Variety.com – HBO comedy site shut down
“This Just In, the comedy site HBO envisioned as both a brand extension and a potential development pipeline, is being shut down just six months after launching.”
Video is hot, and advertisers love it, but it’s not easy to compete with the 800lb gorilla in Mountain View.
IPhone Use Disappoints; Apple Slides – New York Times
Looks like the honeymoon is over for the iPhone, and now it will have to accept its lowly position as the best merely smartphone on the market.
Apple’s shares slumped 6 percent on Tuesday after AT&T said the early surge of iPhone buyers starting service on its network was smaller than some analysts had anticipated.
Generator Failures Caused 365 Main Outage – Data Center Knowledge
This is a reminder of how this high tech wired world of ours is dependent on old school low tech things like electricity and generators.
“Several generators at 365 Main’s San Francisco data center failed to start when the facility lost grid power Tuesday afternoon, causing an outage that knocked many of the web’s most popular destinations offline for several hours. The disruption, which began at 1:45 pm PST, occurred during a grid outage for Pacific Gas & Electric, which left significant portions of San Francisco in the dark. Parts of 365 Main’s data center lost power, causing downtime for customer sites including CraigsList, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp, among others.”
Nielsen scraps Web page view rankings – Yahoo! News
With AJAX, online video, microchunking, widgitization, RSS, etc, the trusty old page view has become less and less relevant and useful as the base key performance indicator for the modern online property. If your site’s content consumption isn’t consistently based on an HTML page loading inside a browser window, then what does a page view really measure? In the case of RSS feeds and widgets, content may be consumed without generating a single page view.
The industry has been debating what KPI should be the gold standard for months now, and in response Nielsen is shifting their focus to Time Spent. This move will address the impact of AJAX and online video on the dilution of the Page View’s usefulness, but it doesn’t truly solve the analytics challenge surrounding syndicated content such as RSS and widgets – because what defines time spent on a widget or feed surrounded by widgets and feeds from other providers.
A leading online measurement service will scrap rankings based on the longtime industry yardstick of page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites.
The move by Nielsen/NetRatings, expected to be announced Tuesday, comes as online video and new technologies increasingly make page views less meaningful.
Spring Marketing Strategies is a marketing consulting firm focused on helping small business grow revenue, profit and valuation through effective online strategic marketing. Spring was founded by Eben Thurston in 2009.
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