Your recent decision to invoke a manual penalty on the download page for Google Chrome will have lasting ramifications for the whole of online marketing, whether display advertising, affiliate marketing, and other performance marketing such as CPA models, making many such business models unworkable.

Policing every piece of content produced by marketing partners (affiliates etc) on the offchance that they inadvertantly linked directly to the traffic or buzz benifitiary without using a nofollow or otherwise blocking the direct link is commercially untenable.

In the following video I have outlined what has led to this unreasonable decision being made, and elaborated a little on some of the commercial implications not just for competitors in the online advertising space, but even for Google services such as Google Publisher Network, Google Affiliate Network & Doubleclick.

Here is a 720p 1280×720 mp4 of the above video (looking forward to supporting this in a player real soon now)

Sincerely

Andy Beard

Here is a specific example

This is an Amazon widget

Wow it is promoting a really cool Google phone!

Here is another iframe creative

Here is a text only link

T-Mobile G2 with Google Android Phone (T-Mobile)

So far I haven’t broken Google’s new interpretation of the webmaster guidelines

I love Amazon

Oops… sorry Amazon that wasn’t an affiliate link, but an editorial link… Google will now feel that they have to remove the Amazon home page from the search engine results and Amazon won’t sell 20M Kindle Fires this year… Just 19.8M – or maybe 21M if they replace the Amazon home page with the Kindle Fire product page. (yes I realise they are very similar)

Whilst pureists might argue that this wasn’t a video CPA advert but an affiliate link, a huge amount of the sites that Google filtered this year as poor quality thin affiliates were using Amazon and other affiliate networks for monetization. The purpose quite often for the content was to drive traffic to the ads in small quantities.
At scale the revenue from 1000s of websites earning just a few dollars a month above the hosting and domain costs add up.

Another comparrison is Google’s own Adsense program and the vast numbers of poor quality sites that have arisen because of it. The good often (in search visibility) outweigh the junk MFA (made for adsense) sites, but it really is a chicken & egg situation. The webmasters target specific topics and even optimize content not just for SEO, but to pull up the highest paying and possibly even specific advertising creatives for products, maybe even video content, and they get paid for clicks on that content.
If I write a blog about Android phones and included an Adsense advert at the bottom of each post, allowed video and display ads, the situation wouldn’t be vastly different to some junk content followed by a video embed of a Google commercial I was being paid for on a CPA basis.

People in the past made complete websites dedicated to the promotion of Google pack, their Adsense program etc, and even offered incentives such as training in online marketing, or included the Adsense registration links as part of the course material… of course without disclosure as that wasn’t allowed.

Google… Please Reinstate Chrome

Here are the links referenced in the video

Matt’s post on Google+
Aaron’s's post Sponsored By Google that started this huge mess.
Danny’s post on all the thin content
Unruly Media is clearly CPA (grats on $25M funding guys)
Wikipedia on CPA (will Wikipedia be the only independent content site soon?)
Wikipedia on Online Marketing advertising models
Andrew Girdwood proving Google has used this form of CPA before
Danny with Google’s statement throwing their agency and Unruly under a bus
Google’s staement and effect (from Danny) – Statement saying this was a violation of their guidelines, possibly from someone who hasn’t read them recently.
My post on Google pack and word of mouth marketing
Google’s policy statement for their Google pack CPA campaign No mention of not giving editorial links etc
The CPA video embed (the iframe contents) – I am not going to drag an individual blogger who may have given a quite nice editorial link to Google Chrome through the coals
The Unruly Media terms of service which have now been enhanced – the nofollow statement is a new bullet point – it shouldn’t be needed as payment is not for the content of the blog post, or links, but based on CPA actions with the video.
Webmaster help forums on Affiliate links Google repeatedly avoids answering questions regarding the use of nofollow with affiliate links and other forms of display advertising.
How to report paid links and selling links that pass pagerank

Disclosure: I work for an online video & affiliate marketing startup called uQast but I am posting this on my personal blog and the words and opions expressed here are my own and my volition and not of my employer (does that remind anyone of Matt’s disclaimer?) – I have been involved in affiliate marketing for 7 years and the issues discussed here have been a topic of this blog since I started publishing it in 2005.

Small update: just added a download link for the MP4 version in HD 720p

But one thing I haven’t read about anywhere are the technical implications of +1 and the way it deals with canonicalization of votes, which currently is significantly inferior to both Facebook and Twitter.

There are all kinds of reasons why a publisher or ecommerce store might want to include parameters in the URLs people bookmark.

• Various kinds of tracking data
• Geotargeting
• Dynamic landing pages based upon advertising campaign (even with Adwords)

A user lands on a page, and you want to ensure that whatever they bookmark or share with friends or family is the exact same content/offer that they saw themselves, or that the initial source for the traffic is correctly counted to evaluate advertising campaigns.
This is especially important with affiliate marketing if you are a vendor who wants to ensure that affiliates get attribution for the traffic/customers they send.

• You see people use multiple browsers on one PC, and cookies are not necessarily shared
• Then you get people who have multiple computers in their home
• Then you have tablet PCs… someone might find a product on their desktop PC, but when they want to share the product with a significant other before making a purchase, they might do so on their iPad, loading a page from shared bookmarks.
• As mobile browsers become more powerful, a phone could also be the device used for bookmarking.

I don’t think it is possible to get everything perfect, to get correctly attributed tracking, ensure bookmarks are handled correctly etc (especially when paramters that remain visible can affect conversion), but I personally feel it is important to do whatever you can to ensure valid tracking data and attribution.

Facebook & Twitter – 2 Different Methods

Both Facebook & Twitter allow you to define tracking parameters or links for their share buttons, but they do it different ways.

With Twitter it is defined within the Twitter button by defining the url and counturl parameters.

The URL is whatever link you want shared, and the most popular way to use it is probably a tracking service such as bit.ly, but at the same time adding additional Google Analytics tracking variables to the URL that is bookmarked within bit.ly.

This is what the Twitter code looks like

					<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
					<a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fpage13312&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwelcome.uqast.com%2Fintro%2F&text=How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet&count=horizontal&via=uQast&related=uqast%3AWebinar" class="twitter-share-button" rel="nofollow">How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet</a>

And this is the result (this uses my affiliate link for uQast, but notice that the count shown is an aggregate canonical value because of the defined counturl

How To Profit By Leveraging The 7 Hidden Trends Driving The Internet

With Facebook it is a little different – within the button code you include the tracking link you want to share, and the “counturl” is actually grabbed from the Facebook Open Graph meta data on the destination page.
Facebook also pull in the thumbnail and descriptions from that meta data.

This is what the code looks like

<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script><fb:like ref="13312" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312" send="false" width="120" show_faces="false" layout="button_count" ></fb:like>

The result is an aggregate count even though every shared URL from the like button could be completely different.

Google +1 Only Gets Half A Banana

As Google +1 has only just been launched, the uQast landing page hasn’t received 100s or 1000s of bookmarks but it is a good example of the current problem with Google’s implementation of the +1 button.

This is the same URL we were using in the above example, my uQast affiliate link, but it could be any tracking link, or just using Google Analytics tracking parameters.

http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312

This is how that button should be encoded

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/page13312"></g:plusone>

With this result… I gave it a plus one to test this earlier as I am considering adding Google +1 to our landing pages, not just for our launch signup, but also throughout uQast and within our embeddable players.

If Google had implemented +1 correctly, then the count for a URL that points directly to the page would be the same.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<g:plusone size="tall" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/"></g:plusone>

At time of writing the affiliate link shows 1 and the “clean” link shows 0 – I am sure that will change over time

This is how a +1 ends up on a Google profile (this is my primary Andy Beard profile)

Lets see how Google fairs with my +1 test

First of all my profile URL is

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy

But from a search result Google themselves redirect to

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about

And if I want to ensure the English version of a page is shown then I have to add an additional language parameter.

https://profiles.google.com/list.andy/about?hl=en

These redirects are a fact of life on the web and so are additional parameters for all kinds of things, but Google +1 doesn’t allow for it, even for a Google URL

Google +1 is broken even for Google’s own pages

In addition they really should take advantage of the thumbnail defined in the Facebook Open Graph, as they currently just scrape the first image on the page.

The Solution For Google +1

It is actually fairly simple for Google to fix this.

They are already looking at the destination page, and all they have to do is look for a canonical link tag in the header for which URL to count… anyone who cares about correct canonicalization for their pages who uses various tracking parameters is likely to already be using link canonical… after all it is stronly promoted by Google themselves as a way to get attribution for the correct link.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://welcome.uqast.com/intro/" />

You would have thought issues like this would have been fixed during the initial beta period – when news of Google +1 first came about, there was a call for interested websites to sign up early maybe to give feedback… I signed up at that time but from the looks of things on the Google announcement post that was mainly as a PR exercise to get large publishers using Google +1.

Google +1 is really easy to set up, there are also some quite powerful features I haven’t explored yet for triggering various actions similar to a Facebook like button

However as currently implemented it is almost like a negative advert if you implement it with any kind of dynamic URLs showing effectively the same content.

Canonicalization is just as important in social media as search.

p.s I have given up trying to get a “+” to appear correctly with a retweet button with WordPress.

I went as far as trying to use the unicode version within the title but that ended up as the raw text, and then WordPress didn’t save the unicode anyway.

+1.... out

Watch this video for the details

To check the cached Google page you will have to switch off javascript using something like the web developer toolbar for Firefox.

Google is not being blocked as there is a cached page, but the cached page is not what is given to users, even when not logged in.

The pages are significantly different in structure.

Google have quite extensive webmaster guidelines including a special on on cloaking and sneaky javascript.

Just to qualify the value of this video – some people rightly or wrongly look on me as an SEO expert – I don’t proactively consult partially because I don’t believe my own opinions half the time and in the past I have spent a great deal of time trying to prove myself wrong.

Ultimately even Google engineers directly involved with webspam or working directly on Google’s algorithms don’t know every aspect of how Google’s algorithms might work in every eventuality, and some results or side effects may be unintended.

It could well be that Twitter left old Twitter in place because Google was having problems crawling the new primarily javascript Twitter. From my perspective the mistake was to do a funky javascript redirect and having a significantly different link graph, but there could easily be something I have overlooked.

This is a presentation I did live for the current uQast founding affiliates at that time. It was presented live but I hope most of the audio is understandable.

The keyword term used in the search engine visibility example was “Body Wash”.

We still have the doors open for 2 more weeks for founding affiliates to get in at a special fixed rate before we switch to monthly subscription with our chartered launch.

There is a special offer only available to webinar attendees.

I have spent the last 5 months working with the uQast team and my official role is uQast Product Manager… the viral SEO features I spent a long time working with our development team refining the code and I am confident no one does it better… but it is only a start.

Very soon we strap on the booster rockets for rocket propelled Video SEO giving people a reason to share great content.

I am an employee/consultant with uQast, an affiliate and power user, and the video seo features are my baby – damn yes I am biased.

But there are all kinds of ways to achieve your quota including various forms of arbitrage.

I read today via the MaxCDN blog that SimpleCDN service is in deep trouble – some of their suppliers have apparently pulled the rug from under their feet leaving them with an inability to supply bandwidth to their clients because they no longer have servers to do it.

Note:  I have a sponsorship deal of this blog with MaxCDN and am one of their affiliates, but I really only worry about the affiliate program for large clients with direct referrals – if you have a large site that has high bandwidth demand or needs acceleration, drop me an email via my contact form and I can help you evaluate whether they would be a good partner.
If you check the blog post I think they have a good deal for former SimpleCDN customers or those that just need some continuity until they can recover – I hope SimpleCDN make a little money from people using the coupon code “simplecdn”

The CDN Dog Fight

SimpleCDN have apparently been using infrastructure provided by SoftLayer and Hosting Services, Inc.

That to me sounds like their 10TB and 100TB offerings.

Who in their right mind would offer 100TB of bandwidth with a single dedicated server and not expect it to be used in some way to serve media in large quantity?
They also have unmetered… of course who is going to buy unmetered unless they intend to really use the bandwidth.

Part of the 100TB terms of service state

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is prohibited from running on our network. Special requests to run CDN services may be approved on a case by case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will result in the disabling of all hosting services.

I don’t know whether they had special permission, or how long that term has been in force.

If someone was going to rely on a hosting partner for a huge amount of bandwidth it seems to me they would check the terms of service, and make any special arrangements.

But Hosting Services Inc also run VPS.net and their own CDN services. Until recently they were Akamai partners until Akamai decided to pull the rug from under their feet, and in a quick shuffle they switched to using Level3.

• This sounds to me like SimpleCDN had a deal
• Hosting Services Inc had had enough of SimpleCDN undercutting them on CDN services using their own hosting plans and decided to terminate them at very short notice, in much the same way they themselves were terminated by Akamai. The value proposition SimpleCDN vs Akamai compared to SimpleCDN vs Level3 is significantly different, such that SimpleCDN are without doubt more of a direct competitor of VPS.net than they were previously.
• That sucks, hense MaxCDN’s offer and me being annoyed and writing something when I should be working

I haven’t had a chance to contact Hosting Services Inc or Softlayer for comment, I am meant to be working on other stuff so just need to get the news out in the hope that it helps a few friends recover from downtime before Christmas.

For whatever reason you don’t kill people’s hosting just before Christmas in this way

Some Twitter Chatter

@SimpleCDN Heard about your predicament. I'm working at MaxCDN and we may be able to help. Call me at 818-284-9829. Cheers, Samir Said (CSO)

December 11, 2010 5:48 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@sbbsam

Samir Said

Latest updates on SoftLayer illegal actions: http://admin.simplecdn.com/

December 11, 2010 5:59 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

Our engineering team can help you get up and running on CloudFront right away, and we've so far heard great things about MaxCDN.

December 11, 2010 6:00 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@QuickWebHosting Us too, but in our case they illegally terminated our services. Hope that didn't happen to you too.

December 11, 2010 6:03 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We apologize, and are working on alternative service - and we can help you move to another provider in anyway possible...

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We'll post any additional updates on our feed, and via this site http://admin.simplecdn.com/ regarding SoftLayer illegal actions.

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@EastOfAnywhere Right now we don't know for sure - SoftLayer's actions are unprecedented and are doing all we can as fast as we can.

December 11, 2010 6:28 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@TVMeuBrasil We are doing everything we can - at this point UK2 & SoftLayer are sticking to their goal of illegally forcing SimpleCDN down.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@cloudharmony SoftLayer and UK2 / Hosting Services terminated our infrastructure (hundreds of servers) with no notice and no reason.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast This was an effort by both UK2 and SoftLayer to remove SimpleCDN from the market.

December 11, 2010 7:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker We feel WikiLeaks pain - we pay these guys THOUSANDS, but still they terminate us for no reason with no notice. SoftLayer is bad bad

December 11, 2010 7:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@jprovo They did cut SimpleCDN off without a valid reason and no notice. Sure we'll go to court, but that doesn't really help our custms now

December 11, 2010 7:25 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

SoftLayer is not responding to any of our customers or complaints at this point - please keep contacting them, but they may hang up on you.

December 11, 2010 7:27 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Obviously we have a lot to share about this - but you know how it is; waiting for the lawyer okay first, etc.

December 11, 2010 7:52 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Our goal is to minimize impact to customers, even if we have to move them to other providers. Thanks MaxCDN for helping out!!!

December 11, 2010 7:53 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@hareemca Many customers lost everything, as our pricing and feature set is / was second to none.

December 11, 2010 7:54 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker As soon as we can release more details we will- but the actions were definitely directed specifically at SimpleCDN - yes we pay bill

December 11, 2010 9:15 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SoftLayer A lot of businesses rely on SimpleCDN, at least give customers time to find a new provider before cutting them off so soon.

December 11, 2010 11:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Y3com

Y3.com

@eluis Believe me, we understand. We are happy that MaxCDN is offering our customers a discount - but yes our offering is / was the lowest.

December 12, 2010 1:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SimpleCDN do you guys have backup of the files? Freakin out here... have 750 customers relying on SimpleCDN + no backup! who do I contact?

December 11, 2010 10:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@leebensondotcom

Lee

VPS.NET Twitter Statement

This is interesting – when questioned, the VPS.NET MD knows nothing about it

interesting goings on the CDN market. first @akamai pull the rug on @vpsnet, now uk2 pull the rug on @simplecdn: http://bit.ly/hVtxFH

December 11, 2010 4:00 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

with uk2 & @vpsnet effectively being the same company, i wonder if the two incidents are related? thankfully we moved content away long ago.

December 11, 2010 4:09 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

@sidepodcast As the M.D. of VPS.NET - I knew nothing of this...so I can assure you it's not related to VPS.NET at all. ^NN

December 11, 2010 4:29 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@vpsnet

VPS.NET

I have also checked cache dates on the 100TB terms of service and have a screenshot from 8th December which contained that clause.

I have had interactions with Ditlev from VPS.net and he always seemed like an honest guy who works hard to satisfy his customers.
However… the prime benefactor of SimpleCDN.com being killed off as a competitor to a UK2 service would be the CDN services within the UK2 group… which are run by VPS.net

So How Can You Get uQast For Free?

uQast For Free

• Be patient – eventually a version will be launched with a reduced feature set. You won’t have a /yourname or /yourkeyword URL and someone may even be using yours if it is at all competitive – a bit like domain names
  I don’t own andybeard.com Youtube.com/andybeard myspace.com/andybeard skype:andybeard and probably quite a few more.
  I regret not grabbing hold of those when they were available
  The exact details of the reduced feature set are not decided or I haven’t details, plus the feature set is a moving target with continual innovation. uQast Pro users will remain on the leading edge.
• Join the uQast affiliate program – I know it is a little corny but as an affiliate all you have to do is refer one person to uQast as you get UQast Pro for free. I am not sure whether that covers some of the other bonuses such as the V.I.P launch seminar or the magazine subscription, but it is a very fair deal.
  If you have a number of SEO clients this is an easy way to rack up one or more valuable media profiles that they control with high quality multimedia presentations and lead capture. It could possibly pay for itself with affiliate referrals as well.
  This is just the affiliate program for the launch – after launch everyone who has a uQast account is a uQast affiliate.
• Domaining – in theory there is a “domaining like” opportunity for premium names, though be warned there isn’t an interface set up to handle transfers – not strickly free but potentially a way to offset the cost of a portfolio

Why & Who Should Sign Up As A Founding Affiliate?

I am going to avoid “forward looking” statements about features that are just on the drawing board or have yet to be implemented.
This is intended to be “no hype” – my own evaluation of the potential of uQast some of it based upon what I initially saw in the platform, and partially from my work with the uQast team.

• Amazon S3 For Free – with some caveats

  If you look on using Amazon S3 for hosting streaming video for your sales pages or members areas, uQast can currently provide a very useful service with no bandwidth charges ever for uQast Pro users. This is especially useful for anyone doing a product launch where the bandwidth costs can be significant.
  10,000 optins watching 400MB of video is 4000GB of data – that is probably at least $500 in fees with Amazon S3. With Kajabi that is $1880.
  What you can’t offset in this way are things like theme CSS files, javascript & images for which you might use a conventional CDN service.

• Reputation Management With Lead Capture

  It is my belief that uQast is going to become an unsurpassed platform for lead capture from syndicated media. I have written blog posts about how unhappy I am with current offerings.

  If you have clients with budget (my readership between them probably have 100,000 clients with budget) – now is the time to get in, secure their names and keywords and not have to pay $200/month which is what I have heard the uQast Pro will eventually be priced at.

  uQast will be a landing page of choice to push up to the top of the SERPs for your clients because they will be able to present great content, and capture leads directly.

  I should note this isn’t a “Leapfish” like pitch – there are no guaranteed search rankings or placement for buying a URL with a uQast Pro listing that I am aware of. Rankings internally are based on quality, and external are in the hands of Google & Bing.
  A URL might offer a small SEO benefit, but the biggest effect is for branding.

• Existing sellers

  If you are selling digital products already, this is another marketplace that you can leverage. You might make some extra sales. The product listings are based upon a patent pending algorithm which focuses on quality and reviews, not how much money you have to pay for advertising – oh and being listed is free.
  Some systems focus only on the newest products currently being promoted – the hope is that products on uQast will have significant longevity with an emphasis on quality not hype.

• Upsell System

  For those selling digital products the upsell system in uQast is extremely easy to implement and doesn’t have some of the restrictions of competing services.
  Of note is you can track the upsell process whilst maintaining session for Google Analytics.
  Up until relatively recently the popular solution for 1-click upsells was Infusionsoft – $300/month for the version with cart and affiliate program. Then there is the added cost of reliable integration and support – I have seen figures of $15k-$20k mentioned by multiple people though there are cheaper alternatives.
  I have tried other systems, but the technology wasn’t necessarily as straight forward as you might assume from the sales information, and they relied on having your own merchant account.
  Clickbank can do upsells but last I heard that was limited to existing high volume partners.

• No Merchant Account

  Some people don’t have a merchant account or would have great difficulty geting one for a number of reasons, yet a merchant account or the equivalent from Paypal is the only way to do an upsell chain effectively – all uQast sales are processed by uQast – they handle all transactions, product delivery, refunds, chargebacks (cross fingers very few) etc
  Don’t ask me how much the fees are – in testing they were set somewhere below that offered by competing market places.
  I also can’t say how long it takes to receive funds – likely initially it would be subject to the refund period – I am not going to speculate on longer term possibilities.

• Revenue & Actions

  You can’t currently include opt-in forms, micropayment and a shopping cart in many other competing offerings. Ooyala does some of it but at a price – I believe Slideshare can do lead generation on a video embed, but that uses their proprietary system which as far as I am aware doesn’t post directly to your autoresponder forms.
  Note: uQast does not currently support document embeds.
  Some of the players that support payment or lead generation “in the player” actually achieve this using javascript. Whilst it is technically possible to get that working for viral syndication, I have yet to see anyone do it and there are other complications.

• Free player

  The cost of players can add up depending on which you use. JW Player isn’t free for commercial use yet I often see “6 figure” & “7 figure” marketers using an unlicensed player. Flowplayer in theory you can use the GPL version as I believe is used with some Amazon S3 solutions – I have never seen any WordPress plugin or other solution that actually used all the features of these players in a user friendly way – some come close, but add other incompatibilities

  Note: Forward looking statement – There is a major issue with hosting your own player… trust – to get a player accepted for embedding in Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, Google Buzz & appearing in Google Reader the owners of those sites need to trust the code. That isn’t something that will ever happen for self hosted code for small sites.
  If your long-term media strategy is based on using your own player, no matter how well the player is coded you are guaranteed reduced virality.
  The best you can expect if you used html5 is that the html5 video would be shown, but without your custom features.

  This is a forward looking statement in that achieving trust and geting the coding right for uQast will also be a long term currently unfulfilled goal, but as an established community it is a goal that is at least achievable.

My Offer For uQast

As I have mentioned in the comments it is hard to dedicate a huge amount of time for an extended period, and I have full time obligations currently with the uQast team in various ways.
However both for work and in various communities I have experienced the immense value of being a member of private chat groups on Skype. So I am going to set up a private Skype group for all my uQast Pro referrals where they will have direct access to me, and to each other. That means there is a little bit of a self help aspect if I am not around for an extended period of time, but I generally have Skype on most of the day.
The intention isn’t as a general chat room – high signal to noise.

I expect for this founders launch that room is going to be pretty exclusive for a few months and will help people get up to speed fast. Even if it ends up one-on-one that just hopefully means it is just better signal to noise.

It is also in some ways a benefit to me to get direct feedback from customers, though my bandwidth is limited.

This won’t be a route to unannounced information or special access to features, but there are likely some methods to do things that work better than others, strategy discussions etc which would be worthwhile.
This is not intended to be a supplemental channel for support issues of various kinds, as for many of those kinds of problems I am certainly not the person to contact
It also isn’t hand holding, and would most likely suit more advanced users with some technical skill.

Here is an affiliate link again so I can track things

It is hard to place a real world value on such a group/room – one SEO membership I belong to has such a group on Skype of typically 60 people and at times that can get a little noisy as there is general chat, but the level of direct feedback from experienced people is unsurpassed. The value certainly exceeds the $30/month you might pay for that if that is the type of community you can gain a return on time invested from.

As noted in my previous post, I have been subverted/assimilated by uQast and am working for/with them full time in various ways. Thus whilst I try not to be biased I am sure in some ways I am – I am aware of future plans, whatever bugs might be lurking etc, but I am trying to portray things as neutrally as I can and avoiding any hype.

This service is in many ways the successor to FreeIQ, but retains hardly any of the old code (which was pretty good and ahead of its time) – FreeIQ & uQast were founded by Brad Fallon who also is a founder & CEO of Stompernet.
I personally look on uQast and Stompernet as different entities (and legally they are). uQast isn’t about training – it is a software-as-a-service platform that enables stuff you can’t do anywhere else.

If you are not inclined to comment publicly, and you have questions my contact form is available or you can always find me on Skype:call-andybeard .

You really don’t want your clients stuck with uQast.com/HGDFSREW/brandname or uQast.com/LJHTDRSW/keyword

I have compiled a list of the reasons I believe people should be interested in uQast (and what attracted me in the first place)
It also mentions my uQast Bonus

Just over a month ago I watched a preview presentation of a new “software as a service” application called uQast. Whilst watching the presentation I had a browser open and did a little digging around, found the development site and started poking to see what it offered.

I then dropped a friendly email to the developers who I already had extensive contact with from their current & previous ventures with some feedback. I could see a lot of promise with the site, as I had with its predecessor.

Hints were made bilaterally that some more formal feedback could be provided in some capacity, though I really wanted to avoid a drawn out negotiation period, and I could see a rough diamond that I could help polish. Just polish… not cut & shape as most of the real work in creating a massively scaleable digital delivery platform was already done.

At the time I was in the process of puting together my own tightly integrated membership site here on andybeard.eu and to play a proactive role I was going to have to at least postpone those plans for a lengthy period of time.
There was also a ton of products I wanted to promote as an affiliate, articles & commentary that really needed to be written, including formally writing about my weird Pinocchio SEO stuff in public with over 2 years of research.

Somehow things worked out and I have been busy for the last month.

What Makes uQast Different To What I Planned?

For 5 years I have had a bee in my bonnet about creating a platform that in some specific way enables both publishers to publish content and affiliates to promote it with some unique technology or “special sauce” sticking it all together and allowing me to leverage my skills & experience.

uQast isn’t it

I say that in a good way – in many ways my entrepreneurial yearning to create a specific platform, and all the preconceived feature requirements that I had built up over a period of 5 years was a double edged sword – both allowing me to come up with solutions to complex problems almost at the drop of a hat, and at the same time instilling an urge to make uQast a surrogate of what I wanted to create rather than the established mission.

So the largest barrier to overcome in my own mind and in negotiations was that uQast is something different despite whatever significant synergies exist.

uQast Is What Exactly?

uQast’s mission is to be the world leader at collecting, ordering and monetizing valuable digital media content.

You could call that the short form elevator pitch I would probably have to worry about remembering if I was talking to important people.

Digital media content is anything that can be downloaded or streamed. Video, Audio podcasts, eBooks & white papers in PDF or doc format, even software in a zip file is possible.
In theory the platform could be used for hard goods, services etc though there might be issues with delivery validation for the credit card processors that have to be carefully thought about.

There is no advertising on the site – the majority of the business model depends on users actually selling products they create.

As well as being able to use promotional content on the site itself, it is envisioned to be able to embed the content on “any website in the world” and have actions & transactions take place “in situ”.
I say “envisioned” – the player has a lot of great unique functionality but it is currently most suitable for videos, but doubles as audio.
Transactions include actually buying product, signing up to a real email list right in the video player, giving a “tip” for a free video and various sharing and embed options.

Having the content playing on “any” website is going to take a little time. A lot of time over the last few weeks has been spent on embed code improvements, and it is early days yet. The long term goal is to get the videos embeddable on Facebook & Twitter via Oembed, and even viewable in Google Reader, Buzz etc.
There are special requirements to be met and obstacles to overcome – one example is player size – whilst the 640×360 widescreen player can be resized, some of the intenal windows for shopping can’t.

There is also some special functionality I want to add that will help take things one step further and make uQast the defacto platform for video SEO, though discussions are fairly early days.

The video player is highly customizable and it is something anyone can do.

One of the big features that is hard to equate is the tip jar – I don’t know how this micropayment system for free content is going to work. Ooyala has had micropayments for a while, and recently introduced Paypal Micropayments platform.
The uQast micropayment system is their own… there are some hurdles to overcome but it is functional.
Oh, and Ooyala is extremely expensive compared to any planned uQast offering I know about.

This Is A Long Tail Play… For The Little Guys

The long tail is a big deal

In any market, there are a few big players who seem to get all the attention.
But their importance, influence and ability to positively affect consumers are dwarfed by the combined effect of all the small players.

- Brad Fallon uQast Founder

It is also about quality content and a ranking system within search results based upon quality reviews from consumers, that is resistant to gaming.

Advance Features

There are, and will continue to be added lots of advanced features with an emphasis on making them surprising easy to use.

One area I have spent a fair amount of time testing has been the upsell system.

You define a number of offsite pages which will contain your various upsell and downpage offers, and uQast provides you with the “Buy Now” and “No Thanks” buttons to place on each page.

But being able to set up an upsell chain is one thing – being able to effectively measure it is quite another.

With uQast we are most of the way there as the shopping cart is maintaining the session all the way through, and thus we can achieve quite an effective sales funnel in Google Analytics.
Ideally there are a few things which still need to be added but I know at least one shopping cart I attempted to use on a project this year where the use of javascript with iframes made it almost impossible to set up a full funnel in analytics. Lots of custom programming to the javascript that embedded the iframe that called the sales buttons was outside my budget, but without it I had to kill the project as being able to demonstrate sales data was an intrinsic part of the project.

Andy Beard Subverted & My Most Biased Review Ever

For the last month or so my “computer home” as in what has been showing predominently on the screen of various PCs has been uQast, the Jira Bug Project & Issue Tracker being used, and various test domains – also a fair chunk of very specific research.
So I have been ripping the site apart trying to make things break all that time, though not to the same intimate level of detail as the programmers working on the project.

I could just publish a list of every outstanding bug or missing feature I know about – if you have ever spent some time delving through the WordPress trac system you would know that sometimes non-security bugs take months to come to prominence, and features might take years unless you code them yourself or they become “blessed”.
But that wouldn’t be a fair evaluation compared to the months/years of work that have already been invested in the project to get it to the current stage.
Development from my perspective is pretty nimble, there is good team co-ordination and dedication to achieve the mission, and create a phenomenal useful service.

This isn’t intended to be a full review of uQast but as the launch wheels have started rolling I needed to get some words out in the ether. Most likely in the next few days I will highlight some of the additional things I personally find interesting and feel important to mention.

And I have left tons of things out that I am sure will end up being raised in the comments… and we can handle them there.

Any questions… criticisms… fire away!

The thoughts about uQast in this post are purely my own and I have liberally peppered this post with referral links mainly because I love tracking stuff, but you might enjoy the 2 tier affiliate program that pays for a year. You can sign up for the launch affiliate program here.

But that is just for users… how about website owners, developers and SEOs?

Search Monkey Markup

The Yahoo Search Monkey team today sent an email to their developers.

Dear Developer, We recently announced that the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences will be closing down as of October 1, 2010. As a result, third-party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results. Developers who wish to retain their code should export it using their favorite copy/paste tool before then. We’ve been very pleased with the benefits that the SearchMonkey program has provided to Yahoo! Search users over the last two years and want to share our plans for SearchMonkey with respect to the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. In keeping with previous efforts to bring structure to the Web, our enhanced results program will continue as we transition organic search listings to Microsoft. As part of the enhanced results program, we will be adding new entities (including people, Q&A, and real estate) to power both additional enhanced results and object filters within Yahoo! Search. All of the existing enhanced result templates will continue to be generated from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds, and Yahoo! will continue to show this structured data on the Yahoo! Search results page, along with Microsoft’s organic listings. Over time, some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform. Webmasters will continue to have the ability to affect the presentation of a search result through page markup on their site (microformats and RDFa). We know many people enjoyed being part of the SearchMonkey developer community, and we want to give a heartfelt thank-you to all of the developers and webmasters who have participated over the last two years. We look forward to continuing to work with developers to explore new and interesting ways to incorporate useful applications into the search experience. Sincerely, The Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team

This means that search monkey markup for things like video live on and continue to have value.

Don’t know anything about search monkey markup? How about this tutorial on how to mark up a Youtube Video with RDFa and Search Monkey.

That isn’t the only way to get videos discovered – I just came across Amit’s relatively new Video Sitemaps plugin which seems to work ok for Youtube videos in some situations – just needs more development work to get it working for other videos such as those I host myself.

Google Instant Video – Marissa Mayer

p.s. For those who think SEO still has no purpose, you would think between all the millions Ooyala have invested and a top tier user like Techcrunch they would somehow get their video optimization and embed code perfected for syndication.
Then again – Google must have a huge budget and that video won’t appear in a feed reader.

With the launch of Google Instant there has been a lot of chatter and I am joining the “me to” chatter with a few thoughts.

The Long Tail & Pareto

A lot gets written about the Long Tail… of anything and there are so many diagrams trying to explain the long tail in various scenarios. The long tail is very similar to Pareto’s 80:20 when applied to search marketing – what is worthy and provides measurable task ROI.

From Google Image Search

There are 2 ways people look on Long Tail search queries

• The likelyhood that someone will enter a particular search query
• The number of keywords in the search query

With the increased emphasis on the use of search suggestions, for some users that is going to change significantly.

I say some users, because it will be interesting what happens when people who can’t type effectively use Google Instant – they are constantly looking at their keyboard rather than what is appearing on their screen.
They might have an incresed incentive to learn how to touch type because with every keystroke something changes on their screen in a very visible manner, but it will also encourage lots of pausing – not because what is on the screen is relevant to what they are looking for, but becasue it takes time to look up, see what has changed, look down again and find the next key.

Such a scenario of course is only going to happen with familiarity – eye tracking data currently suggests that regular Google users just bash out their queries ignoring the instant suggestions.

The thought is that what people typed was what was appearing as a suggestion anyway, but people still typed. It is impossible to tell if what appeared as a suggestion might have guided their typing in some cases, especially with slower typers.
Google suggest (now Instant) could be subliminal too.

I know people who take 3 seconds to find each key on the keyboard. I am sure you do too.

That rubberneck effect will skew search data in some way.

Google themselves state that for both Organic search (the impression data in Webmaster Tools) and for Adwords Impressions, things are calculated in the same way.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:
2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

Google Revenue

Regarding total revenue for Google, I think Greg Boser said it best

The only real game changing aspect of Instant is the additional money G will make by attaching adwords to the Suggest tool.

September 9, 2010 3:26 pm via Seesmic DesktopReplyRetweetFavorite

@GregBoser

GregBoser

Smut

I mentioned to Laurie that Google Instant wouldn’t change search at all for 20% of searches. That seems to be highlighted by the number of filtered words and the ability of Google to adequately cope with the naughty word vocabulary of modern society.

Just a note if anyone from Google reads this, image search universal results do not give a warning for sites that may harm your computer from the main search index – do all browsers now have safe browsing protection?

Keystroke Optimization

• Is your website on speed dial?
• Does your domain name or brand trigger a competitor first?
• Should you go for brand or topical keyword?
• How many keystrokes is too many?

Just to highlight this, I have an “issue” with online reputation expert Andy Beal.

Andy Beal (marketing guy) has a problem to overcome.. Andy Beal (Billionaire) in Wikipedia, but I am sure he will eventually overcome that hurdle. $1B would however buy a lot of links encourage lots of university benefactor links to a Wikipedia article.

That reminds me, I should have a chat with Jann about my image links.

I obviously need to rebrand as “Andy B” – don’t think that isn’t possible, and it could influence search traffic.

How many keystrokes are needed to bring up your site in the SERPs?

Rooting around the SEO blogosphere 6 or 7 seems to be very good – some sites it was as many as 14 keystrokes. That is a lot, with tons of competitors for attention in between.

We Have Seen It All Before?

I realise we have had Google suggest for a fairly long time in internet years but different brains work in different ways – and different searchers are looking for different content in their results, which is why visual search results with various forms of multimedia elements become more prevalent.

Googlers were claiming that Google Instant changed the way they internally performed queries – you can probably assume a high percentage of Googlers can touch type. They did beta test this for a while and rolled it out for everyone. If they hadn’t seem some positive gains from a general audience I doubt they would have launched it.

Google’s business is search.. the one area they can’t really afford total failures.

Oh and SEO Is Not Dead!

You could believe his shock, with so many popular tech, web design & SEO blogs being allowed to flaunt the rules.

A couple of months ago I pointed out that Vimeo isn’t for commercial use, but that message seems to be largely ignored.

To me it seems that any large commercial undertaking using Vimeo fits one of the following scenarios:-

1. Walking a tightrope with a demand to take their content down imminent
2. In some barter arrangement for link juice worth far more than any blogger has probably ever received for a paid post – I wonder what the FTC would think? It certainly influences a lot of businesses to use something they shouldn’t
3. Blindly walking a path of ignorance having not checked terms of service before signing up

The most prominent I have seen using Vimeo are Read Write Web, Techcrunch and in the SEO community Seomoz

There are tons of commercial funded startups who use Vimeo on their home pages.

Over the Christmas quiet spell I would suggest taking your videos and links away from Vimeo, and let Vimeo stagnate in a non-commercial world.

I have never really understood why anyone creating public facing videos would use Vimeo anyway, their primary saving grace are their privacy controls which would be ideal for membership sites if not for the commercial use barrier.