Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

American Idol is turning to digital outlets to try and grow its (suddenly dwindling) audience. FremantleMedia Enterprises and teen virtual world Habbo are constructing a virtual Idol talent show slated to launch by the end of January, hoping to extend sponsors Coke, AT&T and others to the online environment. To help keep the 3 million U.S.-based “Habbos” engaged throughout the 20-week long program, Habbo will introduce new in-game virtual items and activities each month as the on-air American Idol season progresses. (Cynopsis 1/16)

MySpace is building a fully functional webmail product, Techcrunch has learned from sources with knowledge of the product. MySpace mail will compete with services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL Mail, and will on launch be the third largest webmail provider in the world. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/confirmed-myspace-building-stealth-webmail-product 1/15)

MSNBC.com is launching a new feature today that will make it easier for a viewer to find a video clip online and paste it onto other sites. The launch is timed so viewers can capture their favorite parts of President-elect Barack Obama‘s inaugural address. The Wall Street Journal (1/16)

As part of its Open Strategy, Yahoo starting today is letting users add updates from their friends based on their activities on 20 other services across the Web. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/16/yahoo-becomes-more-friendfeedlike-adds-updates-from-20-outside-sites 1/16)

Tonight Hulu will stream outgoing President George W. Bush’s farewell address live. The speech will begin at 5PM PST/8PM EST.   On Tuesday, the site will also be streaming President-Elect Obama’s inauguration speech. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/hulu-streams-bushs-goodbye-and-obamas-hello 1/15)

Vik Singh of Yahoo’s BOSS team has just launched a new search engine called TweetNews that mashes up Yahoo News stories with some of the hottest topics on Twitter. The result is a news engine that is significantly more timely than common news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo’s standard news site. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/15/boss-developer-fuses-yahoo-news-with-twitter-to-create-tweetnews 1/15)

Google TV Ads officially launched the SpotMixer do-it-yourself video ad creation tool from One True Media, enabling small companies to put together and distribute their own measurable spot ads on participating Dish Network channels. (Cynopsis 1/16)

US online video viewing continued to rise in 2008, encompassing more than three-quarters of all US internet users according to eMarketer. And low and behold, the percentage of video viewers who consume video (in-stream, in-banner or in-text) ads is also increasing as users begin to grow accustomed to the necessary evil. Video ads are expected to reach over 80% of all internet users by 2012. (Cynopsis 1/16)

US Online Video Viewers and Online Video Advertising Viewers 2007-2012
Year    Online Video Viewers  % Internet   Online Video Ad   % Internet
(millions)                 Users       Viewers (millions)     Users
2007         137.5                    73.6%             111.4                 59.6%
2008         154.2                    80.0%             129.5                 67.2%
2009         167.5                    84.1%             144.1                 72.3%
2010         176.0                    85.7%             154.9                 75.5%
2011         183.0                    86.8%             164.7                 78.1%
2012         190.0                    88.0%             174.8                 80.9%
source: eMarketer, Nov. 2008

Video sharing site Metacafe gained market share in December attracting more than 11 million U.S. viewers according to ComScore Media Metrix figures. The total represents a 60% increase since Jan. 2008 and an impressive 20% increase from November.