Twitter’s Traffic Climbs to Record Levels

Twitter is flirting with the top 10 sites in the world based on Alexa’s traffic ranking system. Perhaps most people don’t realize Twitter is still putting on record growth because the Fail Whale hasn’t been making many appearances lately.

The novelty of Twitter may have worn off quickly for the original generation of twitter users, but the masses are finally discovering how to use twitter and overall activity is higher than ever for every metric.

Twitter traffic rated by Quantcast over the past 12 months:

Simplified mobile applications, integration into popular sites, and real time search result placements in Google have dramatically boosted exposure for the millions of Tweets posted daily.

How I get down on Twitter:

TweetDeck – hopefully you’ve already tried this yourself. Easily manage multiple accounts on multiple social networks, auto-url shortening with stats integration from bit.ly, and tons of custom layout options.

Web based clients:

Hoot Suite – great aggregator options allow you to manage multiple accounts with ease. Follow only the topics that you’re interested in with ease. The best feature for me here is scheduled Tweets on multiple accounts.

TwitterFall – posts fall onto your screen for whatever topics you choose. Uses different color backgrounds for tweets from different searches you’ve setup . It’s very hand to follow breaking events or trends.

Find me on twitter @jaytoddmartin

Google AdSense Accounts Disabled Before First Payment

Recently one of our web hosting clients had her Adsense account disabled right after she crossed the minimum payout threshold so I examined her Analytics and asked about her click-thru rates, if she had ever clicked her own ads, etc. I did a quick search for “disabled Adsense May 2010″ and as expected found a ton of results. What I wasn’t expecting were so many mom and pop websites with seemingly legitimate and hurt web site owners begging Google for even a one line reply about why they were not going to get paid.

The volumes of complaints about Adsense posted in the 24 hours before I started searching was a real eye opener to the potential for fraud from both publishers and from Google.

Could Google steal more traffic this way than anyone else online? I can’t think of a single company in a position to hijack more surfer clicks than good old GewG ;-) The funniest cases I’ve seen are where Google disables Adsense accounts because of fraudulent traffic and Google themselves are the only source of traffic for the account owner.

It’s just good business for Google to review an Adsense account’s quality before sending the first check. They must protect their advertisers and their integrity – I want and need them to do this. I’m more concerned they can use this review window to save themselves a ton of money, and get rid of many small advertisers that aren’t moving the needle with any serious traffic. No one knows what % of publishers get their accounts disabled once they meet the minimum payout level, estimates I’ve seen are sky high. Of course the check is never sent if the account is disabled.

To be honest, from a business standpoint as an advertiser on Google Adwords this is awesome. Every time they nuke a publisher’s site we can keep the traffic and not pay for any of it. I still wonder if Google is crediting back ALL of the money I’ve spent with webmasters they refuse to pay (pesky gewg!).

As a human being, I feel bad for all the legitimate folks who worked hard to grow their revenue to the payout threshold only to have Google kick them in the mouth. What’s the lesson here? Google is evil, but unfortunately so is everyone else. Diversify your revenue streams so you get screwed less directly by advertisers and ad networks.

Lemons Or Lemonade: Did you get screwed on Adsense and you’re sure they are ripping everyone off? Stop crying. Start advertising on the content network and grab your share of the free traffic you know they aren’t paying anyone for!

YouTube Layout Changes Disappoint Users

The new YouTube layout changes have been met with a lot of criticism from users for a good reason. I have to admit for a week I thought something I changed in my browser settings was causing YouTube’s layout to break .. but then I realized it was showing this way for everyone, on purpose.

A few weeks has passed and I’m still amazed no changes have been made. I decided to do a quick search on google for anything posted in the past 24 hours related to Youtube Layout Changes. This forum was near the top of the results and I clicked it. Notice how every single post is negative? Here are some posts I’d like to highlight:

Furburt: “Let me just say this here. Youtube is the worst (noticeable) online community there is. Worse than 4 chan, or Something Awful or Gamefaqs. As a video sharing website it’s fine, but as a community, you could not do worse, unless you search for bad communities intentionally. ”

FFS-dontcare “The previous system was good enough. We should be given a choice between this new system and the old one by way of selecting it in account options or something, not be forced to use the new one. The old one was more than adequate, and it was easily straight-forward.”

Samurai Gumba “YouTube would have to dispense diamonds onto my keyboard before my experience would be measurably improved.”

Alucard “I dislike the new layout, I dislike the new rating system, and I especially dislike the new Beta channels that they thought necessary for all users to have. My “related videos” are not even related to the stuff I like to watch either, or at best only tangentally related. With each “improvement” it gets worse.”

Is anyone at Google noticing the dislike to what YouTube is Doing? Some people are starting to get the feeling they aren’t. Are YouTube’s legal issues distracting them? Maybe the continued financial losses are just killing morale?

Sooner or later jobs will be lost over this at YouTube one way or another. The backlash and negative impact can’t be avoided now. A mistake this big can’t be swept under the rug. Google has to realize the YT devision is backfiring more than a 83 Gran Torino and it’s only a matter of time before they put in a new pit crew.

My hope is the fresh group that comes in has a better understanding of easy design improvements can be if they build them around community suggestions and listen to user feedback. Call me overly optimistic, but I think their ability to lose more money than anyone else for more years than anyone else in the entire video space gives them about 25 more lives.

YouTube Trades Star Ratings for Likes and Dislikes

YouTube has traded in the 5 star rating system for a Like/Dislike system. Off the bat, it seems to devalue search results (no longer can see the rating of each video) by only indicating which videos are most liked and not displaying any ratings information for the other 90% of videos on the page.

YouTube has been busy changing their site and user experience every week for the past month. Half the time i’m wondering if my browser is misfiring. Did they test all these layout changes with certain users before making them public so quickly?

They are changing the user experience so fast it seems like it would be impossible to measure the effects of each new variant to optimize and learn from each change.

Here is what the new Like/Dislike display looks like for a video AFTER you vote:

I’m not sure if it’s just the “Friend this user / Subscribe to user” mystery that still annoys me or if YouTube is continuing to do things that just don’t make much sense? I guess they are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

With nearly a $1.5millon/day shortfall on revenue, a horrible social networking experience, and basically no evolution for 3 years; I think somehow I have to count these recent blunders as progress.

Maybe Google moved the old YouTube crew over to Google Buzz, always keeping the same people on projects that are years late to market and years behind.

Google Right Side Sponsored Link Thumbnail Images

Today is the first time I noticed thumbnail images in the right side sponsored ads in google search results. Perhaps Google is taking some lessons away from Facebook’s success using the thumbnail + text for sidebar ad delivery.

Check out this example (click for fullsize)

Notice how many of the links on Google’s search results are now sponsored? They have taken 80% of the first page results for themselves.

BING should have an easier time growing market share if Google can annoy their surfers enough with the sponsored listings.