A $500 million to $1 billion problem, depending on whom you ask.

In a front page article in The Washington Post, 'Click Fraud' Threatens Foundation of Web Ad, staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo discusses the mechanics of click fraud, the new forms of click fraud — the fast growing "pay to read" and "pay to click" rings of individuals and companies around the world — and the new lawsuit against Google.

 Some figures from the article worth filing away:

• Google and Yahoo own 70% of all web searches in the  U.S.
• About 40 percent of all Internet ads are clickable text ads (the advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked on)
• Thirty-nine percent, or $1.04 billion, of Google's 3rd quarter revenues derived from affliate networks, website that allow Google text ads
• Click fraud hurts mortgage, insurance, real estate, legal and travel businesses the most

Yankee Group estimates that fraud is involved in 10% of clicks on text ads, or a $500 million problem.  Others estimate the problem is even worse, perhaps as bad as $1 billion — affecting 12 to 30 percent of all text ad clicks.  Google claims the problem is less that 10 percent.

Yankee Group argues that without more agressive measures to validate ad clicks, "fraud could undermine the the entire business model of Internet search engines by causing advertisers to lose confidence."

Virtual gaming fever has hit the MacArthur Foundation, resulting in the philanthropic organization awarding Indiana University professor Edward Castronova a $240,000 grant to build a Second Life -esque virtual world fashioned after the plays of Shakespeare. The project, entitled "Arden: The World of Shakespeare," is meant to let Castronova and his research team delve into online behaviors by conducting ongoing social experiments online.

In an article by CNET's Daniel Terdiman, the professor explains that the early designs are influenced by a "Richard III" theme, which gives designers and prospective gamers the necessary historical context needed to spark the imagination.

Castrova, an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University, is the author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games and Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier, as well as the director of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative. The Synthetic Worlds Initiative was founded in 2004 to "promote research on synthetic worlds." The research center has both a website and a blog .   

Mark Blumenthal, the man behind last election cycle's Mystsery Pollster blog, has a new site called pollster.com and it is fantastic.  There is a blog that provides analysis of the latest polling data as well as a section called The Polls that aggregates all the various polls for each Senate and Gubernatorial race and select House races.  Great stuff.

If you live in the Washington, DC area, you are undoubtedly getting bombarded with ads about the Maryland and Virginia Senate races.  So here are the polling trends for both races.

Definitely check out Pollster.com if you are interested in this sort of stuff.

As mentioned previously, we are currently running a demonstration of our ImpactWatch™ media monitoring platform that tracks mainstream media coverage of the Connecticut Senate Race.  As part of the demonstration, we have used ImpactWatch™ to create a report on media coverage of the race during the month of September.  This is the first in a series of reports we will release in the days leading up to the election.

Following are some of the reports key findings:

• Iraq was the subject of 20% of all stories written about this race, making it the most popular frequently mentioned topic.
• Overall, coverage of Ned Lamont was slightly more favorable than the coverage of Senator Joe Lieberman. 
• However, Senator Lieberman's coverage became more favorable as September went on due to the release of positive poll numbers at the end of the month.  During this same period, Mr. Lamont's coverage became more negative.
• Connecticut media had a larger proportion of positive articles written about Mr. Lamont and negative articles written about Sen. Lieberman than the national media.

The following graphs demonstrate some of the trends in coverage.

Subject Breakdown

Lamont vs. Lieberman Avg Favorability

You can view the full report here. 

If you are interested in learning more about ImpactWatch™, please sign up now for our free access to our demo on the CT Senate Race. 

Personal Democracy has a great blog entry regarding a recent study on the use of Facebook by candidates for political office.

Here are some key stats Personal Democracy highlighted:

(1) "36 or 25% of candidates for U.S. Senate have posted their own profiles: 17 Democrats, 11 Republicans, 8 minor party candidates and independents"

(2) "139 or 12% of candidates for U.S. House of Representative have posted their own profiles: 74 Democrats, 54 Republicans, 11 minor party candidates and independents"

(3) "52 or 43% of candidates for state Governor have posted their own profiles: 32 Democrats, 14 Republicans, 6 minor party candidates and independents"

For some reason it seems right and appropriate that guernatorial candidates would use it more than House or Senate candidates.

Read the full blog entry.

With the recent news that the Iranian government has decided to limit ADSL bandwidth above 128 kbps for all ISPs (BoingBoing reported it before Reuters) without giving a reason, it makes sense that this is an opportune time to take stock of state-mandated Internet regulation (including content filtering and surveillance) schemes around the world.

We've done a post before on the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an organization created through the collective efforts of the various Internet research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. The main mission of this group is to examine the phenomenon of state control over the Internet (filtering and blocking content, etc.) in various countries. The center has published a number of research papers on their site that are devoted to studying the anatomy and pervasiveness of state-sponsored filtering and information-control initiatives around the world. Case studies concerning content filtering and surveillance are currently available for the following countries:

• Vietnam
• Yemen
• Tunisia
• Burma
• Singapore
• Iran
• China
• Bahrain
• United Arab Emirates
• Saudi Arabia

In addition to case studies and other interesting publications, ONI also provides an interactive map that not only illustrates the state of the Internet in various countries, but also briefs the user on the level of filtering in the country, the way filtering technology is used, the state of the media environment and examples of sites that have been either blocked or filtered. (more…)

Recently word got out that the Los Angeles Times is using it's own investigative reporters to help chart the future of the newspaper both online and in print.   According to the New York Times, the LA Times "is dedicating three investigative reporters and half a dozen editors to find ideas, at home and abroad, for re-engaging the reader, both in print and online."

The LA Times came across our report on the features of newspaper websites and got in touch with us to pick our brains about our findings and the sister studies performed in other countries.  Erin and I spent an hour or so discussing how to create more compelling newspaper websites with LA Times' reporter T. Christian Miller.  It was a good and interesting conversation and I think the project is worthwhile.  I'm interested to see what they come up with.

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Reuters now has a virtual news bureau over in Second Life. Tech reporter Adam Pasick (whose byline is his SL name 'Adam Reuters') is now wiring in stories about the goings-on in Second Life. Pasick kicked off his new appointment by sending in a smashing story about how the SL's massive virtual economy there is giving some policymakers something to think about.

Media presence in Second Life is growing. In late September, CNET Networks launched a virtual doppelganger of its real-life office building on a coast overlooking the sea. Wired Magazine also built its own presence to accompany a set of stories published about Second Life. 

With all this media interest in Second Life, Mr. Pasick-Reuters should be aware that with tech PR giant Text 100 on the loose in SL, and other PR agencies taking note,  his virtual phone may just start ringing off its virtual hook. (He may just prefer to hide.)

"How do you put a price on your Dream? Is it worth one month’s salary? Is it worth one year’s salary? Is it worth your child’s college savings account? Is it worth all your retirement money? Is it worth losing a limb? Is it worth dying for? What is the right price for a dream?

I don’t have an answer for it. But I believe it is different for every person. For me, I was ready, and still am, to give my life for my dream."

Apparently, for Anousheh Ansari, the first Iranian astronaut, the price for a dream is about $20 million.  That was the cost of this woman's tourist journey to space. 

This September, Anousheh had the opportunity to to take a 10-day exploration in outer space, which included a 2-day tour of the International Space Station.  Her experiences are documented in detail in her blog, which include tales of space training, motion sicknesses, lack-of-gravity-inspired disorientation, and of course, spectacular mid-orbital views of our planet.

Anousheh is now the fourth person to pay a large sum of money to become a space tourist, following in the footsteps of American Dennis Tito, South Afrian Mark Shuttleworth, and American Greg Olsen.  Japan's Daisuke Enomoto was also scheduled for a space tour, but the failure of a medical test earlier this summer brought his travel plans to a halt and allowed Anousheh's trip to happen.

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As a small company, we've always struggled with how best to market our media monitoring platform, Impactwatch™.  We don't have a dedicated sales force or the budget to sponsor every conference or present at every trade show.  We also aren't much for intrusive cold calling (unlike a lot of folks in this space).  Plus, it's difficult to explain Impactwatch™ on a marketing site with text and screenshots - it's the kind of product that doesn't really click until you see an in person demo and/or play with it yourself. 

We may be delusional, but we think we have a great product here.   We just need more folks to give it a try.

So we're trying a different approach.  Today, we are launching a new version of our Impactwatch™ marketing site that includes an invitation to sign up for a 5 day pass to a demo of the product.  The topic of the demo is the Connecticut Senate race between Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman.  We'll run this demo until November 15th, and then launch a new one on some other timely, non-political topic soon thereafter.  This initial demo will track only Mainstream Media (MSM) - in future demos we will show how Impactwatch™ can be used to help track the blogosphere in addition to MSM.

I would encourage anyone who is interested to sign up for our demo now.  You can also check our our FAQ about the demo to learn more.  We'll begin issuing usernames and passwords for the demo tomorrow.

If you have questions or comments about the demo, please feel free to send me an email or give me a call at 202-741-1500. 

After reading Robert Scoble's account of his conversation with Richard Edelman about the fake Wal-Mart blog, I think this cartoon from Gaping Void may have hit the nail on the head.

So it looks like there is yet another Wal-Mart/Edelman blog controversy.  The gist of the story is that a blog  launched in late September that was supposedly written by a couple traveling across America in an RV and spending nights parked in Wal-Mart lots.  It turned out the blog was paid for by a Wal-Mart funded group and one of the blog's authors is a Washington Post photographer.  None of this information was disclosed on the blog.  You can read commentary on the issue here, here, here and here. 

I think we are going to see lots more misteps like this in the coming months and years.  Lots of companies and organizations are starting to cautiously participate in the blogosphere without really understanding it.  Many are participating using an old school PR/advertising mindset.  Meaning they are trying to manipulate people instead of trying to talk to them.

Note the blog is no longer active and older posts have been removed.

Update: Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel from Wal-Mart's PR firm, Edelman Public Relations, have dived on their swords for the lack of transparency in the Wal-Mart campaign and issued mea culpas.   It was the right move.

But I think it is important to point out that this program was a bad idea even if Wal-Mart was completely transparent about the payment of the bloggers.  The whole RV tour idea just strikes me as old fashioned and, well, boring.  I don't think the point here is to bring the same tired old ideas to a new medium. 

With the rise of blogging has come blogger relations: the efforts of PR and marketing types to get bloggers, some influential with large audiences, some obscure with niche ones, and everyone else in between, to write about their companies and clients' products.

In many ways there's nothing new to this development.  PR types have always worked, basically their bread and butter, to get print, radio and TV reporters to write about and promote their clients' products.  Reporters from the national newspapers to the city dailies get hit with press releases, product samples, and phone calls.  Getting a favorable story by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal can launch a new tech product.  A bad review can do the opposite.

And the better PR pros get to know key reporters very well, and know how reporters work and are able to make the reporter's job easier.  But no money changes hands.  There may be lunches, speaking engagements and other honoraria, but no payments.

But now it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products.  There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend.  There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts.  Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads.  (Yes, this is a real problem.)

Here's my favorite quote from the story: Noramn Miglietta from Turner Sports interactive says that

"paying bloggers to mention an event is no different that buying an ad." 'If it's informative and not misleading, I don't see that as a conflict.'"

Yeah, right. Ask him for a mention or buy an advertisement.  Otherwise the blogger is a paid shill and is being dishonest if he doesn't disclose the 'sponsorship'.  If this goes unchecked bloggers run the risk of being viewed as the social media's equivalent of junk mail and spam.   Caveat Lector. 

In the wake of the purchase of YouTube by Google, there has been a lot of discussion about online video and the various companies trying to gain market share in the space.  When you look at the various players, you’ll see a lot of different approaches.  Some focus on viral video.  Some focus on sharing videos with friends and family.  Some focus on serving the needs of video bloggers.

As someone who builds websites for a living, I’ve been looking at these services the last few weeks.  What I’ve been contemplating is using these services to host videos for some of our clients. 

We’ve built custom Flash video players for a number of clients and we will continue to do so for those who want or need a custom player.  But for clients that produce four of five videos a year, why not host the video using one of these third party services? 

You save time since all the services automatically convert videos into FLV (Flash) format for you.  You save bandwidth costs by hosting through a third party.  You also get a lot of value-added features that you aren’t going to have the resources to build into a custom player yourself.

We launched a website for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation earlier this week that includes a few videos.  After looking at four or five options, I ended up hosting the videos through blip.tv.  Here’s what I like about the service and why I chose it.

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eKarjala inspired me to take the time and dig up some fossils of today's most popular websites using the Wayback Machine. Click on the images to be taken to the archived websites and the text link to see today's versions:

APPLE (December, 1998)

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