical advertisement on the CBS Audience Network receives a 33% brand lift and that viewers indicate a 26% lift in intent to purchase. (Cynopsis 10/31)