Now anyone can participate in the ad-sharing program . . . almost. Actually, you still have to get thousands of video views to participate. The real change here is that instead those thousands of views can come to just one of your videos, instead of each of them. Before, several of your videos had to be popular to get into the Partnership Program. Now, just one of your videos has to go viral, and Google can invite you into the program—for that video:

Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We’ll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.

In addition to making viral hits’ producers more money, analysts believe this move will also let YouTube and Google increase their revenue: they can run more targeted, higher-paying ads against these videos. So is this just the latest in Google’s hunt for profitability from the $1.65B acquisition? If so, at least one analyst disagrees with the move, according to MediaPost:

Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst at Global Equities Research, says Google should have generated a profit from YouTube within three years based on the purchase price. “YouTube should be generating $1 billion in revenue and be profitable for the acquisition to be considered smart and good,” he says. “I don’t think they generated even $20 million in revenue per year so far. It’s a very dumb acquisition. You don’t pay $1.65 billion for a lab experiment.” . . .

Chowdhry says expanding YPP to include videos from individuals demonstrates another failed example, because he doesn’t believe it will add enough revenue to make a difference. He says growing site traffic doesn’t mean anything if it can’t earn revenue and generate profit.

Ouch.

This does add some opportunities for successful viral videos’ producers—which is more than Google has to do—but not a lot of hope. My biggest question for the video producers, however, is whether the deal is retroactive: do you only get your share of the revenue after you’ve signed up (which will often be after the peak of the hype), or will you get a share of the revenue your video generated all along?

What do you think? Will it really pay out for video producers, or mostly for Google? Should YouTube be making $1B/year by now?

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We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to notify you that your Associates account has been closed as of June 26, 2009. This is a direct result of the unconstitutional tax collection scheme expected to be passed any day now by the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) and signed by the governor. As a result, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com after June 26. We were forced to take this unfortunate action in anticipation of actual enactment because of uncertainties surrounding the legislation’s effective date.

Please be assured that all qualifying referral fees earned prior to June 26, 2009 will be processed and paid in full in accordance with our regular referral fee schedule. Based on your account closure date of June 26, 2009, any final payments will be paid by September 1, 2009.

In the event that North Carolina repeals this tax collection scheme, we would certainly be happy to re-open our Associates program to North Carolina residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We have enjoyed working with you and other North Carolina-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

It’s interesting that Amazon has shut the program down before the legislation passes. Could it be that the NC lawmakers thought Amazon was bluffing too? Did Amazon close the program early so that affiliates would still have time to ramp up their complaints to the General Assembly.

Of course, there are plenty of other companies that will keep their affiliate programs running in NC–though Commission Junction doesn’t appear to be one of them–but will there be enough actual affiliate revenue to tax after this?

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We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.

* Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] – did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).

So how does this drastically change the keywords we will see in referrer logs? Well obviously we will see less misspellings. You can probably forget about optimizing for those. It was already difficult considering Google often used “Did you mean:” results for most misspellings.

* Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.

* Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in “san f…” and choose the suggestion right away?

I think the biggest change will be losing long tail keywords. Where you would usually see 4-5 keyword phrases, searchers may opt to try the short tail version Google Suggests. Even is the user stays with a long tail query it more than likely will be one from Google Suggests and not and original one from the end searcher. I remember Google saying at least 25% of all searches never occurred before. We can expect this number to come way down now from this change. So why is Google doing this? Maybe they are trying to push AdWords inventory more? Obviously the shorter the tail the more chance someone is bidding for the keywords.

Look at the keyword “new york….”

Google offers some popular other new york phrases like new york yankees, new york times, etc. Providing this to the end searcher drastically changes your searching habits/behaviors. You were looking for one thing and now Google can or has essentially offered you other suggestions to change your mind. Completely changes the query landscape.

If you happen to rank for one of those Google Suggested queries get ready for a LOT more traffic.

High Rankings discussion continues here:

End Of Optimising For Spelling Errors, Google Suggest goes live

What do you think?

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