www.dpingram.com

I was recently taking a look at which data is mandatory and which is optional when people sign up to some common social networking and file sharing websites.

The attached table summarises what I found.

We all sense that a website should collect only the data it needs, and that the more data it tries to collect the more it may turn off potential users (concerns of privacy, etc). But as business people we also have to balance this with the need to add value to user signups (i.e. more data to help us profile users and deliver to them info and offers that are relevant).

It seems like the amount of mandatory data varies between 2 and 6 items (from simple email and password, to things like zip code, town, gender, country, DOB, occupational status).

The marketeers want as much data as possible, the technicians and user advocates want less. One would think that well-known sites are probably able to ask for more data and people will still not be put off, but younger sites who do not yet have repuation may need a more softly softly approach to data collection. Perhaps one way to satisfy both user and business needs is to take only minimal (eg email and password) at signup, but then incentivise the user to add more info, not with monetary reward but perhaps by unlocking site features.

Paypal Launches Storefront Widget

Paypal has launched the Paypal Storefront Widget, a web based widget that allows anyone to embed a store widget on a web site.

The Storefront widget offers a seamless e-commerce platform for those wishing to sell anything on their site, such as t-shirts, CD’s or other items

The widget (see pic right) includes:
- An Index page that shows thumbnail images of all the items for sale through the widget
- A product page that shows a larger view of the items/ products for sale
- A shopping cart directly within the widget
- About and policy pages mean that any conditions are also contained with the widget

More info here in this Techcrunch article

Tradebit.com, the online digital goods marketplace, announces its recent updates. New features on the file sharing site allow for easier publishing of digital goods. Now everyone with a good photo, MP3 recording or collection of Christmas poems can upload and start selling files within minutes.

“With more than 9,000 active merchants and 2.5 million downloads a day, Tradebit.com has reached a milestone as the download marketplace,” says Ralf Schwoebel, founder and CEO of Tradebit, Inc. “Tradebit.com was profitable within three months of its 2005 launch and has relaunched five times since than to help our users more easily and quickly participate in file sharing activities.”

The file sharing marketplace’s new functionality allows anyone to upload and publish any kind of software. After uploading, the site automatically creates video previews, product images and payment buttons for the seller. Payments are processed by Paypal or Clickbank.

Tradebit.com is host to prominent partners such as CDbaby.com, the service company for independent musicians. The site also hosts well-known Hollywood directors who sell their podcasts on the platform.

Just purchased a new book, Smart Start-ups, by David Silver (founder of Santa Fe Capital Group and author of over 30 books on entrepreneurship and finance).

A quote from the cover jacket…

“Online communities like MySpace and YouTube are shaking up the business world and helping millions of people come together to share information and interests. These social networking sites rely on user generated content to bring together millions of people from around the globe. User generated data eliminates the cost of goods sold, resulting in huge cash flow potential on very little up-front investment…
In Smart Start-ups entepreneur and angel investor David Silver reveals how social networking will change the face of business and create thousands of new millionaires over the next decade…”

.

See other books on my bookshelf here.

DI> A misbegotten idea - See Cory Doctorow’s comments at the end of the article. Cory is a renowned specialist in this field, commentator, and a law professor at Harvard (I think Harvard).

Via BBC yesterday
Anti file-sharing laws considered
The UK government could legislate to crack down on illegal file-sharers, a senior politician has told the BBC’s iPM programme. Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, said intellectual property theft would not be tolerated.

“If we can’t get voluntary arrangements we will legislate,” he said.

The comments could prove controversial with privacy advocates and internet service providers. Lord Triesman called on internet service providers to take a “more activist role” in the problem of illegal file-sharing.

Data banks
There are ongoing talks between internet service providers and the music industry and these are, said Lord Triesman, “progressing more promisingly than people might have thought six months ago”.

“For the most part I think there are going to be successful voluntary schemes between the creative industries and ISPs. Our preferred position is that we shouldn’t have to regulate,” he said.

He admitted that the technology necessary to track illegal file sharing would mean that “it is quite possible to know where it is happening and who it is happening with”. While he said that the government had no interest in “hounding 14-year-olds who shared music”, it was intent on tracking down those who made multiple copies for profit. “Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net,” he said.

“We have some simple choices to make. If creative artists can’t earn a living as a result of the work they produce, then we will kill off creative artists and that would be a tragedy.”

DI> its the same old story, legislation to try to stop technology changing teh existing business model, it just won’t work, if people can find a way around it they will. What is needed is the music industry to embrace the new business model and find enw creative ways to monetize it. As some are indeed doing.

Mere conduit
The debate centre around peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, applications that allow internet users to exchange files with each other directly or through a mediating server. Computer users with the same type of P2P application can connect to each other and directly access files from one another’s hard drives. Some people are using peer-to-peer applications to copy or distribute files including copyrighted material such as music, films and software without paying royalties. People who do this may be infringing the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

There have been various crack-downs on such applications. Most recently the UK-run members-only site OiNK was shut down and several properties in the UK and Holland were raided.

‘Misbegotten idea’
The Internet Service Providers Association has always maintained that it cannot be held responsible for illegal peer-to-peer traffic because it is “merely a conduit” of such material. “ISPA does not support abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft,” said an ISPA spokesman.

DI> Its not quite as simple as that, and most people I have spoken to don’t know the full details of the issue.

He said: “However, ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network. ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope.” “ISPs deal with many more packets of data each day than postal services and data protection legislation actually prevents ISPs from looking at the content of the packets sent,” he added.

The British Phonographic Industry was pleased at the government’s tough line.
“We greatly welcome the government reiterating its view that ISPs should work with us to tackle the problem of internet piracy, or else face legislation,” said Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI.

“ISPs operate the pathways to digital music consumers. Through our talks with the ISP community we are hopeful that together we can arrive at voluntary co-operative agreements that work to the benefit of the whole digital marketplace,” he added.

Cory Doctorow
The iPM programme also spoke to renowned blogger Cory Doctorow who described the idea as “misbegotten”. “It represents the opinion of someone who doesn’t understand technology very well, and hasn’t really thought through the implications of what he’s promising. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s an actual computer scientist involved in digital signal processing who believes that you can accurately identify copyrighted works with any kind of reliability in a variety of situations,” he said.

He believed the idea would createa “giant toxic pool of personally idenitifying private information” that ISPs would not be able to keep secret. “You will dismantle the fundamentals of the democratic state, which is to be free in your person, your mind and your conversation from scrutiny and surveillance. So this is a really misbegotten idea,” he told iPM.

In 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.

It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebit, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.

However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.

zipidee_player.pngAudio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.

You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.

Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).

To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.

Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.

via Techcrunch

Video advertising is coming to YouTube, but it won’t be the type common at sites elsewhere.

Starting Wednesday, the popular video-sharing site plans to feature semitransparent ‘overlay’ ads at the bottom of selected video clips. The ad disappears after about 10 seconds if the viewer does nothing; the featured clip automatically pauses if the viewer clicks on the overlay to launch the full pitch.

YouTube said it was trying to avoid pre-rolls that precede the main feature at sites like Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, which partners with The Associated Press on a video news service.

Shiva Rajaraman, product manager for YouTube, said internal tests show more than 70 percent of people give up when they see a pre-roll. By contrast, less than 10 percent decide to close an overlay, which they can exit by clicking on an ‘X’ in a corner.

The overlay format also gives advertisers more flexibility, he said, because they aren’t constrained to keeping a video ad at 15 or 30 seconds to avoid defection. Because a viewer chooses to watch, a video ad can run much longer — clicking on one pre-launch overlay launched a 2-minute trailer for ‘The Simpsons Movie.’
YouTube, which Google Inc. bought last year for $1.76 billion, is still trying to justify its hefty sales price. Despite its huge audience, YouTube generated about $15 million in revenue last year, based on figures provided in Google’s annual report.

The site already has been showing display ads, but video ads look to be far more lucrative, particularly as they attract brand-name advertisers already used to buying video spots on television.

Initial video advertisers on YouTube include Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE:WMG) , News Corp.’s (NYSE:NWS) 20th Century Fox and Time Warner Inc.’s (NYSE:TWX) New Line Cinema. They will accompany video clips from selected partners, including Warner Music, the band Killswitch Engage and dozens of heavy video contributors accepted into a user-partner program.

Marketers can target their ads by user demographics, location, time of day or genre, such as music videos or sports. They won’t be able to buy ads by keywords, though, the way Google allows merchants to purchase text ads triggered by a user’s search terms.

And unlike Google’s pay-per-click search ads, advertisers will be charged by eyeball — $20 per thousand viewers — regardless of whether the user clicks on the overlay.

Revenues will be split with the video owner, although officials won’t say how. The video owner can decline all ads or selected ones, such as those from competitors.

Despite differences with Google’s keyword ads, which generate the bulk of the company’s revenues, officials said the two share a common goal of being nonintrusive.

‘Ads need to provide value to the user community,’ said Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms. ‘We’ve proved over and over again on Google that ads are really useful information when users raise their hands and engage with them.’

This article is found on CNN money here

Also a great write-up with stats on Mashable

Top Video and Movie Sites, Viewers and Advertisers. A deeper look at most popular video and movie sites, exploring viewer demographics as well as advertisers and types of ads.
Some great stats and table are here.

Now here’s a really disruptive idea…

Why should we pay for ANY music??? Maybe it should be free to consumers?

Digital rights management (DRM) is dying, no doubt about it. It was invented by record and film companies who wanted to restrict an amazing new distribution opportunity instead of embrace it. But, as King Canute discovered, you can’t stop an incoming tide, you either find a way to benefit from it or you drown trying to resist it.

There never was any DRM on vinyl or tapes, and people ripped them off left right and centre. What scared the record companies into creating DRM was how much wider the ‘problem’ became with the ease of communication and distribution enabled by the birth of the internet, email, MP3, P2P, etc, etc.

But these days business never stays static, it changes faster than ever and companies, no INDUSTRIES, must be agile enough to respond to the change and not try to prevent it. The companies that embrace the inevitable chance early, run it alongside their existing business perhaps as an experiment, hedge their bets, will win out over the old school – they will outshine them, outpace them, out-innovate them, and outlive them.

So, here is the idea. Music is media content right? It attracts and engages people, it excites people, they live it, they love it, they mould their lives on their stars. For years the music industry has licensed its music content to the media channels, who have been happy to pay for that license in order to offer engaging content via their distribution channel, to a bunch of consumers, in order that they can either charge people to watch it, and/or charge advertisers to place ads between the media. Why can I turn on the radio and listen to a commercial radio station for free? Its because they make their money from the advertisers, not from me.

Now, years back when I was in supply chain management at the birth of e-commerce the buzzword was disintermediation. The new technologies collectively described as e-commerce enabled businesses to move up and down the supply chain much more easly than before, taking a larger piece of the commercial pie, attacking new markets, increasing margins, creating greater efficiencies, and the natural consequence of this was disintermediation in the supply chain – the removal of entire links in the process – business and whole business models died as new ones were invented.

I see similar opportunities. How about a producer doesn’t sell their content to us. How about they give it to us, but make their money from commercial sponsors? That way you can forget DRM, in fact its in the producers’ interest to make it even easier to share the content, not restrict it. The technology exists to track the distribution path or digital media around the web and that paves the way for producers to monetize their content by ‘selling’ those impressions to advertisers. Its what happens with UGC content, blogs, etc. People produce the content and distribute it for free, the payback being the advertising dollars.
Everything changes. I see no reason why we music producers, and most likely other types of professional media content won’t go this way. In the future we won’t pay for music, it will be sponsor-subsidized.

See this great article on Techcrunch that talks about the ways you can build your own social network.
(Johnny B, if you are reading this we touched on this over coffee on Saturday - you’ll see the first one mentioned is Ning which works really well).

The news may overflow with stories about the social networking giants, such as Facebook and MySpace, but a horde of companies are doing their best to reduce the fundamental features of these websites to mere commodities. These up-and-coming companies provide so-called “white label” social networking platforms that enable their customers to build their own social networks (often from scratch) and to tailor those networks to a range of purposes.

The idea of white labeling a network is to make the platform provider as invisible as possible to the social network’s users and to brand the network with the builder’s identity or intent. While definitions of “social networking” may vary, social networks are primarily defined by member profiles and some sort of user generated content.

There are roughly three types of companies that have emerged in the space of white label social networking. The first provides hosted, do-it-yourself solutions with which customers can largely point and click their way to a brand new social network. Companies of this type interact minimally with their customers and rather focus on providing the network-building tools that they demand.

The short list is this:
- Ning
- KickApps
- CrowdVine
- GoingOn
- CollectiveX
- Me.com
- PeopleAggregator
- Haystack
- ONEsite
All of these provide free baseline services.

There are also a whole bunch more and there is a more comprehensive list here.

There is a great table of comparisons on Techcrunch here.

CLICK HERE to read the full article on Techcrunch

LATEST (28 August 2007) - and here are another 34 ways…