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An increasing number of users are turning to Facebook to watch their favorite films and online videos rising up to 47 million people this last July. According to recent statistics by comScore, Facebook has reached the third spot among the most popular websites when it comes to broadcasting online videos.

Google Sites keeps the number one spot being the most popular source of online videos, attracting 143,000,000 viewers and Yahoo keeps a steady second place with 55,000,000 viewers. The rest of the list is integrated by Microsoft Sites with 45 million viewers, VEVO (43 million), Fox Interactive Media (38 million), Turner Network (33 million), Viacom Digital (30 million), Disney Online (28 million) and finally Hulu with 28 million spectators.
In a nutshell, these numbers let slip that 84.9% of U.S. Internet users viewed online video.

Video ad statistics go as follows; Hulu produced the highest number of video impressions at 783 million, Tremor Media Video Network ranked second overall (the highest one among video ad networks) with 452 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network (248 million) and Microsoft Sites (232 million). The rest of the list is formed by Google Sites (219), Crosspoint Media (206), SpotTXchange Video Ad Network (170), CBS Interactive (134), BBE (120) and Viacom Digital (110).

Americans viewed nearly 3.6 billion video ads and reached 44.5% of the total U.S. population an average of 27 times during the month. Hulu delivered an average of 27.9 over the course of the month. The top video ad networks, in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S., population were: ScanScout Network at 40.5 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 39.4 percent, and Break Media Network at 38.7 percent.
The average online content video duration was 4.8 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes. Video ads accounted for 9.8 percent of all videos viewed and 0.9 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

However, ComScore’s statistics do not take into consideration the videos linked directly by their users through the social media website’s video tool from YouTube; therefore, there may be some miscalculation when it comes to determining Facebook’s performance in this field. Watch out for Facebook!

eBay is in its 15 year anniversary and Facebook just announced it has over 1/2 billion members. It’s amazing to me when I think back on all the things that eBay did over its 15 year course. Pretty amazing how this site changed the face of ecommerce on the web. However, one of the things that it did in the last few years, I find really interesting. Since John Donahoe become the CEO, what’s most interesting about eBay is to compaire its growth to others. If you look to the last few years of eBay and the last few years of Facebook, you can see how one man’s trash became another man’s treasure.

Facebook is right now the number one site on the internet with over five hundred million users in social media. It’s getting more traffic now than Google, as a landing page, and just a few years ago it was not even on the radar. What made Facebook grow so fast? It was the community. What made eBay grow so fast in the 90’s? It was the community. The last eBay Live I attended was themed “the Power of Us All” which was recognizing the power of the community.

Yet recently, eBay and John Donahoe have decided that the community is no longer important for their platform and they even rolled out the founder of eBay to help them trashed it. eBay told their community to basically f*ck off, we are NOT going to keep things fair and balanced. I think John Donahoe refers to the eBay community principle, as a “sacred cow” in this video with Pierre. At one time Peirre valued and treasured that cow, but guess they missed the meaning of the word “sacred” and messed with the magic formula. The new eBay says nope, we got other things more important to us than our community. They trashed all of the tools that the community would use to communicate with each other. Bought Skype and then figured out that they did not want the community to talk to each other. They changed all the open chat forums and boards and locked them down tight. So tight, that the community could no freely interact with one another the way they did in the past.

Donahoe and crew even removed the ability to blog on their platform, discouraged the sharing of photos in ads. Now just a few years later and all

of these kind of things that eBay threw away basically became Facebook, now you see how community is so important to a business model. They are building a business model around the community the same way that eBay built its business model via a community. The community is the most important nucleon of any business.

I remember back in the late 80’s, early 90’s, one of my most favorite shows was a show called “Cheers” and they had a song, and in the theme

song it said “A place where everybody knows your name” and no matter how good or bad the economy was or how good or bad people’s lives were. They always communed at this little bar called Cheers. So, cheers never had an episode about it going out of business or having money problem, because they could always sell liquor to their community.

Community is probably one of the most important factors in business so get it, understand it and use it for your benefit in your business. Don’t trash your community; learn from the mistakes of companies like eBay and from the successes of companies like Facebook. Embrace your community!

I am so all over the recent push of new tools from Facebook. The boy faced billionaire CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a series of simplified and more seamless experiences for users with the Facebook Open Graph platform during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco.

These social plug-ins, which are dropped into sites and allow the user to see which of your friends like content around the Web, will make Facebook applications a lot more social, said Zuckerberg, without sharing any unnecessary data.

There are now more than 400 million people on Facebook, four times as many as there were the last time Facebook held an F8 event. It took Facebook only a year for Facebook Connect to have 100 million users on both mobile devices and Web sites.

"These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web, and today with the Open Graph we’re bringing all these things together," Zuckerberg said.

This is something that will go far beyond the "news feed" structure that Facebook pioneered several years ago. "The stream is ephemeral. You post something to the stream and people see it for a few hours and then it mostly floats away," Zuckerberg said of the current craze in real-time streaming information–a possible dig at Twitter, the company that ignited it all and has been encroaching upon Facebook territory with its own "@Anywhere" product.

"We’re going to make it possible to make those connections," Zuckerberg said. For example, a "news feed" item about a Yelp review of a restaurant could bring up more information about the restaurant and which of a user’s Facebook friends have been there.

"We’re going to connect all of those different graphs together to form the Open Graph, and when we connect all of those graphs together, the Web is going to get a whole lot better," Zuckerberg said.

So of course I had to see what the hell the dude what talking about and WOW! Look above. I am loving these new plug ins that work so easily. Above are two of the Facebook social plugins you can add called Activity Feed and the Recommendations one…also at the bottom of the post you will see the NEW Like button which is a huge improvement over the old Fan buttons. If you want to see this in action here is what you can do…

1) Press the like button below to ad your "like" to this post

2) Refresh the page and look at the Recent Activity and you should see your action IN REAL TIME

This is so freakin sweet isn’t it? Facebook will NOT be left behind in social media and it is quickly becoming my favorite social platform of choice…this week, LMAO. Next week I am sure I will change again.

Paypal continues to show rapid growth and has been front and center on eBay earnings calls as the darling of its portfolio. Who is the LARGEST merchant of Paypal? Well that one is pretty easy, its the momma bear….eBay.

Yep, eBay makes more money and transactions for Paypal than any other single merchant on the platform. Everybody knows that one, right? Easy answer, that is almost a gimme question. But then I will ask you who is #2? What would you think is the #2 merchant for PayPal? Maybe you guessed it right off the bat, but I didn’t. I got it wrong and then heard the real answer and did a V-8 head slap. The second largest Paypal merchant is none other than Zynga, I know, crazy huh?!?

Zynga is a casual game developer located in San Francisco, California, United States. The company develops browser-based games that work both stand-alone and as application widgets on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Zynga is probably best know for the Facebook games of Farmville, Fishville and Mafia Wars.

I know man, that is crazy when you really think about it. Did you know that according to Wikipedia  through 2009 Zynga makes its money from lead generation advertising and selling virtual health and gifts to game players. In 2009  Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch republished a video of a speech by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus.  In the speech, Pincus said:

So I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the [face]book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don’t know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.

—Mark Pincus, Speech from Startup@Berkeley

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Several days after the Techcrunch story, Zynga’s most recent Facebook game FishVille, was temporarily taken offline by Facebook on claim of advertising violations. According to Zynga, Fishville had 875,000 users within two days of launch.

Pincus later said that he had been too eager to increase company revenues through advertising, and that operating in reactive mode by taking down ads only after receiving complaints had not worked. The company removed all ads for a time, relying only on direct purchase of game currency, then began reintroducing third party ads only after they had been screened.

What is crazy to me is that this type of revenue seems to be somewhat "fleeting" at best. I know Facebook users like to play Farmville today but how long can Paypal expect that money to continue to flow in. Right now it is somewhat un-opposed as an alternate payment processor for Facebook games. But you got to think about all of the Paypal growth stories coming from John Donahoe on the earnings calls that you have heard. Personally, I was under the impression that Paypal was seeing large growth in ecommerce and online retail acceptance, come to find out, it is seeing most of its growth from Farmville, LMAO. I just found that revelation somewhat fascinating, don’t you?!?

Scot Wingo blows the roof off! This interview is so full of sizzle and STEAK. Man, I have not heard this much great information and insight anywhere, honestly. This is such a good "exclusive" interview.

Hey, Scot even brought some brand new stats on Amazon CGM, eBay Antique Sellers, Google vs. Bing…Damn I could go on, but why? Just look at the notes and PRESS PLAY!

Listen to the Interview NOW!
(press play button and be patient, it takes a minute to buffer)

OR Click to Download

OR Subscribe to the series via iTunes 

Scot Wingo – CEO ChannelAdvisor.com and eBayStrategies.com

2:12 – Amazon vs. eBay Growth
3:05 – What is EGM?
4:10 – Amazon partitions are growing at up to 54%
5:50 – 5 Points – Value, Ease, Merchandising, Trust, Selection
7:12 – 600 Million Shoes … wow
8:03 – Amazon has moved marketing $$$ to free shipping
8:54 – Can eBay subsidize its free shipping model?
10:22 – Is ChannelAdvisor keeping up with eBay changes?
14:24 – How does WalMart.com & Sears.com factor into the eCommerce mix
15:29 – Marketplace Wars
16:34 – Is the Kindle a factor for Amazon’s traffic success?
17:26 – Google Commerce Search Changes
18:15 – Google Search 62% – Bing Seach 35%
19:20 – eCommerce Search is up to 40% of all search
20:12 – eBay Best Match Search
21:14 – eBay Top Rated Seller Program
24:21 – Should eBay Go Retail? (http://ow.ly/ECvi)
26:01 – Some EXCLUSIVE eBay Numbers Data From Wingo!
28:00 – Are Antiques and Collectables suffering on eBay?
29:40 – Will eBay changes squeeze out the SMB’s on eBay?
30:30 – eBay vs. Paypal
33:00 – 45% of Paypal is actually eBay (the Paypal Monopoly)
34:15 – Paypal is holding up to 15% of sellers GMV
36:17 – Social Media – is it a viable channel for selling?
37:01 – eCommerce on Facebook
39:27 – Mobile commerce (red lazer, shopsavvy, deocrab)
42:00 – ChannelAdvisor Catalyst May 3-5 (www.ChannelAdvisor.com/Catalyst)

Press "Play" to listen now

Be sure to subscribe so you do not miss an episode.

On the ColderICE Facebook discussion boards I have asked the simple question; How do you use Social sites to support your business?

There really is NO right or wrong answer here, it is the open question of the week. Do you use it? Should you use it? Should you NOT use it? WHY?

Sure all of the "so-called" savviest in social media experts have a say, LMAO. But it really boils down to the business owners. Is social marketing a tool that you will use? If so how? If not, why not?

Screw the masses, what do YOU think. It is possibly one of the most important topics and it has a vast area of differentiation.

Let me here what you think, simply CLICK HERE and join the discussion.

In September 2009, nearly 27 billion hours were spent on the Internet globally by a record online population of 1.2 billion Internet users age 15 and older. Microsoft Sites accounted for 14.5 percent of total minutes spent online in September, making it the most engaging global property, with Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger representing nearly 70 percent of time spent on the property during the month.

Google Sites captured 9.3 percent of total minutes (2.5 billion hours), with YouTube accounting for nearly half of total time spent (1.2 billion hours) at the property. Yahoo! Sites ranked as the third most engaging Web property at 1.7 billion hours, followed by Facebook.com at 1.4 billion hours. Facebook’s share of attention reached 5.1 percent in September, an increase of 2.9 percentage points from the previous year, as its continued growth in popularity precipitated this surge in share.

  Top Global Properties Based on Total Hours
  September 2009 vs. September 2008
  Total Audience Age 15+ at Home/Work Locations*
  Source: comScore World Metrix
  -----------------------------
                                         Total Hours (MM)
                                         ---------------
                                Sep-2008        Sep-2009      % Change
                                --------        --------      --------
  Total Internet : Total
   Audience                       21,746          26,988            24
  ----------------------          ------          ------           ---
  Microsoft Sites                  2,734           3,920            43
  ---------------                  -----           -----           ---
  Google Sites                     1,703           2,512            48
  ------------                     -----           -----           ---
  Yahoo! Sites                     1,975           1,699           -14
  ------------                     -----           -----           ---
  Facebook.com                       474           1,387           193
  ------------                       ---           -----           ---
  Tencent Inc.                       589             893            52
  ------------                       ---             ---           ---
  AOL LLC                            584             513           -12
  -------                            ---             ---           ---
  eBay                               231             239             3
  ----                               ---             ---           ---
  Fox Interactive Media              361             204           -44
  ---------------------              ---             ---           ---
  Baidu.com Inc.                     175             163            -7
  --------------                     ---             ---           ---
  Lycos Sites                         59             107            81
  -----------                        ---             ---           ---

  *Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or
  access from mobile phones or PDAs.

  Global Regions Exhibit Different Preferences at Top Online Brands

A regional analysis of the top global properties in time spent by their visitors revealed different preferences across global markets. Microsoft Sites held the largest share of time spent among the top worldwide properties in Europe (16.8 percent), Latin America (35.9 percent) and the Middle East – Africa (33.1 percent). Yahoo! Sites captured the largest share of time in North America with 11.2 percent share, while also attracting a notable 7.9-percent share of time spent in the Asia Pacific region. Google Sites commanded a strong share of time spent in Latin America (19.4 percent), Middle East – Africa (9.7 percent), Europe (9.6 percent) and North America (9.1 percent). China’s Tencent Inc. captured the largest share of visitors’ time in Asia Pacific with a 10.7-percent share, but had negligible engagement in other worldwide regions.

  Share of Time Spent at Top 5 Global Properties Based on Total Minutes
  September 2009
  Total Audience Age 15+ at Home/Work Locations*
  Source: comScore World Metrix
  -----------------------------

                     Share (%) of Total Time Spent Online in Region
                     ----------------------------------------------
                                                                    Middle
                              North              Asia      Latin    East -
                 Worldwide   America   Europe   Pacific   America   Africa
                 ---------   -------   ------   -------   -------   ------
  Microsoft Sites  14.5%       8.6%     16.8%     6.4%      35.9%    33.1%
  ---------------  ----        ---      ----      ---       ----     ----
  Google Sites      9.3%       9.1%      9.6%     6.4%      19.4%     9.7%
  ------------      ---        ---       ---      ---       ----      ---
  Yahoo! Sites      6.3%      11.2%      2.0%     7.9%       2.1%     4.9%
  ------------      ---       ----       ---      ---        ---      ---
  Facebook.com      5.1%       6.0%      6.6%     2.4%       5.0%     8.0%
  ------------      ---        ---       ---      ---        ---      ---
  Tencent Inc.      3.3%       0.0%      0.0%    10.7%       0.0%     0.0%
  ------------      ---        ---       ---     ----        ---      ---

  *Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or
  access from mobile phones or PDAs.

"The Internet continues to be a dynamic and growing environment around the world with the global online population climbing more than 20 percent in the last year," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. "With the U.S. economy only now emerging from a recession, many multinational corporations have shifted the focus of their growth strategies towards developing markets and the Internet represents an important aspect of those strategies. Understanding the global Internet landscape is the first step towards executing effective marketing strategies in these growing markets."

Hard to believe that just 15 years ago AOL ruled the world of the internet huh? Nope, there was no rumors of this Google thingy and Yahoo was just a bunch of links. However AOL was the place where you went to market to users, on AOL internet marketing ruled.

You wanted to get your brand on the internet, then you simply HAD to have a www.AOL.com/MyWidget address back in the day. You wanted to tap into the gigantic user base of AOL registrants? You would create an app using their proprietary platform…sound familiar?

Want more similarity? OK…My Mom, who is now over 70 years old now, got her first taste of computing by using AOL. For her, AOL was the INTERNET. She would say. "I saw thus-and-so on the internet", not understanding that what she was in was the AOL universe. She would NEVER click a link that brought up the standard warning message "You are about to be taken off of AOL to an unknown link" that would stop her dead in her browsing tracks.

Fast forward to 2009 and I am seeing the same thing. My family and friends who are FAR from technophiles are now using Facebook and for them, that "IS" the internet. This is their walled protective environment, but this time around the prison has a few windows to see out by linking to good stuff.

But what I find, by looking at their profiles, is that for the most part, they stay pretty much in the walled red zone. Almost NONE of them have links to stories outside of the safe domain of Facebook. The are simply not net savvy and Facebook is about the only place they desire to explore.

So John, what are you saying? …. Nothing, just contemplating the similarity….for now (stay tuned).