Video advertisers looking to expand their audience should be eyeing televisions, and IPTV can make it possible.

While I've been railing for months for cable systems and DVRs to find a way for web video to make it into home theaters, IPTV and set-top boxes are the path of least resistance. Motorola just shipped its one millionth IP-enabled set-top box, and the company offers boxes that include DVR functions in addition to carrying broadcast TV.

IP set-top boxes provide broadband access to content, so forming the relationships with web video companies to deliver MPEG video is an easy fit. Video upload site Revver already has a relationship with Verizon's FiOS IPTV service to do just that through an ad revenue sharing agreement.

IPTV can provide broadband and on demand channels with greater flexibility than cable or satellite, and adding web video gives them a decided advantage. Of course IPTV services are tiny by comparison today, but that may change soon.

Vertical search engines are becoming so popular that we'll soon need a vertical search engine to keep track of them all.

Just in the last week we have the addition of CarePilot, a home health industry search engine, Balihoo, for ad industry search, and Retrevo, which identifies the most relevant information related to consumer electronics.

These search engines are carving out a niche for underserved markets and seek to best the Googles and Yahoos of the world using unique algorithms and interface innovations.

For example, Retrevo produces four sets of search results -- one for shopping, one for manufacturer info, one for blogs and one for reviews. This enables consumers to quickly zoom in on the most relevant information to them. Searches for pricing, versus how-to, versus reviews are clearly different functions, and Retrevo smartly distinguishes the results.

The difficult part for consumers will be finding these search engines that can suit there needs. An index for vertical search is needed, and perhaps these smaller players will also need to do search marketing so that they can get their names out.

I recently started advertising on Superpages.com and was shocked to find that the company is charging more for its premium pay per click placement than for pay per call. I'm really having trouble understanding under what scenario a network might justify
charging more for a click than a call, and I'm coming up empty.

Superpages wants to charge $2.50 PER CLICK for ads that appear among the first 8 in a category. For the same placement, the company is charging $2 for calls made through a number that Superpages sets up for advertisers.

A call to a company is a commitment of time and shows a much higher level of interest than a click, which is often done to browse the competition and see if there is a match between supplier and consumer. If you are picking up the phone, the odds of making a purchase are a magnitude higher than a click.

$2.50 per click just seems outrageous for a small business to pay. We know what the click through rates are on ads, and the odds that a link to a company's website will lead to a conversion are very slim. Pay per call customers can't put their website link within their ad, but that is not enough of a detriment to push people to pay per click. What am I missing?

Yesterday Microsoft announced the end of their bCentral business directory product and said they'd shelve the product in order to preserve links for all of its existing customers. bCentral was a directory submission staple oldskool seo firms used for link building and directory submission campaigns and thankfully that era is coming to an end. Blogs are now all the rage when it comes to getting backlinks and whether we call it link baiting or link swapping or just plain ol publicity, it's all the same game, get your links on sites that can boost your pagerank. Here's what Microsoft had to say about the retirement.

On May 18th 2007 Microsoft will retire its Submit It! service... existing Submit It! customers are being offered a way to retain their Small Business Directory listings, for free, through 2008... Effective 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 18th 2007, you will no longer be able to log into and access the Submit It! service. The service’s site preparation and optimization tools, directory submittal, and reporting services will be decommissioned and any data associated with these service components will be permanently deleted from Microsoft servers. If you want to preserve any reporting information please log into the Member Center to do so before the service end date.

Here's where it gets funny though, they're going to keep the directory around so you can still reap the benefits of all those high quality links (snickering~).

the bCentral™ Small Business Directory will be retired. In its place, we are offering existing Submit It! customers and others who currently have bCentral Small Business Directory listings a free, grandfathered listing in the new Microsoft Small Business Directory. While we will be preserving the present directory’s link friendliness and search ranking value, slight changes will be made in the way the directory appears to the public and how you may alter your listing...On May 18th 2007 when the Submit It! service ends, the bCentral Small Business Directory will be converted to a read-only online business directory. This means that while the public will still be able to browse, search and view directory contents, you will not have access to the listings in order to edit your information.

Well there's not much more to say other than, R.I.P bCentral-iatch.

On Friday I brought up a couple of points regarding coupons on social news aggregators and used an example that was found on digg and del.icio.us. I also asked Jay Adelson for his thoughts on whether or not they plan on making a more prominent category focused on coupons and got his response. Consider this a mini Q & A and catchup all at the same time.

Q:) Have you ever considered creating a category just for coupons or deals?

A:) Our Tech Deals section is where most coupons live on Digg - we've had that area for a long time, almost the entire history of Digg. It goes fairly unnoticed by many newer readers but it's a very high traffic section for users seeking deals.

We've found that many eCommerce websites have tried to get dugg onto this section, and frankly we're fine with it. If it's a great deal, it will get dugg to the Newly Popular list.

We're always looking at new ways to direct traffic to the best places...the point at which user interest in coupons gets strong enough to warrant creating a new topic around it, we'd definitely consider that

Rocketboom, the "original" for profit vlog, is still having a hard time monetizing its content despite providing more than 200,000 downloads per day.

Per MarketWatch, advertisers aren't interested in his "small" audience, which shows that web video is too splintered to be mass media.

Publishers are faced with two choices -- work with ad networks to aggregate their content along with others (and get a lower CPM), or find vertical advertisers will to pay more for less of an audience.

200,000 viewers per day isn't what TV advertisers -- who are used to buying in seven figure increments for a simultaneous audience. However, if they want to attract the sweet spot (under 35) of consumers, advertisers will have to change their thinking to deal with this new reality.

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to worry about filling up your TiVo with programs or that the hard drive on the box would go south and screw up your viewing plans? That is the dream behind "network DVRs," where cable TV companies would make the copies for you and save it on their servers.

Cablevision was testing such a system, but for now the plans are on hold after the company lost a legal battle in New York. A bunch of cable networks including Disney and Fox successfully sued to prevent Cablevision from offering the service. It's basically an unlimited video on demand service, which nearly every cable company offers.

Network DVRs would be cheaper for cable operators to maintain since the storage cost per megabyte is much lower for central servers, and since they wouldn't send technicians into the field to replace broken down boxes. Customers would love it too, but the content companies want no part of it because they aren't getting any money from the deal.

This kind of service is coming, once the cable companies and content production companies can agree on how to share the ad revenue. Content companies should be excited by this because they could get all of the data about who is watching, and they could also offer the service without a fast forward so that the ads must be watched. They need to realize that prime time is coming to an end, so partnering with cable companies to milk the most from advertisers would be a smart alternative to TiVo users speeding by ads.

Old media needs to learn about distribution if they want to survive in the fast-paced online, according to IAC's Barry Diller. Diller says (as quoted in the Financial Times that video and print publishers who resist decentralized content distribution will fall into the same trap of the music biz that has seen copyright infringement and alternative distribution sap their revenue.

Now, if they don’t distribute, then you have the same effects that happen, probably with the music business. If they bury their head in old sand.

Diller is right - decentralization is the only way to reach a broad audience. Unlike the 100 or so channels of TV, there are millions of websites, and pretending that you can pull all the strings (like NBC/Fox) is the wrong way to go. Media companies who want millions of eyeballs need to work with and not against the Joost's and YouTubes of the world if they want the volume of traffic needed for ad-supported video (and print) content.

Today there are dozens of media portal hubs, but that number will shake out to a handful of major stars. But for content that appeals to vertical audiences, media companies will have no choice but to work with a greater number of smaller companies who will know how to find and serve a specific audience.

If you want to know the weather in Bangalore or Mumbai, don't go to weather.com, just answer your home phone.

Companies are offshoring their customer service departments faster than you can say "tax loophole," and now telemarketing is tapping into the large international English speaking population by transferring jobs overseas.

Now I'm not a protectionist, but for me, hiring someone who, as is often the case, is difficult to understand because of their dialect as the first point of contact in introducing a new service is a bad idea. If the company really wants me at a customer, they should be providing the most knowledgeable, easily understood person to broadcast their initial message.

Even though I'm on the do not call list and filter my calls, I still get 3 or more calls per day from mortgage services that employ call centers in India. As soon as I hear someone who is obviously from India talking, I politely tell them I am not interested in mortgage services.

Customer service is different because the company already "has you," and for many services it is easier to deal with the system in place than find a new ISP or wireless carrier. And certainly we import billions of goods from Asia, but consumers don't usually judge the company that sells them dishes or toys based on where the product was made because it is not tangible to the end product.

But marketing is about image and consumer confidence, and to hire people with whom it can be a challenge to communicate (and this goes for poorly trained semi-literate Americans as well) tells me that the company doesn't really want my business.

The question isn't quite as ominous as it may sound, Digg isn't going to create another category labeled coupons anytime soon, at least not that I know of, but there are a few folks out there taking advantage of Digg for their own profit (none of this is new). However, it might not be the same scum of the earth you're use to hearing about.

It all started a couple of days ago when I got an email from Buy.com with their weekly specials and I noticed at the bottom of each special there was a link to add the item to del.icio.us and another to digg the item. I thought that was interesting though not that unusual and figured I'd poke around a bit and see what I came up with. So I looked on Digg and found JeffWisot, a user that has posted 11 links, all of which are to buy.com specials (seriously - those are the only links he's dugg). Now he's not burning up the charts with high numbers of diggs on the links he's dugg, his highest digg has 6 diggs on it, but he is blatantly spamming digg for Buy.com, no doubt he's an employee.

Now when I headed on over to del.icio.us one might think this user would be smart enough to go under a different alias, or to post his buy.com deals with different tracking urls than the ones buy.com used in the email and on digg, but that's just not the case. Low and behold, same story second verse (err link aggregator).

Now there are a few conclusions I arrived at as a result of this little find.
1.) Buy.com is testing social news aggregators and their doing it internally because they're using the same tracking urls in all the links submitted to the aggregators.

2.) Although the other major electronics sites like Circuit City and Best Buy have not yet jumped on board, they will once a site like buy.com cracks the formula.

3.) It may be in the best interest of Digg to create a new category for Coupons because they could take a huge chunk of the market away from sites like fatwallet and coolsavings.

Reasons For My Conclusions

I. Buy is testing this internally
1.) We know buy.com is testing this internally because if it was someone who really thought the buy.com coupons were cool enough to post to digg then they probably would've posted other cool links to digg and del.icio.us as well but they have only posted the same links found in the buy.com email.

2.) Buy.com has an affiliate program and if someone was using that then they would've posted their own affiliate code url rather than the buy.com tracking url.

3.) Buy.com can track these from digg by using the referring url for each visitor as well as the tracking code params embedded in the url. That allows them to determine if someone clicked on it while reading their email or if they came from Digg.


II. Other sites will jump on the bandwagon
1.) This won't happen immediately because, as I'm sure buy.com is realizing now, the traffic from these social bookmarking sites converts terribly. At the end of the day a commercial site is all about making money and they usually do that by selling product. I doubt Buy.com has sold a single product as a result of this experiment thus far.

2.) Once a major retailer does in fact crack the code, the other retailers will be all over it. It's the same as when a porn site finds a loophole in Google's natural search algorithm, it takes a few months before it appears on mainstream sites but it will appear.


III. Digg might create a coupon category
1.) I think there's really something to this. Digg could generate a solid amount of traffic from cheapskates looking for a good deal (isn't that the definition of a geek?). The only catch is that the coupon industry is defined by it's affiliates and affiliates are secretive loners. They don't like sharing secrets about how they make money and as a result, a site like digg would shine a spotlight on the good ones and the rest would catch on much faster than large corporate sites.

2.) On the flip side however, I'm not sure digg wants to get caught up in affiliates and their schemes and sniffing out scams like this buy.com thing is what they're focused on right now.

What Does All of This Mean?
You've got to keep an eye on what's being pushed in front of you at 100mph every second of every day. People are trying to take advantage of ignorance and as technology increases and advancements are made there will always be those who prey on the weak, so don't be weak.

My point isn't to say that buy.com sucks, cause honestly I have purchased more than my fair share of products from them. I think they're just a bit ignorant with their marketing tactics and don't really understand the ramifications of their decision to have an internal hired gun post junk on digg. I'm sure they weighed the prospects of hiring someone with a high trust score versus an internal employee with no reputation and decided to do this internally because using someone externally was simply too risky. I'm sure the thought of a quasi-famous person on digg exposing buy.com's sneaky tactics was a PR nighmare that they just weren't willing to risk.