Viral Ad Network

A lot has been said about Google’s launch of Search Plus Your World – by watchers, and (largely) by the PR teams of Google and companies that feel under threat from Google’s move.

Perhaps the most confusing comment was from Twitter. Here’s the email their PR teams have apparently been sending out to news outlets:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Hang on a minute, are twitter implying that this change is going to stop twitter showing up in results?

As Google’s Matt Cutts blogs, the new change pulls in results from lots of sharing sites – including livejournal, friendfeed, and Google+.

You may ask why links from twitter aren’t on that list – is it some secret manipulation by Google? No. Twitter have told Google not to include results from Twitter.

How did they tell Google not to include their results? Well if you look at the HTML source for twitter’s website, you’ll see that all links from twitter have an attribute rel=”nofollow” on them. This isn’t an accident – it’s a special feature which Google introduced in 2005, designed to let websites tell Google not to show those links. There is no other reason for it – if you add that to your links (like twitter), you don’t want Google to count them.

There’s more though – you may remember that Google used to show more tweets in their search results, and why why that changed. The answer is that Twitter used to have a deal with Google to give them direct access to their data – which was not renewed when it expired in July 2011.

So in summary, six months ago Twitter stopped Google’s access to most of their data, and they tell Google not to include anything linked to from tweets. With that in mind, does Twitter’s statement about Search Plus Your World:

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users

still make sense? Or does it suggest that Twitter may have an different motive for their emails?

organise the world’s information

Google’s Mission Statement is to “organise the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And I personally believe that this latest change really is a tactical move to this end, rather than a pure land-grab for Google+ in the social space.

While Twitter do provide APIs to access their data, they charge significant sums to get real access at the volume that Google needs it.

By opening up large screen volume to social sites who provide free access to their data (such as livejournal and friendfeed, and their own Google+), they’re providing a huge incentive for sites to make their data accessible to be indexed and searched by search engines – which is Google’s core business after all.

Something of a Christmas tradition for me, I’ve been looking at our stats for world-wide Internet usage across the holidays and trying to make out what families are doing.

Here’s a sample of a chart I’ve been looking at, showing how many ads we were displaying per second over the festive period – you can ignore the different colours, they represent which datacentre ads were being displayed from.

It was the night before Christmas…

And all through the house not a key was pressed, nor even a mouse [button].

Yup – Christmas Eve saw the majority of web traffic drop off far earlier than the rest of the year, as people got a good night’s sleep ready for the big day. (And countries who have their main celebration on Christmas Eve settled down after a long day). Traffic during the night (at local times) was approximately 30% lower than normal.

Christmas Day

I for one was too busy putting the turkey in the oven and peeling veg to be surfing the net at the start of Christmas day – and with kids distracted by stockings and new toys, internet usage seems to have been focused in a much narrower period in the middle of the day.

This is different from the behaviour we used to see a few years ago, when there would be a large surge of traffic in the afternoon as people brought their new internet devices online. Perhaps the market in the countries we are focusing on is saturated enough that Christmas no longer brings so many new internet users.

Boxing day relaxation

Boxing day was the first day I had time to go online to catch up on emails etc – and it seems I was not alone. From early afternoon people came online in their masses – and many stayed there late into the night – making this boxing day come very close to being a record-breaking day for the Viral Ad Network – we served only 350K less ads on this Boxing day than on our highest day ever.

What did you do?

What was your internet usage like over Christmas? Did you spend Boxing day shopping online, talking to friends, or reading news sites? I’m interested in hearing – leave a comment below.