Mike Butcher

Facebook has quietly launched a keyword advertising system to rival Google’s AdSense. Disguised as a simple upgrade to Flyers, its system for selling cheap ads on a self-service basis, the new system charges per click and lets advertisers target by city, gender, age, relationship status, employer, educational level, political views, and keywords. Facebook has the data, generated by its users and the new system will have “detailed reporting”.

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups.

First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week.

But research by tbites has found that adverts continue to appear alongside groups associated with the BNP, including the groups BNP – People Just like you making a difference, Old-Fashioned Fascists and Vote BNP and Save The World.

In each case the advert in question is for Searchanything.co.uk, an affiliate advertising search engine run by Advertising.com International Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US-based Advertising.com Inc, one of the world’s largest interactive advertising network. There is no suggestion that Advertising.com is aware that their adverts are appearing beside these groups. In all likelihood there is an automated script making these ads appear which Facebook appears not to have taken down.

Adverts continue to appear beside far-right and racist groups on Facebook despite major advertisers pulling their campaigns following revelations that their brands were appearing alongside such groups.

First Direct, Vodafone, Virgin Media, Halifax, AA, and Prudential have already pulled their ads after finding they were appearing next to the far-right BNP party, following a story broken by New Media Age this week.

But research by tbites has found that adverts continue to appear alongside groups associated with the BNP, including the groups BNP – People Just like you making a difference, Old-Fashioned Fascists and Vote BNP and Save The World.

In each case the advert in question is for Searchanything.co.uk, an affiliate advertising search engine run by Advertising.com International Ltd, the UK subsidiary of US-based Advertising.com Inc, one of the world’s largest interactive advertising network. There is no suggestion that Advertising.com is aware that their adverts are appearing beside these groups. In all likelihood there is an automated script making these ads appear which Facebook appears not to have taken down.

The WSJ's Kara Swisher visits Bebo London. Why is it so small an office for such a high-profile startup? Its development team is in San Francisco, while much of the commercial deals take place in London, since Bebo is growing fastest in the UK and Europe. Featuring an interview with Joanna Shields, “President of International”, a former Silicon Valley executive with extensive European experience at companies like RealNetworks and Google.

Plaxo plans to release a social network “aggregator” on Monday. Its key features look likely to be an independence from platforms like Facebook, the ability to add information about the social networks your contacts use, feed aggregation and control over your owen data.

Plaxo hopes its independence from closed networks like Facebook will give it a competitive edge, although all the evidence is to the contrary right now. While many commentarors have been saying that users owning their own data would be an idea which triumphed in the end, so far the fastest growing network – Facebook – has disproved that theory by making the process of social networking very user-friendly by locking users into a closed environment. Not unlike the way Apple locks people into hardware by focusing on the user experience.

In the past Plaxo had a reputation for eating into a PC and spamming all your contacts with Plaxo invites. As a result it was usually used by small businessmen with zero idea about tech. It’s unlikely to get much traction amongst the hip-young things on Facebook.

A Comscore survey of global visitors age 15 and older highlights how Facebook has grown by 270% in the last year, which would put it on track to being larger than MySpace by the end of this year. In North America it has racked up 68.4% of the total unique visits to MySpace’s 62.1%. Facebook only opened its APIs on May 24th, 2007.

Comscore said social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago. Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors. Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.

Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.

“A fundamental aspect of the success of social networking sites is cultural relevance,� said said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets. “Those doing well in certain regions are likely doing an effective job of communicating appropriately with those regions’ specific populations.

Since February, Facebook has doubled its ad rates for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000 in the US, reports ValleyWag which has obtained Facebook’s PowerPoint rate-card deck. Facebook now says it’s the top photo site. The minimum sponsorship remains $50,000, and Facebook claims the click-through rate is 20 times that of banners. This higher fee means the number of homepage links and sponsored stories advertisers get also doubles.

King of Shaves, the shaving brand and e-commerce site, is planning to release a Facebook application in what could be the first ever brand marketing use of the social networking site in this manner. Word leaked out via Twitter and a screen shot has been posted to Flickr.

So far brands in the UK (outside of media companies like Virgin and the BBC, see comment) have hung back form developing full-blown applications, preferring instead to use traditional advertising banners on the site.

Jaman, California-based company that offers full length movies for either downloads or rental via a P2P client is planning to launch a European arm. The move is prior to an expansion of its programme of buying up rights to “mid-tail” independent and niche films.

Unlike Joost, which is really aimed at TV viewers, Jaman is going for audiences who want successful independent film (the kind of thing “Trainspotting” was once before it hit the big time) which they can’t get in their local cinema. (You might think that would mean that there would be a lot of Bollywood movies and Asian or Latin American cinema on it as a result. There is indeed much of this content, but so far 60% of Jaman’s content is actually English language based).

Babelgum is closest to Jaman’s model, with it’s emphasis on independent professionally produced video content, but unlike both of the aforementioned, Jaman is about downloading high quality HD film to rent or keep, rather than P2P streaming.

Jaman’s player works on Windows XP, Vista and Mac. Jaman has also developed an unofficial plug-in for the AppleTV device which syncs content downloaded via the Jaman player (they have their own proprietary DRM player which, like Apple’s Fairplay DRM, allows the sharing of the content across 5 devices) to Apple’s box. They’re lead engineer on the project actually came from Apple, in fact.

Founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon previously co-founded Informatica in 1992, which IPO’d in 1999. Jaman is not short of friends in high places. Backers include Hearst Corporation.

Although Jaman’s video downloads to a PC, evidently they expect people to hook up the PC to a proper HD-capable TV and watch it in all its glory there. Any user creating an account – the sites is on an open Beta right now – will get three free film downloads before they have to shell out any money.

So far Jaman has aggregated over 1,500 international movies, and plans to acquire more content after its series A funding round, which should be completed this Autumn.

I met with British-born Faisal Galaria, recently appointed General manager EMEA, who was at one point a European director of Skype…

[continued]

“Jaman is about attracting the cognoscenti. It’s about the ‘fat belly’ of the Long Tail,” he says. “According to Screen Digest 99% of films made do not get theatrical distribution, which leaves a lot of great films unseen by the public.” Jaman is able to offer those rights holders distribution in return for a revenue share.

What’s the share? It’s 30/70 in Jaman’s favour. That sounds possibly on the high side, but if you think about it, all a film maker or rights holder has to do is allow their content to appear on the Jaman system from then on they need do nothing, since Jaman handles all the bandwidth and distribution.

Galaria says it’s taken $7.5m to develop Jaman over the last two years and it was launched in Beta in March.

Right now he is over in London talking to rights holders of libraries of content. Part of the Jaman strategy is also to strike deals with ISPs and portals to gain distribution and be a value-added service. In other words, “Sign up to our ISP and get movie downloads of independent cinema and TV”.

Downloading HD movies sounds like something of a nightmare. In reality the ‘weight’ is about 1 hour to one Gigabyte on an average broadband connections. So a 2.5 hour movie would be 2.5 hours long to download. At $2 to rent for a week and $5 to buy, that doesn’t sound too onerous, especially if its HD-quality content which you would just never see at your local cinema because the audience is too niche.

The downloading process is also “progressive” meaning that you can start watching the film before its finished downloading. A trailer appears in Flash on the site so you can ‘taste’ the movie prior to download.

Much of this would be impressive enough were it not for the fact that Jaman is ALSO a social network around independent cinema.

“We also have social networking built in for people to recommend movies and share lists – they can use it for content discvery. We think of it as ‘iTunes for Movies meets LastFM’ ” says Galaria.

This social element even extends to watching the film. It’s possible to watch the movie in ‘interactive’ mode where you can see comments other users have made in the time-line of the movie. Say the leading man punches the bad guy, someone might have said “That looks very fake” at that point – so that comment appears exactly as that scene flashes up.

Although Jaman is not strictly “UGC” – independent film makers can upload their own content using the “Open Cine” function. The community votes on it, and if it gets sufficient backing then Jaman flips the content into it’s main network and then will do a revenue share with the rights holder. No porn has appeared as yet – says Galaria – because the community can easily vote it down for deletion – plus its probably just not worth any pornographer’s while!

Jaman could also be fairly immune to competition from the likes of Joost of Babelgum, which rely on streaming to deliver their content.

As Galaria points out: “Joosta and Babalgum are streaming-based and standard defintion. We’re high definition and download. What happens if YouTube takes off their 10 minute limit on video? They have 100m users already. That’s hard to beat. Our approach is different in that it’s a compelling HD experience. So DRM and HD and community is a barrier to entry. A lot of our content is hard to get hold of. It’s not replicating Cable or satellite TV where there are 500 channels of crap. Thus is great quality content you can’t get it at the cinema. It’s not MTV or Daily motion. Again it’s quality. Hence why people pay to download it.”

Personally I should think documentary film is going to be one of the more compelling aspects of this service. There are plenty of niche documentaries released – especially at events like the Sundance Film festival – which here in Britain we never get to see unless Channel 4 or the BBC buy them up, and then months or years after they have aired elsewhere.

It’ll be interesting to see what content Jaman manages to acquire here in Europe as they ramp up, and how the European audience takes to their offering. I can also see a few TV channels will start to sweat a little more…

ValleyWag today runs an interesting insider piece from a startup developing Facebook applications. Until recently FB members could invite all their friends to an app. creating massive viral adoption. Hence why some apps like Top Friends by Slide ended up with millions of users. Now Facebook is limiting app invitations to just 10 per day. That mean anyone creating a new app and trying to go viral has a mountain to climb. This is basically Facebook shooting themselves in the foot. Previously there seemed to be a great ecosystem developing where startups would be able to hook into revenue share deals based on the adoption of their app. Now, the ‘head’ of the apps ‘long tail’ will win because FB has artificially rigged the system in favour of those apps that came out before the “invite all” gate closed. Given that there are even a few UK developers who were banking on the Facebook app platform to create some success, this news makes for some depressing reading. Why is Facebook the new AOL? It’s just another a walled garden baby…