Not so secret, but Techcrunch has a good compilation of tricks, tips and other “magic” to boost viral viewership of online video clips. A whole new layer of people and companies has arisen over the past several years that one could describe as “media market makers” or “attention arbitrageurs” in a sense; they’re often only indirectly making money but are moving user attention around, building on top of relationship- context- and relevance-graphs that are increasingly addressable online.

Good post from Compete’s blog about the ubiquitous social network ads for Who has a crush / Swami Predicts and so on. They claim a pretty decent conversion rate. The danger in their model might be that it’s very susceptible to mobile phone chargebacks which can really kill a ringtone- or similar mobile content business. They must have a decent amount of volume for the carriers then…

CPM Advisors has launched and I am one of the contributors (as is now reflected in my LinkedIn profile). It’s essentially the research and consulting piece of what I’m doing right now - alongside launching an exciting new Advertising 2.0 company (more about that later!). We’ll also have some very cool additional contributers so keep an eye open for that too.

Public service ads (PSAs) - these are what run on websites when they don’t have any paying ads to show. Now it’s pretty hard to not have *any* ad that will pay you at least a couple of cents per thousand impressions out there, so when you see these types of ads showing up a lot you have to ask a few questions of the site, if it’s monitoring and monetizing its ad inventory very well. In the attached picture, on Facebook, is a PSA and I’ve been seeing a lot there recently. I’m not a very high-volume Facebook user so I don’t expect its because their adserver thinks I’m a terrible non-person who shouldn’t get any paying ad shown to me. But seeing a lot of these like I am today leads me to question how seriously Facebook is treating it’s advertising business, and of course as I’ve asked before - whether it has to worry about it all.

Seth’s got a good perspective on what’s going on with Facebook, and the bears and bulls view thereof…. I agree with many of his points, and eagerly continue to watch what seems like a big shift and a big experiment at the same time (that’s online media really - it’s always a test!). If there’s one thing that playing video games on a 48 Kb ZX Spectrum computer taught me as a kid, is that sometimes a more limited development environment can force gameplay to be better; we’ve seen a bit of it but we’ll see more of that with Facebook. Less could be more.

It’s almost a frenzy! I’m glad I really spend almost no time trolling the blogosphere and reading the news, but I still hear a lot about it. I definitely am detecting an uptick in the thirty-something crowd getting onto Facebook, and I do like a lot of what they have put together… though the clutter is still a bit of an issue. I figure it will sort itself out though; I’ll be keen to see how.

I do agree with the contrarian point discussed of there not really being a solid advertising revenue story there yet (Microsoft revenue guarantees for no advertising aside)… still bottom of the barrel stuff. But then, they have time to figure it out. There’s lots of upside left, but it is a bit overhyped at the moment. I’d love to see Facebook make a run of it independently, that is much more interesting than any kind of acquisition story. Let’s see.

Not a surprise - law enforcement posting crime clips on YouTube in order to find suspects. This could be a disaster waiting to happen — vigilante justice, gang reprisals, wrongful accusations — there are some pretty scary implications for this type of thing run out of control…

Konstantin Guericke [call], VP of marketing and cofounder of (my former employer) LinkedIn has left to become CEO of jaxtr which is a “free .. service [which lets] users .. link their phones with their online network to hear from callers worldwide while keeping their existing phone numbers private”. The idea is to put your jaxtr widget on your own social media pages, like myspace profiles or blogs. You put in your phone number (if you live in one of the 29 countries supported) and it then creates a phone call that connects us together.

The first iteration of the flash widget as created is too big for my sidebar, so I shrunk it a little bit but it wasn’t really intelligible, so to allow people to call me and try out the service I just put in a link on the sidebar. It’s a pretty neat service - I have no idea whether I’ll get any phone spam out of it (doubtful given my very low hundredish number of daily PV) but I guess we’ll see. If we know each other and/or you have some interesting consulting projects for me to take a look at, let me know. Click here to try it out.

Teen social network Tagged.com’s traffic appears to have exploded recently, so much so that their own stats page doesn’t seem to be keeping up. According to the Alexa numbers:

I’ve often talked about the problems with the Alexa numbers, but then again I’ve also talked about the issues and differences w.r.t. some of the other ratings services. But check out these audience composition numbers for tagged.com from comscore MediaMetrix and let me know if you really believe them… then also check the (albeit outdated but this is not as big of an issue) composition figures that Tagged.com gives on its site — “75% of members are 14-17 years old“.

Sounds like a bit of a disconnect. And by no means am I picking on comscore exclusively; as I’m fairly sure my old employer Netratings will err similarly (as I pointed out in a comment on Fred’s blog when the big discussion about the age of MySpace users came up in October. Makes it tough to figure out what numbers to put in the press release, doesn’t it? But regardless or perhaps because of the “under the radar” teen market that isn’t captured 100% by the major web traffic measurement guys… Tagged.com (and their team) is definitely one to watch.