Month: April 2007

I did. The PS2 was the #1 selling non-hand held console last month, beating out the Wii by over 10% and the 360 by just under 50%.

Some other interesting statistics:

Interestingly, the PS3 was the only new console to see an increase in sales for the month. Wii sales were down 22 percent and Xbox 360 down 12 percent. … PS3 saw a month-over-month increase of 2% with sales…

This is likely due to the launch last month in Europe, creating renewed demand for the PS3.

As a side note, the number one over all console is the DS hand held by Nintendo, selling nearly double that of the PS2. Here’s the actual numbers for those of you too lazy to read:

1. Nintendo DS – 508K
2. PlayStation 2 – 280K
3. Wii – 259K
4. Xbox 360 – 199K
5. PlayStation Portable – 180K
6. Game Boy Advance – 148K
7. PlayStation 3 – 130K
8. GameCube – 22K

Google’s profits are up 69% for the quarter since a year ago. They beat expectations from analysts across the board.

Even while they increased capital spending by 73%, they still made a huge gain. Most analysts were predicting a bad quarter due to the increased spending. But their profit margin also grew by 1.4% to 63.5%. Their sales went up 66% in the same period. Their total revenue for the quarter: $3.66 billion.

Another interesting factor is the internationalization of Google:

Sales outside the United States now represent 47% of all of Google’s revenues, compared with 42% in 2006. That upward trend should continue, Google executives said.

It’s interesting to think just over half of all Google users are in the US! They have a ton of room to grow, which makes one realize just how much bigger they could become.

This comes only days after Yahoo and Microsoft were shown to be bleeding away market share to Google. It was announced only days ago that Yahoo’s revenues declined by 11%. Consequently, their stock also fell 12%, showing just how valuable search is to Yahoo. I really hope Yahoo realizes the pile of gold they are sitting on before it’s too late… That, or they need to move away from the search business and focus on their amazing content business (music, pictures, social networking, chat, email, videos, etc.).

So with this unstoppable growth, what’s next? Why, expanding into new markets of course. Google is now focusing more energy than ever in diversifying its business model, as shown by its recent $3.1 billion commitment to buy DoubleClick, one of the largest pay-per-action advertising firms on the net. It’s very possible that we can expect more purchases by Google this year as it tries to use its cash surplus to get even further ahead.

If anybody is paying attention: this is in direct opposition to what Google’s CEO said last month about his intention on buying other companies. It’s hard to assess why he would mislead the public on that issue, but it likely has to do with keeping his lips sealed about pending deals. Still, it leaves the door wide open about what Google plans to do with all of this excess cash. Most likely, we should see them buying up more companies while they have the cash flow to cement their lead.

Now this is an interesting development to an already busy day: Google has released a “stumble” like feature into their toolbar.

Google has been tracking user queries for several years now. However, this tracking was mostly unused, at least not as a readily visible enhancement. But today, Google added a new “My Picks” button into the Google Toolbar. It works by showing you pages that other people, similar to you, have visited.

Stumble is based off of user submitted content, whereas Google’s tool works in automation. I use Google to do a lot of programming related querying, so will I see nothing but Java reference pages? Not likely. From my interpretation of things, it also tracks general browsing behavior of its toolbar users to determine what to show. So it might correlate me to users of Slashdot, and thus send me to a recently popular article there. I arrive at this conclusion based on the second feature Google introduced today: a customized Personalized Homepage tab.

For people who don’t have the toolbar installed, they can still check out the feature by adding a “recommendations” tab to their personalized homepage (see image). As you can see, it has recommended groups, videos, and even news. Clearly this stuff isn’t necessarily content that is searched for, but likely content that is being browsed by toolbar users. If so, this is an impressive union of products by Google and lives up to their recent commitment to integrating their products instead of creating new ones.

I’m glad to see Google finally utilizing this data in a more interesting way. It was like a treasure chest they didn’t want to open or something.

The timing of all of this is very weird. It was only hours ago that the rumor broke that eBay was about to buy StumbleUpon. So where’s this put eBay and StumbleUpon?

It puts the $40M+ buyout into perspective. It’s possible that Stumble saw this coming and wanted to be bought out ASAP. Meanwhile, eBay wanted a foothold into the toolbar market so that they could get a piece of the toolbar search market pie. I still think eBay could have spent their money better, but for all intents and purposes StumbleUpon investors made a safe bet by cashing out.

I can’t say the same for eBay. By eBay’s logic, any big website should buyout any other toolbar makers in an attempt to steal search traffic from Google.

Of course, Yahoo and Microsoft can tell you why such a plan is completely futile, at least right now. After all, they have their own toolbars, dedicated search technology, strong brand recognition, and made several notable enhancements to their search engines in the past year, yet they are still bleeding away market share.

Note: I would have used a screen shot of my own recommendations, but I have had search history tracking disabled for some time now. Perhaps in a few days I’ll see able to see what sort of stuff Google recommends.

Quickly becoming one of the most talked up pieces of vaporware (okay, that’s not true), it seems Google is finally “very close” to enabling their “Claim Your Content” filtering system.

My main question is how the hell does it work?

It is supposed to automatically identify copyrighted content. This sounds impossible. How do you distinguish between fair use and infringement? What if I mash up a parody video combining elements of other videos? That is protected by law. How is YouTube going to keep people from maliciously (and believe me, they will) claiming material that they really have no right to?

For anybody who mentions things like “look certain patterns in the video…,” I reiterate the importance of protecting free speech: everybody has a right to report on, make fun of, or comment on any copyrighted material out there. That includes using it, so long as you don’t rip the entire thing. Any sort of automated scanning would fail to recognize such fair use.

However, if Google’s technology works, they will murder their competitors. Much like the idea of the digital transmission right, creating the one and only copyright safe haven will make YouTube powerful. It will be the center of user-generated content as well as licensed content. This is because once Google has this filter in place, the once-angry Viacom and friends will come back with arms wide open.

More importantly, it puts their competitors in deeeeeeeep trouble, especially if Google spent the past year patenting their new technology. It makes Google’s attempt a clear stab at respecting copyright, while everybody else just looks like thieves.

Of course, looking like stealing never really stopped something on the web. Nobody cares. Well, not you and I. But without the deep pockets of Google, what video site can withstand a billion dollar lawsuit? And that’s just from Viacom (hint: there are more owners out there).

Still, I think this ushers in the end of a great era. You know, sort of like what it felt like when Napster was finally taken offline. Not that BearShare, Morpheus, Kazaa, Lime Wire, torrents, and other things didn’t pop up afterwards and replace it.

So long YouTube of the wild-wild-west, we’ll miss you (as we move to your cooler to-be competitor that doesn’t have filters)!

While it was no secret that counting website visitors is notoriously inaccurate, comScore has released a study that indicates cookie tracking can over represent your visitors by a factor as high as 2.5.

Some interesting highlights in the article:

• 7% of computers account for 35% of all cookies
• 31% of Internet users cleared cookies during the month of the study
• Only 4% of Internet users delete third-party but not first-party cookies
• Traffic overestimation can be up to 150%

This is interesting because many online tools such as Google Analytics (which I use) leverages cookie track visitors. This is an example of a “third-party” cookie. The cookie is used to track when a visitor returns.

There is some good news: If this is the case, return visitor rates may be far higher than what is reported. Cookies are used to track return visitors, so if those cookies are getting wiped out, using the same logic, I can conclude my return visitor rate may be up to 2.5x greater. 😉

The alternative is to use server side tracking such as Awstats, or some combination. In reality, I don’t really care how many visitors I have, but it’s still an important thing to keep in mind.