Dynamo Player – Instant Monetization Tool for Videos Unveiled at SXSW

Rob Millis and Will Cohlan, the pair beyond the web show Political Lunch, gave a presentation at SXSW called "Beyond Advertising: Can Online Video Finally Pay?" The discussion led to the unveiling of a tool for online video monetization called Dynamo Player.

The goal (short-term at least) of the tool is to simplify the process of uploading a video to the web, making it portable, and quickly getting viewers to pay for it.

WebProNews pulled Millis and Cohlan aside after the presentation to discuss Dynamo Player a little bit more:

Dynamo's slogan is "Powering independence." This concept comes from the idea that the product lets content producers have more control than with other options. Users can set their price, upload the video, and publish it anywhere on the web, and start making money immediately. Each time a viewer pays to watch your video, the money is deposited directly into your account.

For payments, the Dynamo player uses PayPal. Viewers are asked to pay, when they press play, right from the player. Of course, you'll have to provide content that people actually want to pay for, and Millis and Cohlan made a fair case as to why paid online video content will likely become more accepted by users (with sites like iTunes already paving the way).

Dynamo is not about competing with a site like YouTube, as far as offering a destination for users to go and watch online video (at least at this point), although they did say a future option could be to present featured videos on their site. Dynamo is geared more at the producers themselves, to put their videos wherever they choose.

Content producers who want to give it a spin can send an email to the guys at beta@dynamoplayer.com, and let them know.

 

Microsoft Talks Google’s Privacy “Fails” at SXSW

At the keynote today at SXSW, Microsoft's Danah Boyd placed a lot of emphasis on Google's privacy "fails" with Buzz. The topic of the keynote was the relationship between privacy and publicity, and she certainly covered much more territory and social media in general, but it was interesting that Google Buzz was essentially the first thing talked about.

A lot of people will love Buzz, and will use it, but that doesn't mean Google didn't mess up in terms of privacy, she said. She says that the company did nothing wrong technologically (there were multiple ways to opt out), but that Google managed to find the social equivalent of the "uncanny valley".

Google got in trouble by integrating a public facing system inside of one of the most intimate (Gmail), she said, adding that a lot of users believed Google was exposing their private email, even though this was never actually the case.

Google also assumed that people would opt out if they didn't want to participate, she said. She said she gives the company the benefit of the doubt, but she can't help but notice that more companies are starting to think it's ok to expose people and then back pedal once people flip out.

She said she kept meeting users who thought if they opted out, it would cancel their Gmail account.

With regard to Google's handling of the situation, Boyd says they "foolishly" told users what they wanted to hear rather than asking them what they wanted to hear.

Make no mistake, the point of the keynote was much larger than pointing out Google's failure, and it was quite a thought-provoking talk. Still, one can't help but notice the excessive amount of jabs at Microsoft's main rival, and emphasis placed on a very young product (the remainder of the speech's focus was mostly placed upon Facebook and Twitter, with a little bit of Chat Roulette).

 

Yahoo Gets Stock Boost From “Outperform” Rating

Although this turned out to be a pretty "meh" day for the stock market as a whole - the Dow and S&P 500 slipped a little bit, while the Nasdaq didn't gain much - Yahoo investors should be feeling pleased.  Yahoo's stock rose by a significant amount as an analyst rated it "market outperform," up from "market perform."

Sameet Sinha of JMP Securities is the man who's responsible for making that change, and he attributed the move to Yahoo's relationship with Microsoft.  Sinha indicated that other experts will come to think better of the company, too, as additional financial models incorporate the deal.

Then here's another, more concrete, detail: Sinha set a price target of $21.  Since Yahoo's stock hasn't been that high since July of 2008, that would be a significant level.

As for the current price of Yahoo's stock, it's been very much on the move.  It rose 2.86 percent during the trading day, taking it from $16.06 to $16.52.

Again, then, this was a good day for Yahoo's shareholders.  Google's shareholders lost a small amount of money, meanwhile (its stock decreased 0.31 percent), and Microsoft's shareholders made an even smaller amount (its stock rose 0.15 percent).

Examine Your Site’s Text, Reduce Chances of Search Engine Confusion

Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts?

At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.

Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in).

Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. "Ranking is going to be less of a measurement," he says. "We're going to be focused on more the traffic."

"When I decide I'm selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I'm talking about....I don't mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don't mean a bowling ball...you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board," says Clay.

"One of the things that I think is important, and that we've been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better - what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence - before they type in hammer...so if they're on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I'm gonna put the words on my page. I don't see a lot of people even thinking that way."

Personalized search is nothing new. Google's been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience (whether they want that or not).

Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That's why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.

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