my.blog

My.Projects

Game Baker Easy to use, graphical Game Designer for linux.

Social Comic Book Display your twitter posts in a comic book layout.

Seam Resizer Implementation of seam removal and insertion for photo editing.

More:

Viral Ad Network Make money from your website by showing viral ads on your site.

Santa's Snowy Workshop A highly playable Christmas Real Time Strategy game..

My.Papers

Average Views on YouTube The average daily views/video on YouTube doubles at the end of 2007.

My.Blog

Nerdy news updates and articles
Tim Wintle
Fig 1

Tim Wintle's Blog

Tim works at Team Rubber, where he uses Python, large computers, and some clever maths to look at the web in new ways. In his free time he codes various other bits of software, and web apps.

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Tue, 29 Jan 2008

What is the Viral Ad Network?
So I've been talking about the viral ad network a lot recently (e.g. Viral Videos, Banner Blindness and Listening to myself speak), and about the work I have been doing working on some of the research into Average YouTube Views that I have been doing as a part of it, but I realised that I have not really explained what it is (actually I realised this when my mum called me the other night and asked me).
Here's the overview:
For a few years now the standard method of getting paid from advertising online has been Google AdSense. This was all fine in 2002, but it's five years later now and people are suffering banner blindness, they're just not clicking on traditional adverts as much any more. (in fact they're not even seeing them).
What is worse - running too many banners and AdSense blocks on your site can put your users off.
Most websites don't know about it yet, but there is another way. Advertisers are beginning to create adverts that are specifically designed to be entertaining. These adverts may be videos, games or mini websites, but they are all designed to spread virally (i.e. so that visitors find them so entertaining that they email them to a friend, who emails them to other friends, who email it to other friends.
Where You come into this
When a viral is first put on the web nobody knows about it, and to start off the "viral" growth, the ad companies need to do something called Viral Seeding, which is basically getting the first few thousand people to have a look at the game, movie, or whatever, hoping that they will send it around to their friends.
This is where website publishers come into it. By becoming a Viral Ad Publisher, you help the companies get the first few thousand views, and the Viral Ad Network gives you money for it.
I hope that helps to explain a little more about what the viral ad network is, if you're interested go over to the site and sign up, or if you just want to search for viral videos then head over to viralsauce.com - another site I have been working on recently.

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Sun, 13 Jan 2008

Youtube Views Double in Oct-Dec 2007.
Update: Read the full press release here
I have just published some research I did for Rubber Republic on the change in average daily views/video on YouTube over the past quarter.
To summarise the data briefly: There has never been a better time to post YouTube videos.
We found that the average number of youtube visits per video has roughly doubled over the previous quarter. That roughly means that if you post a video now, you can expect nearly twice as many viewers as you would have recieved a few months ago.
The WGA strike
One of the major factors people attribute to the growth of video sharing sites recently is the Writers Guild of America striking in the US. We tend to find that, for our metric of views per video, this was not so important, possibly because of the increased number of people publishing their own videos.
More information can be found on the Viral Research and Strategy page of Viral Manager, or you can view the entire report : YouTube Views Double in Oct-Dec 2007 (pdf).
This research was carried out using a system which I helped develop at Rubber Republic funded, in part, by the South West Screen Alliances for Convergence Programme.

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Wed, 09 Jan 2008

Social Comic Book Wins Award

Social Comic Book, a twitter / flickr mashup I created in 2007 has won Mashup of the Day over on mashupawards.com. I'd like to thank my mother, my father, God, the guys at Bristol's best curry house, the Brunel Raj, ...
On a serious note though, I'm sorry to all those who tried to view the site yesterday, we've had power problems all over bristol, and servers have been going down like anything, both here and at my ISP. Afraid I was too busy keeping Viral Sauce up to notice the problems on social comic book.

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Sat, 05 Jan 2008

Viral Videos, Banner Blindness, and listening to myself speak.
Firstly the viral content network that I started working on last year slowly developed into a viral video search engine (viral sauce), and now part of another project I have done some work on, (Team Rubber's viral campaign management system) has split off into a dedicated viral ad publisher system.
To help with our launch, I was involved in creating some simple video tutorials for webmasters. The videos cover a range of topics, including using videos for SEO (one of mine). I'll post links to more of these videos in the coming weeks.
Today, though, I'm going to share one of the other videos I created, and the one which seems to be most popular so far.

Getting past Banner Blindness using Viral Ads

(I'm always a little nervous about doing voiceovers for videos, I'm not sure that my voice comes across well - but feel free to give me any comments to the contrary, hint hint)
This video has a quick look at some eye-tracking studies available online, and then suggests how viral video ads can remove the "banner blindness" effect. The Basic idea is that users are trained to look at the content on your page, and to ignore the ads. When you start to use viral content as your actual page content (since viral content is designed to be interesting in itself), the user continues to look at the page content, but this time it is the content that is pulling you in money.
I also cover why this is not like "paid links", the system that Google is picking up on as spam. Enjoy...

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Fri, 07 Sep 2007

Microsoft Silverlight - "cross-browser, cross-platform" media

So, Microsoft have released their new silverlight platform, designed for "Cross-browser, cross-platform" media content, and have released Tafiti, a silvelight frontend to windows live search. Eager to view it, I searched for "tafiti" in Google and recieved the following description:

tafiti

You'll need to install Silverlight to experience Tafiti.com. We’re sorry, but Tafiti doesn’t support Safari 3 beta yet. Tafiti supports Internet Explorer .."

Apart from their obvious skill at ranking for the term "tafiti" (the term is repeated five times in the entry on the SERP), I couldn’t help thinking that the people who designed this search engine could do with a little training in SEO - this wasn’t the most descriptive text.

Assuming that Microsoft clearly just hadn’t yet finished their version of silverlight for the (rather unpopular) safari I continued to the page, to a blank page with a small button telling me to download silverlight. Note this is not the fancy screen you will see in Windows using Internet Explorer, but a very plain black page with a button that seemed totally out of place. Still the optimist, I clicked to download it and eventually got redirected to the download page for my operating system, which can be found here (I encourage you to open this in a new tab and download the version of silverlight available).

Confused, welcome to the "cross-browser, cross platform" part of Microsoft’s new venture. I know I am using Linux, and there are only 29 Million of us out there, but I had hoped that "Cross-browser, cross-platform" may include us. I had also hoped that my browser (Firefox) would at least be able to display the download page correctly. Clearly it does not include anybody using *nix or Apple users who use Safari. What is more, I am unable to find exactly what Microsoft defines as "cross-browser", since whenever I try to find out I get send the usefull page above.

I did try to look at the source code for tafiti for more information of supported browsers, however I gave up after noticing 40 lines of Javascript code to catch Silverlight errors (I can't remember seeing that for a flash movie). Anybody else have any news about silverlight? Leave a comment.


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