Daily Bits

YouTube Now Lets You Create InLay Video Ads Easily

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Notice those animated overlay that YouTube displays at the bottom part of a video that you are watching? Well, yes I know those ads can get pretty annoying but hey, if you’re a video ad publisher those overlays is one major way by which you can sell ads on YouTube.

And besides, YouTube is not going to be doing away with it. Not in the near future, at least. In fact creating those InVideo  ads were  just made easier with the availability of the Display Ad Builder which everyone who wishes to advertise on their videos can use.

Since its launch in 2008, YouTube has added more templates and fonts to this Display Ad Builder. Making it easier and quicker to create video overlay ads. This is fully complimented by the Display Ad Builder’s functionality for creating animated ads.

With this feature in Display Ad Builder, you can now turn your image ads into overlays and run ad campaigns on YouTube in a matter of minutes. You can run those overlays on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM). These ad campaigns will be matched to YouTube videos based on various criteria such as demographics and content categories.

If you want to run ad campaign overlays, the process can be best illustrated below:

Or if you want more details, check out this guide.

Nexus One, iPhone, Motorola Droid Sales Compared

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Mobile analytics company Flurry has published an interesting report. A comparison actually of the sales figures of the first generation iPhone, Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One during the first 74 days since these phones were first released. And guess what? The report found out that sales of the Nexus is nowhere near the outstanding sales achieved by both Droid and iPhone.

Apple managed to post its 1 million units sold on its 74th day of being released. This is the reason why Flurry decided to measure the same for the Nexus One to see how far its sales went after 74 days. Unfortunately, Google’s first major venture into the mobile phone market is an epic fail with the Nexus One managing to get only around 0.135 million units sold.

Interestingly, the Motorola DROID managed to post the most number of units sold during its first 74 days of becoming available in the market with 1.05 million units sold.

Can we now conclude that Google’s first venture into the selling and marketing of mobile handset is an epic fail? Before we do so, we might want to consider first how these three phones were made available. For all we know this might have affected the Nexus One’s sales performance.

Apple has its brick and mortar stores scattered across the states which helped Apple in selling the iPhone. This is in addition to its online store. For Motorola Droid, this was distributed by Verizon Wireless. While the Nexus was only made available for purchase online through Google’s web store. Even if it was released under T-Mobile contract plan, Google did not allow T-Mobile to distribute the phone on their own. [Read more…] about Nexus One, iPhone, Motorola Droid Sales Compared

BlackBerry Users Ready to Ditch Their Phones for the iPhone, and Android Too

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I was about to write a post about a different topic but decided not to when I chanced upon this article currently running on Ars Technica saying that 40% of BlackBerry users are willing to trade their current phone for  an  iPhone.  This has caught my attention since I recently got a BlackBerry Bold 9700, but I did not ditch my iPhone 3GS for it.

The report was citing the study conducted by market research Crowd Science. According to the study, two in five BlackBerry owners are said to be planning on swapping their current phone for an iPhone as soon as its time for them to upgrade.  And among the reasons suggested by the study is the fact that RIM may not be keeping up with consumer demand in its effort to fight the encroachment from the iPhone and even Android devices more particularly Google Nexus One.

This is quite interesting since RIM holds a pretty strong reputation in the smartphone market although this was slightly rocked by the iPhone’s rapid growth last year.

CrowdScience also suggested that this development can also be attributed to the fact that many smartphone users are now using their units for both personal and business use and not for business purposes alone anymore. And since the iPhone is both personal and business oriented it is no wonder that it is threatening BlackBerry’s stronghold in the business mobile phone market as well.

Aside from the iPhone, current BlackBerry users are also eyeing to replace their units with an Android-based phones, more particularly with the Google Nexus One phone. 32% of the surveyed BlackBerry users says they are ready to exchange their phone with a Nexus One.

Crowd Science CEO John Martin said that BlackBerry users are getting restless with the BlackBerry brand and are getting enticed by the allure of iPhone.

“Rather, BlackBerry as a brand just isn’t garnering the loyalty seen with other mobile operating systems,” said Mr. Martin.

Now, here’s the best part. About 90% of current iPhone and Android users are not planning to swap their current phones with another model.

Twitter Wants to be @anywhere

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Twitter just announced its latest strategy at possibly conquering the web – Twitter @anywhere.  The Twitter blog describes this simply as a new set of frameworks that will add the Twitter experience anywhere on the web.  In other words, Twitter will soon be rolling out a framework that will let you do your Twitter activities where ever you maybe on the web – minus the need to visit Twitter.com.

Twitter @Anywhere aims to bring all the features of Twitter that we have all grown to love and some even hate – read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters and more, follow any account and be followed by any account and interact with the whole Twitter community. Again without leaving what you are currently doing on the web.

And how does Twitter plans to implement this? Not through APIs. It’s too complicated for simple folks like us but rather a more simpler method – through Javascript.

The Twitter blog also stated that once Twitter @Anywhere is ready for launch, there will be more participating sites including Amazon, Adage, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, Meebo, NYT, Yahoo and YouTube. Yup, those are the sites that have become part of our daily online fare.

Soon, you’d be able to follow your favorite NYT journalist directly from her byline or tweet a video right from where you are in YouTube. Or if you’re a Yahoo fan, you can discover new people to follow on Twitter while getting your daily news fix from Yahoo.

Sounds promising? Actually it is. If only Twitter gave some examples on how this is going to implemented. But then, patience is a virtue dear readers.  We can count on the Twitter folks to roll this out the soonest time possible.

Big Changes Are About to Happen with Digg

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Do you still use Digg for bookmarking and sharing these bookmarks? Do you still maintain a Digg page? If you do, well expect to see some big changes in Digg in the coming weeks. These changes were announced by Digg CEO Jay Adelson during the Digg’s annual SXSW party.  Some of the changes that you should expect include – streamlined submission process, new personalized homepage, unlimited amount of topic pages, new commenting system and better curation tools.

Read Write Web got the full details of these changes. You may check out their coverage or read the summary below.

Personalized homepage – The new Digg personalized homepage will be populated by popular stories among your friends in relation to the topic that interest you.  This will become your default Digg homepage and not the generic Digg main page anymore. So, once this new feature kicks in, it is imperative that you sign in with Digg.

De-emphasizing the Power of Submitters – The new Digg will now put more premium on who votes for stories rather than who submit them. It will also put more emphasis on third-party services like Twitter and Facebook by allowing auto-submission of stories from these services.

More Twitter and Third-Party Integration – The Digg folks finally realized that to stay relevant in this “social integrated” market, they have to establish a relationship with other sites. So, more integration with Twitter as well as other social sites will be established in the coming weeks.

A Whole New Platform – Digg has stripped down its old infrastructure and completely rebuild a new platform. Possible directions will be more advertising and monetization option for Digg traffic, and the old Digg effect will no longer apply.

All these changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Digg is also testing beta testers and you can sign up here.

Smartphone Phone Users Want More Freebies

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Here’s another interesting statistics from comScore, this time regarding the behavior of smartphone users. According to the report,  smartphone users’ behavior has been changed, whereas before smartphones were used to access email, calendar and contacts while on the go, now more smartphone owners are using their devices as much for personal productivity as for entertainment purposes.

Around 74% of smartphone owners are using their mobile devices for personal use. And when asked how much time they spent using their smartphone at various times of the day, the result showed that smartphones are being used practically all through out the day.

So, what’s the point of these findings?  It is definitely very important if you are managing a brand campaign or even if simply running mobile advertisements. This opens up a huge audience base for your product and could result to sales if you can handle it pretty well.

But of course, businesses wanting to engage in mobile advertising would want to know how much of these smartphone users will be potential customers. In other words, how perceptive are they with mobile ads.

Surprisingly, comScore found out that there are quite a number of smartphone users who are willing to partake of what’s being offered on mobile ads.  Smartphone users are more than willing to take on grocery coupons, barcodes that can be scanned by the smartphones, savings offers on consumer products, movie theater offers and more.

Given this fact, if you’re planning to take on the mobile ad space for your products, be sure to make your ads engaging enough to merit a click or tap on your link from smartphone users. The mobile ad industry is still young and is bound to grow leaps and bounds in the coming days.