Utube Followup: They monetized their website (Like I said they should)

Breaking news, Utube has succumbed to the better option (ie: my advice) and monetized their website with a search bar at the top of their homepage. Now you can get instant access to all the wonderful world of poker / dating & xtreme travel.

At least utube have chosen a smart, professional looking & unobtrusive option without losing too much integrity. The search bar only appears on the homepage & search pages. The only problem with this approach is that it appears this type of monetization doesn’t quite cash in on the video traffic they will be recieving. Thereare no video links or other various other video-targeted strategies I would have imagined. For example, if we were searching for a video of the latest internet hype, Chaccaron, the netflix results return a terrible no results page instead of something that may direct me to a video site, any video site. The only other results I get from searching with utube are Poker ads, which are like the scourge of the internet (even if they do pay well).

I think utube has succeeded in the look & feel of their monetizing efforts, but the execution will leave a lot to be desired. At the end of the day if they leave it like this, they wont make nearly as much money as I predicted they could.

When SEO Fails & The Importance of Impressing Real People

Flash isn’t dead. In fact, Flash could well be growing in more of a niche than we realised. A lot of people may already know this but STOP PRESS: 1. SEO is great, but it’s strategies & implementation tend to spoil a website (gasp, ooh ahhh!). 2. Flash is great, for multimedia style presentations with fantastic creative displays of information & visual elements – when you don’t need to index a million pages & be number one for everything and top 10 google and ppc and adsense and paid links and ctrs and arrrrrrrgh! . . . . . Brain Explode!

My point here is simple: talk to more REAL people (not search engines). The best way to do this is to draw them in with creativity & good flash.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is important.

…But there are so many people on the bandwagon. It’s gone to the extent of a large number of people using SEO practices as the basis for building websites.

Why not engage & use real life principles.

Be Creative

Be Spontaneous

& most of all

Be Intersting

Also I have found a good site with some good visual flash FX (effects) for those interested after the jump.

A new Google PageRank update?

It seems today (April 6) that Google has done another PageRank update across the board. Naturally I went over to Matt Cutt's blog to see if there was a post about anything but left with an April Fools joke that he is moving to Yahoo. The next stop for me is naturally SitePoint and it seems it's true. Google has updated their pagerank.

The changes

This site has only been up a few months and I have gone from PR0 to a PR6, which is fantastic. This also seems to be the case with a few other SitePoint users. What seems strange though, is Google seems to be giving blogs and real content based and organically linked websites higher priority now more than ever. I mean a PR6 is quite a high PR especially for a new site so I don't see why it would be any other way. Previously, to get such a PageRank you would have to be linked by multiple PR7's (I think I have one PR6 link and a lot of lower ones).

What will the "Internet Marketing" industry do?

This really is going to be quite a shock for a lot of "internet marketers" who have built their websites up with link farms and link exchanges because it just goes to show these really aren't going to make a dent in the future for rankings. They've been saying this for a long time now but I think with this last Google update it's really proved itself.

On the other hand…

Some are saying it's either a hoax or pagerank is bouncing around. This blog doesn't have a load of traffic at all which leads me to consider these points.

Nonetheless, I am happy

UPDATE: A few others are actually posting their experiences on the latest post on Matt's blog. One even said his rank went from 0 to 8 unexpectedly with 6 backlinks. Strange.