Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer with the awesome YouTube demo video we wrote about earlier this month, has launched into beta tonight. We’ve kicked the tires and can report that the parts of the service available now do deliver as advertised (see video again below). Accounts are being opened slowly but hopefully Scrybe won’t leave too many disappointed in the short term. It’s impressive and we hope that the full functionality comes online soon.

For some people this will be very important: it’s not Ajax or Java – it’s Flash. Flash continues its march towards world domination, if it’s not there already.

The basic idea is that the application can be worked with in a browser offline and automatically syncs up whenever you get back online. You can copy and paste list items from Word and Excel documents into Scrybe. There’s a whole lot of smooth zooming in and out and many things can be moved by drag and drop. The UI is almost as smooth as the demo makes it appear, though it would be nice if things shifted or resized to fit the browser window.

A number of features have not yet launched, most notably the bookmarks, the global times display and data export. (Correction: global times have in fact been implemented.) Just a few hours into launch, though, the company has proven that it can bring to market a very fluid, multi-feature product that bridges the online/offline gap very nicely.

Last week social software company SixApart launched Vox, its newest social networking and blogging service. The launch was high profile, the site is beautiful and many people (myself included) thought Vox was bringing something important to market. Not everyone agreed.

In the following QandA I queried Andrew Anker, Executive VP of Corporate Development at SixApart, about some of the biggest criticisms of Vox at launch. Prior to working at SixApart, Anker was co-founder and CEO of Wired Digital and a general partner at August Capital. I think these questions and answers will be of general interest to startups and social social software practitioners in general.

Anker told me that he thinks the social networking market is far from saturated and that there is a market in protecting privacy even if people don’t use it. He says that software can be both feature rich and accessible to non-technical users; that the world of online advertising is just beginning to move beyond “punch the monkey” style ads and has lots more room to develop as well.

The following are Anker’s replies, I’ll let you judge for yourself whether they are convincing. Graphics below are from a few of the site’s more than 150 layout templates.
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Marshall Kirkpatrick and I spoke with Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian just a few hours after the announcement of their acquisition by Condé Nast earlier today. A recording of the discussion is now up at TalkCrunch.

Steve and Alexis wouldn’t disclose the acquisition price (even under pressure), but they did talk about current traffic (70k uniques & 700k page views per day), and previous funding ($100k total in seed funding, all in the summer of 2005).

Listen to the podcast here.

Microsoft has made a number of announcements in the last 24 hours that show it is not going to let the oncoming Google Office steal its thunder without a fight. It looks to me like the transformation of Microsoft into a Web 2.0 company is underway at this moment and is happening faster than many people expected. Redmond has announced that it is partnering with PHP commercialization firm Zend, it has released a free, lightweight accounting application integrated with online activities and it will be bringing the first version of Office Live out of beta in two weeks. A new cross vendor ad management service will allow customers to buy AdSense as well as Microsoft ads and there will be a new hosted CRM service. These are huge changes.

The company announced this morning a multi-year relationship with Israeli PHP company Zend Technologies. The collaboration will focus on making it easier for PHP developers to program against Windows Server 2003 and in the future Longhorn. This is important because it’s a clear signal of recognition that the company can’t use its market share to force developers to use its .NET platform. The partnership with Zend looks like a great move towards increased participation in the larger development ecosystem.

Yesterday Microsoft released a free downloadable accounting program called Office Accounting Express 2007. That software focuses on integrating with online sites like eBay, PayPal and Office Live. See for comparison Google’s partnership with Intuit.

Today it was announced that the first version of Office Live will come out of beta on the 14th of November. Office Live is a free service with premium services for small businesses. It includes online storage, webmail and calendaring. The highest level of premium service will cost a mere $40 per month for up to 50 users.

According to InfoWorld’s coverage, when Office Live comes out of beta, two new services will become available in beta stage: Office Live adManager and Office Live Business Contact Manager. AdManager will let customers purchase and manage ad campaigns on any ad platform including Google, Yahoo! and Ask as well as Microsoft’s own platform. The Business Contact Manager will be a hosted CRM service.

Got all that? Microsoft is partnering with an open source facilitator, releasing free rich internet applications, online storage, web mail, calendaring, hosted CRM and a non-walled garden ad campaign manager. The fight between Microsoft and Google is getting very interesting.

We just received confirmation that Condé Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Boston-based Reddit earlier this morning, and will make the announcement later today. The price is not being disclosed.

All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital. Reddit, founded and funded in 2005, is a YCombinator company (see our interview with YCombinator founder Paul Graham here). The two original founders are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and they were later joined by Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz.

Reddit is a social news site that has always played second fiddle to Digg, although Reddit does have an active and loyal userbase. Users praise Reddit for having a very quick load time and no advertising. Like Digg, news stories on Reddit are submitted by users, and other users vote up or down on the story. When it gets enought “up” votes, the story appears on the home page.

Wired will leave Reddit as a standalone site, and also integrate it into Condé Nast web properties.

See our earlier coverage on recent Digg acquisition rumors.

Update: Marshall and I just recorded a podcast with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and it will be up on TalkCrunch shortly. We couldn’t get them to tell us the acquisition price, but they did tell us that the company has raised just $100k (all in summer 2005) and currently has an average of 70,000 daily unique visitors and 700,000 or so page views.

Google’s office strategy just got a whole lot richer with the announced acquisition of the wiki based company Jotspot. A business oriented service that plugs a long list of different applications like calendars and photo sharing into a wiki framework, we called Jotspot “the best business-facing hosted wiki available” when we reviewed its newest iteration this summer. We also reported on rumors that Yahoo! was going to acquire the company in May. See all our previous coverage of Jotspot here.

Other than a wiki, most of Jotspot’s plug and play applications are things that Google already has its own versions of. The acquisition may have been largely motivated by the desire to bring on board an agile team able to quickly ramp up lightweight hosted business applications for collaboration. Google may push Jotspot primarily as a project management application, one of the most important missing pieces of the company’s office platform. In fact, far more than a wiki, I’m going to guess that when Google reopens Jotspot to new users it will be as a wiki based project management service.

The Palo Alto company reports having more than 2000 customers who subscribe to services costing $5 and $200 per month. An intro page and screencast about Jotspot is still online but may not be for much longer. As of today all existing customers are no longer being charged and new account registration is closed while Jotspot is integrated with the rest of Google’s services.

Founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer are also founders of early web portal Excite, now an IAC property. Excite was once considered a darling of the early web but was first acquired for less than $10 million.

Jotspot raised one round of funding in 2004 for $5.2 million from Redpoint Ventures and Mayfield Funds. Joe Krause frequently points out that it cost only $100,000 to get Jotspot to market.

Jotspot has often been discussed as one of the most successful and established enterprise 2.0 companies and I imagine the selling price was a good one for the small startup. Details haven’t been disclosed but Jotspot is a strong company, the deal has officially closed and Google said in its last earnings call that YouTube’s all stock acquisition was unusual. Google probably paid a substantial amount of cash for Jotspot.

If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. How much longer until a web conferencing company is acquired?

Israel based social networking and user generated media sharing site eSnips is announcing the closure of its Series A funding with $2 million from Greylock Partners and Gemini Israel Funds. Users buy and sell art, music and other user generated content on the site. The company says it has registered nearly one million users since launching this March. See our previous coverage of eSnips here.

This is a company that takes a remarkably simple approach to serving consumer producers. They monetize storage beyond 1 GB of media and run AdSense on most pages. Purchasing items on eSnips currently goes on through PayPal. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new funding is used in part to develop or purchase an ecommerce tool that eSnips can generate revenue with. They certainly have built up a vibrant user community in a short period of time.

On Tuesday Prosper.com, a person-to-person lending site that launched in February, will announce a couple of fairly significant milestones: 100,000 members and $20 million in funded loans.

They reached both milestones faster than UK-based competitor Zopa, which was recently named a Busines 2.0 “Disruptor.”

Prosper allows members to request loans of up to $25,000 (the average funded loan is $5,000), and then other members offer to fund the loan at various interest rates. Prosper breaks the loan up into multiple pieces to distribute risk, and then funds from the lenders offering the most attractive interest rates. Over 4,000 loans have been funded since the site launched in February 2006. Prosper earns revenue by taking 1% of the loan amount in fees from the borrower up front, and charging a 0.5% yearly loan maintenance fee to lenders.

Interesting fact: Benchmark invested in both Zopa and Prosper, and the two will soon be competeting directly as Zopa expands to the U.S. market.

While the launch of Brightcove has garnered no shortage of attention today, it wasn’t the only important video news of the day. Google’s first “Sponsored Video” had its debut as well. Titled The Domino Effect, it’s Diet Coke and Mentos part II from the guys in white lab coats – EepyBird. Sponsored of course by Coca Cola and Mentos. What portion of the ad money goes to the video creators hasn’t been disclosed.

The original Diet Coke and Mentos video that the pair made was much more entertaining and brought them a reported $35,000 when they posted that video on Revver. Reeling in viral video stars with promises of revenue sharing has been Revver’s strategy – apparently they got beat at their own game when EepyBird got this Coke, Mentos and Google deal.

The official Google Blog said today that this was just the first of what they hoped would be many Sponsored Videos. This is not a long tail approach that’s being taken so far to monetize Google Video content. People interested in participating in the Sponsored Video program are directed to a Google Video page that says it is for publishers with more than 1000 hours of video available. The advertising on the EepyBird video is a very produced post-roll. This isn’t massive upload of user generated video content with AdSense wrapped around it. Perhaps that will be the role of YouTube and Google Video will be for relatively high-brow, formally produced video footage.

It’s fascinating to see Google, the creator of possibly the best long tail monetization engine in history, launching a video program focused on elite producers only. On the same day Brightcove launched a free for all network aimed at a much larger number of video producers and Metacafe took the bulk approach with their new Producer Rewards program. Metacafe is paying publishers $5 for every thousand views of a video after the first 20,000.

I’m sure that things will change with time, but perhaps Google has come to terms with the fact that hipness isn’t what its in-house video service has to offer. Perhaps it’s class they are seeking. If, in this world today, high class means hundreds of exploding Diet Coke bottles followed by an advertisement then perhaps what they are doing makes sense. Whether Google can split large advertising revenues with elite amateur video producers and build and sustain a vibrant, creative and authentic video community out of that is doubtful. The second EepyBird video sure felt stale.

Business Objects has released a free, lightweight version of its spreadsheet visualization software Crystal Xcelsius. Called CX NOW, it’s a Windows desktop application that connects with Excel, Powerpoint and Word to offer an interface for creating dynamic graphs and charts based on spreadsheet data.

The best thing about the software is that it lets you use GUIs like sliders and dials to change a particular field in the spreadsheet and both your spreadsheet and visualization change in real time along with the slider.

We threw up a quick and dirty example below; visualizations like this can be embedded in Word files, PowerPoint slides and on the web. Once it’s set free on the web, the visualization obviously no longer changes the .xls file, but it does when both are on your desktop.

The company has a well made screencast demonstration that’s worth checking out. There’s a fair amount of creativity made possible and the company is holding a contest that will award $10,000 to the creator of the best visualization with its tools.

The full Crystal Xcelsius software is far more powerful but CX NOW is a fun, fast and free way to create some slick little presentations.

MotionDSP uses military grade video enhancement technology to improve the quality of low-grade footage from devices like mobile phones. The technology compares every frame in a video to find and replace missing pixels. We profiled the company in August and today they have launched their first product. Called Ikena, the offering is a B2B deal aimed at websites hosting consumer generated video content. The company offered a brief period of free public beta use, but that period is over now.

If you start seeing the quality of mobile shot video on the web improving, don’t assume it’s an improvement on the phone side. MostionDSP’s resolution enhancement could become an industry standard for video sharing sites. You can see the quality of the video enhancement on the company’s sample page or on the MotionDSP user page on YouTube. The difference isn’t huge, but when consumers had a choice between the two I think the demand will be clear.

MotionDSP began in 1998 as a US military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. Its first product provides real time enhancement (meaning a one-minute video will take one minute to enhance) using a system of 3 dual core servers. Those systems start at $30,000 but most large companies will want to buy them in bulk.

A company representative told me that future products could include chips to perform the resolution enhancement on phones or laptops. Anything that can run its algorithm is a potential platform, they said. They have taken about $500,000 in angel funding and are expecting to close Series A funding before end of year, probably in November.

Monitior110, the pre-launch web monitoring service for hedge fund traders we wrote about in September, will announce on Monday that it has closed a Series C round of financing with $11 million from new and existing investors. The company, which will begin offering its product for general subscription early next year after three years of development, has now raised a total of $20 million.

The service tracks information from now 50 million sources, analyzes it for topical relevance and delivers near real time alerts to customers. It focuses on blog, deep web and static web changes. Topical expertise evaluation is an important part of the secret sauce.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson led this round of funding and Ron Conway is the most prominent new investor. The company claims to have spent very little of its investors money so far. Longtime financial markets AI geek David J. Leinweber has also joined the Monitor110 board of advisors.
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Many commenters in previous TechCrunch posts on PayPerPost compared their business model to payola in the music industry. At PayPerPost, bloggers are offered cash to write about products. Disclosure is optional, and often the bloggers are required to only express positive comments. The company is now well funded, and a number of competitors have launched. This “virus” seems here to stay.

Don’t look for PayPerPost to require blogger disclosure anytime soon. Instead, they are creating a distraction, designed to keep the buzz about PayPerPost going strong, as well as to move people’s attention away from the core issue of blogger disclosure of product shilling.

In a move reminiscent of big tobacco funding tobacco research, PayPerPost is announcing a new initiative on Monday called DisclosurePolicy, which “provides policy creation tools, best practices and forums for discussing the delicate balance between content creator freedoms and audience transparency expectations.”

DisclosurePolicy creates a disclosure policy for bloggers to post on their blogs, based on their answers to a few questions. They will also pay every blogger who posts a PayPerPost disclosure policy on their blog $10.

While that sounds like a fine idea, PayPerPost bloggers should also be disclosing the fact that they are being paid for their post prominently within the post, not on some separate page in their blog. Also PayPerPost subtly works with the language they use, particularly around the definition of “compensation” to suggest that all blogs have bias (and therefore PayPerPost isn’t really that bad). Here are the three choices – bloggers must choose one:

This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. We write for our own purposes. However, we may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

This blog does not accept any form of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. However, we will and do accept and keep free products, services, travel, event tickets, and other forms of compensation from companies and organizations.

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

If you are a PayPerPost blogger, or the New York Times, or anything in between, you must pick the third option. That’s because “taking advertsing” and “paid insertions” are defined as the same thing. And even if you have no form of advertising or other revenue on the site, you have to admit to bias based on “background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.”

Blurring the lines in this way – facilitating the pollution of the blogosphere while creating an illusion of doing something good for the public, is a good business move for PayPerPost. But it is a terrible development for the blogsphere and public trust. I hope that very few bloggers are suckered into going along with this.

High profile video startup Brightcove has launched what it calls the Brightcove Network, its video delivery and monetization service for small video publishers. To date Brightcove’s most visible moves have been in providing web video services for major media companies like Warner Music Group, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and MTV. The new Brightcove Network, however, appears to pull much of that content into what the company has aimed for since its inception in 2004.

Now that the veil is lifted, it is a little anti-climactic to look at Brightcove after YouTube ramped up, filled out and sold in the time it took this company’s consumer facing service to come to market. None the less, I think it could be a viable play in the long term as media channels proliferate and small publishers look to make their work economically viable.

If a million video channels bloom, Brightcove is positioning itself to be at the center of that new infrastructure. The company has loads of connections to leverage in trying to make that happen. Company founder Jeremy Allaire is the former CTO of Macromedia, the makers of Flash, and the co-founder of Allaire Corporation, the creators of ColdFusion. Brightcove took $5.5 million in Series A funding led by General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners in March 2005, and $16.2 million from AOL, Hearst Corp and IAC last November. IAC Chairman Barry Diller is on the Brightcove board. This isn’t a startup coming out of any one’s garage, but it is providing video service to a long list of big corporate customers already. Here’s our previous coverage of Brightcove. Now it’s going for the long tail.

By participating in the Brightcove Network, video publishers will be able to manage video posted on their own web sites, showcase their channels for syndication and subscription on the Brightcove website, take 50% of advertising revenue from videos wherever they play and take 70% of revenue from pay-per-download videos, including videos purchased on partner site AOL Video. The Brightcove site is quite changed as of tonight; it looks like an entertainment site instead of a B2B landing page. My first look at it does make me cringe; we’ll see what the quality of the small publisher provided content is.

Full, free, ad supported versions of video files will be available online at Brightcove and DVD quality Windows Media DRM infected files can be purchased for download at the publisher’s discretion. Though the company says it will include videos of all lengths in its directories and community – Brightcove will probably have more 20 to 60 minute videos than other familiar video sites around the web.

The company plans to rely on the DMCA safe harbor clause in regards to copyrighted video, meaning they will remove video upon a rights holder’s request but will not take pro-active measures to discover illicitly posted content with the kind of technology found at YouTube or Guba.

Ads will appear in several different formats: pre-roll, post roll, overlays and synced banners appearing next to the video player. Free Brightcove Network accounts will have ad placement decided for them, premium Publisher accounts will be able to select their own ad format.

If you believe companies like Brightcove, copyrighted content is not a big part of the YouTube story – it’s about consumer generated video and what we see today is only the beginning. Brightcove is targeting the growing market of semi-professional or serious amateur video producers but small businesses could well find Network participation valuable as well. The company says it sees its primary competitors as Google on the low end and NBBC (our coverage) for high end video producers. I’d add the newly funded Podshow to that list of competitors. Still others could include Blip.tv, VSocial and VideoEgg. I wish I could write great things about Revver, the company that runs post roll still frame ads after user uploaded videos. Brightcove is like a high class version of Revver with more features, a pay-to-download option, a partnership with AOL and a whole lot of money.

Brightcove’s founder Allaire emphasizes the difference between IPTV, which he calls Telcom TV and the open alternative that he calls the Internet of Video. While Telcom TV is a needed upgrade to cable and satellite delivery of traditional video programming, Allaire says, a more exciting model is emerging in the proliferation of countless online video channels produced by small publishers and delivered on a wide variety of platforms. The Brightcove Network appears to be the manifestation of Allair’s vision for the Internet of Video.

Is there a large market of people who would produce quality, monetizable online video if they only had better management tools and infrastructure? I think there are. Some will wrap ads around their content, others will offer videos for a price and still others will license the technology to deliver their message through video in their own branded player. I expect Brightcove to serve all of those user groups relatively well. Whether a community of video producers forms around Brightcove or not will remain to be seen.

Top10Media, parent company to Massachusetts based TopTenSources, a human edited blog aggregator, has raised $3.5 million in a venture round led by Highland Capital (see our previous coverage of TopTenSources here). They are also announcing their acquisition of Blogniscient, a TechMeme-style blog news aggregator. We compared Blogniscient to TechMeme and other competitors in October 2005 and again in February 2006.

Top10Media also acquired StyleFeeder in June 2006.

On Monday MySpace will announce a partnership with California startup Gracenote to help detect and block copyrighted music from being posted on MySpace member pages. This will allow them to be more proactive about copyright enforcement, in addition to complying with DMCA take-down notices.

YouTube made a similar announcement earlier this year, although YouTube is not simply blocking copyrighted material – instead they are encouraging the copyright holder to allow the use and take a revenue share from advertising placed around the video.

Copyrighted material, particularly music, is one of the key drivers of the success of social networks. Over 3 million bands now have pages at MySpace – it is now a defacto requirement for a band to have a MySpace presence. Competitor Bebo recently announced that they have over 300,000 bands after just one year.

Recent news suggests YouTube’s free ride on the copyright infringement gravy train may be coming to an end. They’ve complied with “requests” to remove 30,000 Japanese media clips, as well as clips from Comedy Central shows. Rumor has it that in the past, marketing departments for TV shows would anonymously upload content to YouTube to get exposure, even while their legal departments were issuing take-down notices for the very same content. Now that everyone understands the value of being the online network for TV clips ($1.65 billion), copyright holders are taking a step back and thinking about how they can get a piece of that money, too.

TechCrunch is co-hosting this year’s LeWeb3 in Paris, France December 11th and 12th, an event organized by Loic Le Meur of SixApart. It is a two days conference to discuss the next generation web and mobile services, virtual games/communties, old and new media and other topics. Last year the event gathered 450 web entrepreneurs, key players and bloggers from 25 countries.

A great panel of speakers with a european focus has been gathered (Niklas Zennström/Skype, Martin Varsavsky/Fon,..) and many startups will be invited to showcase (you can register here startups wiki if you are interested). The program is online and will be updated as additional speakers join are confirmed.

A wild party will also be organized the night of the first day. Michael Arrington, Sam Sethi from TechCrunch UK and myself will of course be there. It will probably be the biggest or one of the biggest web event this year in Europe.

1000 participants, bloggers, VCs and angels, startups, journalists internet passionate are expected there. The conference is english. The registration fee for this event will be 300 EUR – about 380 USD (VAT excluded) if you register before Nov 11th or 500 EUR – about 630 USD(VAT excluded) from Nov 11th to Dec 10th. It includes also breakfast, lunch and attendance to the party. Registration is now open.

A blog has been designed with all the details of the event as well as a conference wiki.

New York based BlueTie released a very nice hosted Ajax email suite last week. This is a polished product – the company has been in business since 1999 and has hundreds of partners, like ISPs, that already distribute this software to their customers. The new product is a customer-facing email solution, with both a free and premium version.

This is a crowded space, with products from Zimbra, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Goowy, Foldera and others (although I am stretching the definition of competitor here to include simple Ajax webmail offerings, and Goowy is a Flash application). But getting control of people’s email account can be a profitable business – BlueTie says that people spend an average of 4.6 hours on email every day, and many people spend far more time than that. More than any other application, email is the center of the work flow in a business.

None of the competing services listed above, except Office Live and Zimbra, currently offer the breadth of services (email, calendar, contacts, instant messaging, file storage) of BlueTie, however, and Zimbra is not a hosted application (you must install it on your server). Foldera will have these features but is yet to launch.

Many individuals and businesses will like the BlueTie offering: It’s free and battletested. The email application worked very well in my testing (and was fast). The company will generate revenue through the premium version and advertising on the free version. The advertising will be built into the product. For example, through a partnership with Orbitz the company will offer travel services.

I am on the board of directors of Foldera, a competitor to BlueTie.

A couple of months ago I decided I was going to buy a new car, but there is almost nothing I like less than negotiating with car salespeople. The first thing they do is try to get your name and phone number. They will then begin calling you a day or two after you leave to ask how your search is going, and try to get you back to the dealership. If you do go back to the dealership, the second trip is when the hard selling starts. The guy you already know is the “nice guy,” who’s going to “work with his boss to get you a really good deal.” The boss is a guy who tries to belittle you and make you feel cheap for negotiating and passing on the upgrades. It’s basic psychological warfare, and they do it multiple times per day, so nothing throws them off. But for the buyer it just adds to the overall cost of buying a car.

So for the third time I’ve skipped the dealer hassle and bought a new car through CarsDirect. I’ve researched other services, including autobytel and a very good program offered by Costco, but CarsDirect was better than anyone else on pricing. I’ve put my notes on the entire experience below, including research and test driving vehicles.

My car buying experience was a three day process and involved almost no stress and a minimum amount of dealer direct contact.

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Videoblogger Ze Frank is in what he calls a nerd fight with Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron. Frank says that Baron’s numbers are inflated and make it difficult for he and other video bloggers to sell advertisements with much lower numbers to offer. I spoke with both of them on the phone, looked at Rocketboom’s traffic logs and ran my understanding of what I saw past several podcasting industry experts who confirmed my analysis.

I think that if Baron is exaggerating, it’s not by very much. I think his rough numbers are more or less accurate. I also think that’s just the beginning of the story.

Baron says that episodes of Rocketboom are downloaded about 300,000 times each. Frank says his show (called “The Show”) has about 30,000 viewers. Rocketboom delivers its show from four different servers, Tivo, iTunes, Hellio mobile phones and all over the web. Viewer numbers and ad impressions are impossible to quantify absolutely, but it appears to me that each show is getting downloaded through verifiable channels between 150 and 200 thousand times.

Are other, non verified by me distribution channels, bringing those numbers close to Baron’s 300,000 claim? I think they are probably coming close enough that Baron’s number can be accepted as generally accurate with a large grain of salt. Ze Frank himself emphasizes that good analytics are just not available in this brand new industry.

In other words, Baron’s show may only be downloaded 7 or 8 times as much often as Frank’s, not ten, but his claims appear to be in the ball park. Heather Green of Business Week’s Blogspotting just posted on this as well and came to just the opposite conclusion of mine but based on the same numbers. The issue here, though, is the ability to sell ads. Whether Rocketboom has 250k downloads or 300k isn’t the issue if Frank has 30k. The point is that Rocketboom may not be strong in some metrics (like pageviews) but when it comes to downloads the show is scoring high. As Green points out, it also shows that the loss of Amanda Congdon did not cause great pain to the number of downloads.

Big Issues

Numbers and money are obviously what pays the rent and thus they are important, but there are many things that matter more than these numbers. The number of downloads does not equal the number of people who actually view the show. The number of people who press play does not equal the number of people who watch long enough to view an ad. Tacked on ads like Revver serves up for Ze Frank are very different from innovative ads like the one based in Second Life that Rocketboom recently did for a rechargeable battery recycling company.

Pageviews are very difficult to track and are close to meaningless anyway, particularly when it comes to multimedia. See this Alexaholic graph, for example, that makes it look like Ze Frank is beating Rocketboom handily and that TechCrunch is much larger than both of them combined. I’ve seen Rocketboom numbers, the show is of general interest and it is everywhere. In fact there is little reason to come to the site if you like watching the show. I believe that they have a larger number of downloaders than we have subscribers and page visitors. Of course we’re a very topic specific site.

What people get out of watching is an other key question. Jeneane Sessum says there needs to be a likability metric and Robert Scoble says we need a way to measure engagement.

Ze Frank viewers leave hundreds of comments, participate in contests, send in clips of themselves and donate money. Comments are far sparser at Rocketboom. My girlfriend once spent all her free time for a week watching every Ze Frank show that’s been made and I laughed out loud after most of them. If I never saw another episode of Rocketboom again that would be ok with me. I like Ze Frank’s content much better.

The fact remains however, that Rocketboom’s content is being downloaded nearly 10 times as often as Frank’s. I accept Andrew Baron’s explanation of that, too. Rocketboom exercises almost zero control over distribution of their show – other than to push it into as many channels as possible. Frank prominently asks his viewers to keep his videos out of sites like YouTube, presumably so he can track the numbers closely. Rocketboom also has first mover’s advantage, is work safe and, as unfair as this may be, plays the attractive woman card.

Ze Frank and many other video podcasters ought to be able to make a living doing what they are doing. The question of numbers is probably one part of what’s slowing advertising spending in the space. The fact that Rocketboom is as well known as it is shouldn’t lead advertisers to believe that every other video blogger’s audience is insignificant. It’s a changed game and it continues to change.

To see more top video blogs, check out the site of the upcoming Vloggies awards.