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Editor’s note: Earlier this week, guest writer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan wrote a post about the state of online video. In this post he follows up with some thoughts on what’s holding back this budding industry. Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, a leading producer of premium, informative and entertaining video content. The company’s catalog of 5,000 videos has generated over 100 million streams since 2006. Photo credit: Flickr/Paraflyer.

After four years in the online video business, one thing is clear: if you produce high quality content and build sufficient distribution across a large enough number of consumer touch points, you can generate more than enough revenue from multiple sources and platforms to build a profitable, stand-alone business.  But no one said it would be quick or easy. Building distribution isn’t obvious and most producers fail to build any meaningful reach, but if you can hatch an editorial direction and business strategy that can attract an audience, over time you will be able to create a real business around it.  But keep in mind the surprises below.

Surprise #1: Lack of Definitions and Standards After All of These Years

Steven Spielberg was trying to transition online with Pop.com in the 1990s and, until his resignation last week, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser has been “at this” for 16 years since 1994 .  Yet to this day, in online video, we still don’t speak a common language.

Heck, we’re not even on the same planet. The first thing you realize about video advertising is that most of the money being generated from video content isn’t derived from in-stream advertising (such as pre-,mid-, or post-roll) but rather by in-banner ads (be they standard display ads or rich media). Yet when you look at the projections being forecast by eMarketer and Forrester, they focus mainly on videos sold inside the video player.

Meanwhile, as online video consumption continues to soar, it is clear that the share of total advertising for video content is going to be much larger than the projections suggest.  YouTube, for example, sells pre-roll ads on an infinitely small percentage of its videos. They generate the lion’s share via display banners. Personally, I think that while display banners aren’t worth much in articles because a reader scrolls down quickly past them, next to video content they are worth a lot more.

But with so much video being consumed on third-party sites, how can producers stay in business, let alone thrive?

One answer, of course, is branded content, which remains unproven at best, and the latest fad at worst.

Surprise #2: The Myth That Branded Content Is a New Thing

Branded content can be many things. It is ultimately the blurring of church and state, or information and advertising. Examples are numerous and include:

• Soap operas, which were funded initially by Procter & Gamble
• That ubiquitous Coca Cola cup on American Idol
• A web series about a couple trying to conceive sponsored by a home pregnancy test
• How-to videos featuring products, such as the use of a particular vodka or gin in a how-to-make-a-martini video.

Whereas publishers have always relied in part on advertiser support, branded content tends to be fully supported by a marketer.  With the so-called death of the 30-second spot and the short-form nature of online video entertainment, the appeal of branded content is growing among video producers desperate to make a buck.

Problem is if a producer waits for the green light from a marketer to produce content that bakes in advertising, they just won’t scale their libraries, which means they won’t grow overall streams.

Also, it begs the question: does branded content fall into video advertising or sponsorship? That detail isn’t clear yet. But with so many competitors vying in the genre, it’s worth questioning how important it will be over the long term and if audiences will accept it.  What looks like the light at the end of the tunnel for many struggling online video producers could turn out to be an oncoming train.

Surprise #3: It Takes A Different Playbook

The biggest difference with regards to monetizing videos as opposed to articles is that it requires a “distribution-over-destination” strategy. When Quincy Smith took over as CEO of CBS Interactive, he said that the Tiffany network’s Innertube project should have been renamed “CBS.com/NoOneComesHere.”

No wonder then that the first video content companies went out of business—because they sought to build “owned-and-operated” properties. This strategy might work with text content but is nearly impossible with videos. Search engines don’t pick up video content well. Hosting videos is expensive. Plus, audiences who read a business article don’t automatically watch business videos (and so on).

Looking at the leading video destinations, you quickly realize that they are all basically aggregators or traditional media companies who still reasonably view online video with suspicion and fear.

Surprise #4: Video Consumption Patterns Are Whack

From our experiences, we see that audiences (readers, listeners, viewers) consume content by type (video vs. articles vs. podcasts) and not categories (auto, business, fashion, etc). And when it comes to videos, some categories are much more popular than others, which lead to unreachable expectations for marketers.

According to TubeMogul, 25% of views come in the first four days after a video is published and, over time, the average YouTube video is seen 500 times. Articles are the opposite: search engines tend to drive people to older articles.  This is alarming. In order to win, it is imperative to grow video views over time and generate exponentially more video views than the average.

Surprise #5: Just Because You Build an Audience, Doesn’t Mean The Advertisers Will Come Knocking

There are three main ways to build an audience: the old way and the new ways.

1. The first is a retail approach where viewers watch your videos on your site and your network channels. This is historically how publishers have built audiences.
2. The second is through wholesale partnerships, which are facilitated by MRSS. (RSS – or Real Simple Syndication – has change the way users consume content and publishers ingest and distribute content  Analogously, MRSS – or simply Media RSS – was designed in 2004 by Yahoo! and the Media RSS community. Unbelievably, it has made distributing videos even easier than syndicating text content).
3. The third is through social media: be it bloggers and/or social media referrers on Facebook, Twitter and the countless other outlets.

YouTube pioneered the embedding and viral distribution of video.  It is certainly true that bloggers are the new “newspaper editors” who can make or break a producer. Similarly, the same way that MySpace helped build YouTube’s success at the macro level, social media referrers will help a video take off on the micro level.

Between MRSS simplifying distribution and video’s embeddable nature, syndication exploded . . . but revenues didn’t. But don’t worry.  Over time, marketers follow the audience, they always will.

Surprise #6: When It Comes to Sales, Sell Your Audience, Not Your Videos

Historically, publishers sell ads by audience. But with online video and the lure of branded content, some have developed a tendency to pitch individual videos or a series of videos to advertisers.  Publishers don’t sell by individual articles, so why should they think that they should sell by individual videos, especially when you consider the widespread nature of videos and where they ultimately end up.

Nonetheless, I see way too many producers sell videos over audience, and then when they fail to generate any meaningful distribution, the marketer gets disappointed, blaming the strategy over the tactic.  You have to create audiences for your content. It can be one audience or it can be many.

With a magazine, you can take any one article and project the demographic of that one piece to the whole publication. With videos, due to their embeddable nature, each video can have its own audience profile and as such can embody the demographic of the site that embeds or distributes the video.  So videos have the potential to reach a broader demographic than content locked into one site.  Regardless, until videos generate more revenue from in-stream ads than in-banner ones, videos’ embedding nature remains a double-edged sword.

For a producer to distribute through third party distributors, it means:

1. less recognition of your reach initially. This hurts producers in the short term, but over time, services such as comScore and Nielsen will catch up and offer something while startups like TubeMogul seek to establish the best practices. More importantly, agencies recognize this phenomenon and will let you build your case.
2. less control of the ad inventory, which can be seen as a negative or a positive. Ultimately, as a producer, you have to position this as a plus because you can offer advertisers more reach and share of voice across a larger segment of the online video universe. But, it takes time, especially with a lack of data to support your reach.

Surprise #7: The Myth and Danger of the Viral Video

Too many clients get enamored with the idea of green lighting a viral video. You might as well just flush your money down the toilet instead of approving such a campaign. It is impossible to actually plan for this and if the ad agency you hired is guaranteeing video views, then fire that ad agency yesterday!

But by the same token, who cares if a video generated a million views last month. If an advertiser runs banners next to that video next month and the video fizzles away, it’s moot. This is why it is more important to publish and syndicate videos that over time can generate incremental and sustainable views.  This makes the real estate before and next to the video more valuable.

Surprise #8: With Advertisers Sitting on the Sidelines, Partnerships Need to Make Sense for Producers

Historically, advertisers seek revenue-share deals with publishers to mitigate risks. With video, advertisers have sat out the dance, so the commercial nature boils down to producer/publishers and distributors, who in turn seek revenue share deals with producer/publishers. Problem? Most can’t generate any sales, so producer/publishers don’t get any revenue out of the deals. So my advice is to seek revenue guarantees until advertisers really embrace video advertising.

By and large, most revenue share deals flop because:

• Media companies have great sales teams, but they are only warming up to online video. So while they might be starting to generate revenue from online video, it is immaterial to their operations. Most of these traditional media companies are not producing or publishing enough online, so they are turning to new media producers like us. However, even though they have great sales organizations, they lack volume to make a dent.
• A lot of the video views are coming from video social networks, but most of them are just not set up to sell ads. They are technology companies operating in the media space, not media companies that understand advertising. Often times their VCs bring in experienced sales executives but have very unrealistic expectations. They also have not yet mastered shifting large portions of their audiences from non-sellable user-generated or pirated material to professional content. It has been stated that YouTube, for example, only sells ads next to 15% of their total streams.

However, social media and user generated content has increased pageviews and ad impressions greatly on these sites. Across the web, there is a chance the equilibrium is broken for good. As a result, CPMs are dirt poor and sell-through rates are abysmal. This adds to the challenge and forces a producer to take over the sales process which, while expensive, should ultimately be the end-goal.

Surprise #9: Don’t Chase Hits

Chasing hits is perhaps the most surefire way to kill your business. We adopted the Field of Dreams content strategy: creating content we’re passionate about and/or think audiences will watch, build an audience around it, and only worry about monetizing it afterwards.

It’s not ideal, but the reality is that what works online is very much random. When we look at our most popular videos, we are flabbergasted! This is why online video is such a challenge to TV companies, because they cannot program a show in a time slot and force it down audiences’ throats.

Surprise #10: YouTube is More Open than Challengers

What kind of online video article would be complete without an observation on the leader in the space: YouTube. While far from perfect, YouTube has actually been fairly friendly with producers by allowing them to sell ads around their content.

Surprisingly, this is an “open” strategy. Usually, open strategies are adopted by challengers, not dominant market leaders. You would think that Daily Motion, Veoh and others would allow for this, but they don’t. This hurts their standing and importance in the space. Time will tell if they change their policies and follow the market leader YouTube.

Surprise #11: Everything Won’t Be Ad-Supported

To quote Ty Ahmad-Taylor, it’s true that in theory “if you make television shows, films or music, your business is actually the audience business.  In practice, however, right now there aren’t enough ad dollars to support the “audience” business. So let’s leave the theory for academics. Those in the trenches will tell you it’s about survival, and judging by the past year… it is still about surviving more so than thriving.

After we got disappointed by weak revenues in our earliest syndication deals, we held back distribution and began to pursue licensing deals.  Licensing can generate insanely high eCPMs for a producer, but most producers don’t have the kind of libraries that can command guaranteed and recurring licensing fees. So your best bet to keep the lights on is to command licensing revenues in the short term while you position yourself for syndication revenue over the long term. By doing that, you will in turn build a large enough library to command the richer branded content deals that will push you over the top.

Surprise #12: Search and Video are Still Miles Apart

Ultimately, video is where search was in 1999: a major part of the online ecosystem is still looking for a business model. But history repeats itself and without a doubt video streams will be monetized just as search queries were.

But differences shall remain, with the two leading ones being:

1. Expectations: Google saw over a dozen search companies precede it, most of them had gone out of business, sold or exited search for portaldom. By the time the Nasdaq crashed, Google had an open field with practically no competitors. Video is the exact opposite: even though only YouTube has had a gargantuan exit, VCs have continued to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into so-called YouTube clones (Veoh, Daily Motion, Metacafe) as well as enablers (CDNs and content management systems) and advertising networks (Tremor, Broadband, Yume, Scanscout).  It seems as if everyone is looking for the Google of video, even though for all intents and purposes, Google will be the Google of video thanks to its acquisition of YouTube.
2. Short term vs. long term nature of the payoff. Search is largely a performance kind of medium, whereas video is a branding one. While search captures intent, video captures interest. Both are valuable, but in a very different way.

We’re still early in the development of the online video business, but we are starting to figure it out.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Aprovechando el anterior post hablando de los coches de la Policía Nacional, me he puesto a buscar algo de información sobre los coches de la Policía Autonómica Gallega, que es complicado verla fuera de la capital gallega o de las grandes ciudades pero cuenta con una nutrida flota de vehículos, además todos ellos dispares puesto que no se compran en grandes lotes sino pocas unidades de cada vez y por eso lo hace más curioso aún.

Desde el foro de Coches de Policia, cuentan con una nutrida gama de fotos de varios de los vehículos de la Policía de Galicia y además también buscando e conseguido algunas fotos más de los diferentes modelos que sirven como coche de policía a las autoridades gallegas, puesto que una de las labores principales es de escolta de cargos institucionales o edificios públicos (entre otras funciones).

Los más nuevos en llegar son los SsangYong Kyron, que tienen pocos años en el cuerpo y que los tengo visto en más de una ocasión en alguna comisaría de la autonómica o en labores de escolta de cargos. La verdad es que impresionan bastante y son un todoterreno muy curioso como coche de policía y no es habitual verlos. Pero no es el único vehículo policial de SsangYong, sino que desmarcándome algo más del tema la Xunta de Galicia también donó para las policías locales gallegas varios todoterrenos SsangYong Actyon con motor turbodiesel 200 Xdi de 141 CV y tracción total, otro modelo que es muy curioso verlo en varios ayuntamientos gallegos vestido de coche de policía (que en algunos ayuntamientos substituye a los viejos Patrol o Terrano).

Siguiendo con los coches de la policía autonómica, una buena remesa de unidades del Renault Mégane llegaron en 2004, hasta incluso coches de calle sin rotular. Y dentro de la marca del rombo también cuentan con unidades del Renault Scenic sirviendo a la policía autonómica gallega.

Pero sin duda los más numerosos son los modelos de Citroën (recordemos que la fábrica está en Vigo) y además del coche del Presidente de la Xunta que es un Citroën C6 actualmente, también cuentan en la policía con Citroën C4, C5 y hasta incluso los antiguos Citroën Xsara. Además también cuentan con algunos Nissan Terrano II, incluso sin rotular tengo visto alguno también.

Espero que os guste este pequeño repaso de los diferentes modelos de la policía autonómica gallega e intentaré recopilar más información sobre las flotas de otros cuerpos de policía, porque sobretodo en la local y autonómica hay muchos modelos curiosos como vehículo policial.

Coches de la Policía Autonómica Gallega

Fotos | Coches de Policia, DeCalle , Coet.es

I’m not normally a t-shirt slogan person, but there are so many on this site that I love…

Saracastic Politics

Ogden Nash wrote:
I like the duck-billed platypus
Because it is anomalous.
I like the way it raises its family
Partly birdly, partly mammaly.
I like its independent attitude.
Let no one call it a duck-billed platitude.

I was thinking this morning about platitudes and ended up thinking about platypuses, because (a) they are more interesting and (b) I have written about them before.

One of my earliest works, now lost to the ravages of time, was a “Just-So” style story written (and illustrated!) by me in eighth grade. It was a partnership with John, a classmate and pal (wonder whatever happened to him?) but as I remember it, John, though an all around good egg, did not come through in the clutch on this one and I took on most of the writing and illustrating responsibilities. Either that or I was full of inspiration and rode rough-shod over John’s interest in the project, I don’t really recall. Suffice to say that I wrote and illustrated this story about how the platypus became a platypus. It was an amorphous shmoo-like animal in the beginning and wandered about the forest envying other animals. It envied the duck’s bill, and the beaver’s tail, and the bear’s claws. Well, the creator caught wind of the platypus’s complaints and bestowed him with all of those gifts, and the platypus was so horrified that it had been turned into a monster that it slinked off to Australia and hid in the mud.

I think I could tell pretty much the same story about a platitude, being a rather featureless sentence that wanders about the forest of rhetorical devices, envying this one for its humor and that one for its sharpness and a third one for its bluntness. It ends up a rather sorry amalgam of good intentions gone horribly awry, and is fit for nothing but the muck down under.

I’m not a big fan of platitudes, and they abound in writing (or any creative endeavor): that you should follow your dreams, that persistence will be rewarded, that you have to believe in yourself, etc. My main opposition to such platitudes is that they are untrue. Which is not to say they are false, just that they just don’t have enough substance to have a factual status. I think people become preoccupied with the platitudes, thinking of themselves as that storied ant with the rubber tree plant as they query an eighth round of agents, rather than taking stock of the situation after the seventh round of rejections. The truth is that the secret to success at anything meaningful is impossible to condense into a memorizable principle.

However, many years later, I feel bad for having maligned the misunderstood metronome. Platypuses are perfectly put together for the lives they live, and serve a purpose on the planet. Maybe you can say the same of platitudes, but I’m not so sure.

The upcoming PS3-exclusive title Last Rebellion has been confirmed for a European release by publisher Koei. More info after the jump.
 
Thanks to Peter for the tip!

Forget PowerMats and wireless charging and the like, because the Airnergy wi-fi signal harvester is my new front runner for the future of gadget charging.

It’s not exactly new tech, as ohGizmo notes, but it’s the first application that’s of any real use to consumers. Put simply, Airnergy takes the energy created by wi-fi signals and stores it in a rechargeable battery. At CES, the device’s battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes.

Pretty handy, and supposedly available this summer for $40. Not too shabby, and very appealing considering how ubiquitous wi-fi hotspots are these days. Very simple, somewhat cheap and incredibly useful if it works are advertised—by far one of the coolest things I’ve seen come out of CES this year.

More information [OhGizmo!]

Filed under: EV/Plug-in, Mitsubishi, North America

It doesn’t take much to have the biggest electric vehicle fleet in Canada. In fact, if you can get 51 EVs together, you win. The aspiring record-holder is Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada, which is about to bring “up to 50″ i-MiEV all-electric cars to the Boucherville suburb of Montreal. Mitsubishi is partnering with Hydro-Québec to bring the EVs to the city in what the automaker is calling the, “largest Canadian project ever fielded to integrate, test, and evaluate all-electric vehicles on urban streets under real-world conditions.” More information on who will be involved when were not released, but we can assume this will be a longish trial, since Mitsubishi is saying that the cars will be tested “in both fall and winter urban conditions.” More details in this PDF.

[Source: Mitsubishi]

Continue reading Canada’s largest electric vehicle project? Mitsubishi’s 50 i-MiEVs in Boucherville

Canada’s largest electric vehicle project? Mitsubishi’s 50 i-MiEVs in Boucherville originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few weeks ago, Rogers decided not to upgrade the aging HTC Dream to Android 2.0 but offered existing owners the opportunity to switch to the HTC Magic for free in a limited time promotion. We thought this would end all controversy surrounding the Dream but, alas, the saga of the Rogers’ Dream is not over yet. Rogers is now apparently halting all sales of the Dream due to a GPS and software issue which hinders 911 calls. An internal memo circulating on Friday instructs employees to halt all activations, upgrades and sales of the Dream effective immediately. Both the white and black Dream will be removed completely from all sales systems by the end of the day today. Current Dream owners are being advised to turn off GPS satellite tracking on their phones until the next Android 1.5 upgrade is released. Hit the jump for the internal memo with all the details.

Thanks to all who sent this in!

[via MobileSyrup]

Taken from Sales Central

Start Date: January 15, 2010
End Date: On-going
Regions: National
Reference # NDP 2010-01-17

——————————————————————————–

!!! ATTENTION !!! Cease ALL HTC Dream Sales!
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY

Due to a software issue, ALL sales (activations, upgrades, and device sales) of HTC Dream are to STOP IMMEDIATELY until further notice.

In addition:

There will be NO SUBSIDY paid for activations or upgrades on the HTC Dream effective as of end of day today;
This applies to all SKUs of the HTC Dream;
DREAMBLKR
DREAMWHTR
These devices will be removed from Vision21, Sales Central, point of sale systems, Rogers.com, and telesales effective as of end of day today;
More information to follow.

Unofficial Statement from Rogers

I’m writing to share some urgent news with our Rogers HTC Dream customers.
We have contacted all of our Dream customers by text message asking them to disable GPS location

on their HTC Dream device to ensure all 911 calls complete.

HTC is expediting a software fix to the 1.5 Android Operating System

that will address this issue – and provide several other improvements to the OS.

We expect this upgrade to be available very soon. In the meantime, Dream customers need to follow these steps:
1) Select Menu
2) Select Settings
3) Select Location
4) Uncheck Enable GPS Satellite

Please note that the Rogers HTC Dream is the only device affected.
Protecting our customers’ safety is our top priority and we communicated with our customers as soon as we were made aware of the issue. We have texted all affected customers and we have immediately requested that the device be taken off the shelf until HTC implements its upgrade.”

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If you’re looking for the perfect green Valentine’s Day gift then LUSH has you covered with lots of bubbly Valentine’s Day goodness. Some good Valentine’s Day picks include…

LUSH Magic Mushroom Bubble Bar – strawberries and vanilla cream bubbles!

LUSH Love Soap – a pretty red, glittery heart-shaped soap will make everyone smile since it’s jam-packed with aphrodisiacs and skin smoothing ingredients.

LUSH Ex Factor Bath Bomb – a sweet little blue gingerman with a pink heart.

LUSH Be Mine Gift – a nice gift pack filled with pampering goodies. The set comes with three pleasurable products, all wrapped up in rose printed paper; Flying Fox Shower Gel; Shimmy Shimmy Massage Bar; and Honey Trap Lip Balm.

LUSH True Love Gift – this ultimate Valentine’s Day temptation kit is filled with aphrodisiac-infused Sex Bomb Bath Bomb, red glitter Love Soap and moisturizing Yummy Yummy Yummy Shower Gel plus Vanilla Dee-Lite Lotion bar.

Lush is not the perfect green company in my opinion, but that doesn’t mean they’re not close. Lush has many green perks such as…

• Naked packaging – meaning, if you head to a LUSH retail shop, about 70% of their products are available sans ANY packaging if you choose, including Bath Bombs, shampoo bars, bubble bars, massage bars, body butters and solid facial cleansers, deos, Emotibombs and sugar scrubs.. Ah naked soaps. With other products LUSH uses simple packaging along with post-consumer recycled, recyclable and biodegradable materials whenever possible. The total recycled content in all LUSH packaging is about 89%.
• Bath Bombs are made with moulds made of recycled plastic.
• The company uses motion sensors in their change rooms to save electricity along with a shower to encourage staff to bike to work.
• The company uses large compost bins outside their factory for all the seeds, pits and peels leftover from making products and use compostable cheesecloth to cover bins of product, so the product is kept clean and dust-free, and the cheesecloth “lid” can then be composted.
• No animal testing.
• All the bins and totes used to carry ingredients and products around are made of recycled plastic, and they have a zero plastic bubble wrap policy.
• Everything in North America by land (except for Hawaii).
• LUSH makes many solid products which help to reduce plastic bottles plus the products last longer.

Basically I’d like to see more organic products from Lush, but overall they’re doing well from a green living standpoint.

Post from: Blisstree

LUSH Valentine’s Day Goodies

If you’ve always dreamed of taking over the world with an army of robots, but your plans have stalled due to your characteristic procrastination (or lack of said robots), this, my friends, is your time to act.

The robots in this 3 million square foot factory in Newark, Delaware used to make cars for Chrysler. But I don’t think they’ll complain if you put them to work for more nefarious ends.

The auction is being held by the University of Delaware, who bought the Chrysler plant and all robotics therein some years ago.

Here is just an incomplete list of the mechanical bounty up for the bidding:

Equipment includes: Machine Shop and Maintenance; Welding and Cutting; CNC 6-Axis Robotics; Coordinate Measuring Machines; Compressors, Dryers and Air Tanks; Cooling Towers, Weld Water, Heating and Cooling Equipment; Back Up Generators; Vehicle Lifts and Wheel Alignment; Vehicle Test, Repair and Fill; Fork Lifts, Mobile Equipment and Floor Scrubbers/Sweepers; Distribution Center; Production Carts and Storage Containers (Large Quantities); Storage and Retrieval Systems; Misc Plant and Support Equipment; Large Quantity of Metal Stock; Cafeteria Equipment; Office Equipment (Large Quantity); and Much More.

If you’re stroking a cat and muttering, “mmyes, YES,” to yourself as you read this, here is the pertinent information: the auction takes place February 25 at 10 AM at University of Delaware’s Clayton Hall. [BoingBoing]

Article Tags: ClimateGate, Lawrence Solomon

Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?

This week, Google announced an end to its long-standing collaboration with the Chinese Communists — it will no longer censor users inside China.

That’s good of it. Maybe Google will now also stop using its search engine to censor the rest of us, in the Western countries.

Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.

Source: network.nationalpost.com

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