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Ross Fadner, Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 10:56 AM
80% of Twitter Traffic Comes from Third Parties
The Guardian
The Guardian has some interesting stats about Twitter, which were disclosed by Evan Weaver, Twitter's lead engineer in its services division, who gave a talk at QCon 2009.
-The average Twitter user has 126 followers
-Only 20% of Twitter's traffic comes through the Twitter Web site; the other 80% comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. This means that if you're looking at only twitter.com generated stats on your Web site, you may be underestimating the source of that traffic by a factor of five.
-During President Obama's inauguration in January, more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.
Weaver's talk was mainly about how Twitter started out as a sort of content management system, but later morphed into more of a messaging system. His job centers around optimization and scalability, which couldn't be more important to a site that has experienced the kind of growth that Twitter has.
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Yahoo Kills Maven Networks
TechCrunch
Carol Bartz continues to swing the axe at Yahoo, closing down weak and under-performing products at the Sunnyvale, Calif. Web giant. According to TechCrunch's Robin Wauters, the latest to go is online video advertising provider Maven Networks, which Yahoo acquired at the beginning of last year for around $160 million.
The news comes from a Maven customer who was informed last week that Yahoo will cease development on the platform and will no longer support it in 2010. Another source confirms that Yahoo has fired most of Maven's employees in a move that's being called a restructuring. The same source claims that Yahoo never even used Maven's technology for its own video properties, which is strange, considering Bartz's recent admission that Yahoo is interested in acquiring digital video startups. Among Maven's competitors were Brightcove, Ooyala and KIT Digital.
As Wauters points out, this is the third video property that Yahoo has killed in less than 8 months, after shutting down both Y!Live, a live video streaming service, and Jumpcut, an online video editing tool. However, there's always the possibility that Yahoo sells off what's left Maven to someone interested in buying it.
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China Bans "Gold Farming" in Games
InformationWeek
China has banned the trading of virtual goods for real money, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity at risk, InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn reports. According to China's Ministries of Culture and Commerce, "The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services." The Chinese government estimates that trade in virtual currency exceeded several billion yuan last year. One billion yuan is currently about $146 million.
The ruling could have a massive affect on the virtual currency trading industry, which in the context of online role-playing games like World of Warcraft is often called gold farming. The government justified the ban on virtual currency trading as a way to combat gambling and other illegal online activities.
However, it's unclear how exactly the new rule will apply to online role playing games. For example, a report in China Daily claims that in-game gear is not considered virtual currency, so selling items that have actual value inside games may be allowed to continue.
According to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester, the trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually. Heeks estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China.
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Report: Mobile Ad Spending to Reach $28.8 Billion by 2014
Reuters
A new report claims that advertising on mobile phones could reach $28.8 billion within five years, as consumers embrace new Internet-enabled devices like Apple's iPhone. According to Ineum Consulting, mobile advertising will grow at an annual rate of 45%, reaching $28.8 billion in five years, up from $3.1 billion today.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that ad agencies are seeing an uptick in mobile campaign interest. "We have launched many mobile campaigns for the first time in the last three months. New people are coming in every week," David Kenny, Managing Partner at VivaKi, a unit of Publicis Groupe, said at the Cannes Lions 2009 ad festival. Kenny added that mobile apps and social networks like Facebook would be key drivers.
Also speaking in Cannes was Scott Howe, corporate vice president of the advertiser and publisher solutions group at Microsoft, who predicted that mobile phone advertising would account for 5-10 percent of global ad spending within five years. He said that because of location-based targeting, mobile advertising was likely to attract interest from small "mom and pop" advertisers who would not normally embrace mainstream advertising.
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The Pirate Bay to be Sold for $7.7 Million
Information Week
It's been less than a week since a Swedish court denied an appeal for a retrial in the case of major media firms versus The Pirate Bay, and the controversial file sharing outfit is now selling itself, Information Week reports. Global Gaming Factory X on Tuesday said it reached an agreement to acquire The Pirate Bay for about $7.7 million. The Swedish tech company claims it will introduce legitimate business models to the site, which for years helped facilitate illegal file-sharing.
"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," said Global Gaming CEO Hans Pandeya, in a statement. "The Pirate Bay site is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies that requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary," he added.
In April, The Pirate Bay's four Swedish founders were ordered to one year in jail and fined $3.6 million. The new deal could see The Pirate Bay evolve in a manner similar to Napster, a one-time illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing service that was eventually bought and then resold as a legitimate vendor of online music.
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Ad Agencies, Web Firms Unite
The New York Times
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Gladwell: 'Free' Not Necessarily the Model of the Future
The New Yorker
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