Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr

According to comScore Video Metrix, more than 170 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 31 billion online videos during November 2009. This means 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video that month, a new record.

Americans watched an average of 182 videos per viewer during the month. And the duration of the average online video was 4.0 minutes. This means the average online video viewer watched 12.2 hours of video.

If you drill down into the data, you’ll see that 128.1 million viewers watched more than 12 billion videos on YouTube.com. That’s 94.3 videos per viewer.

Now, let me add some context to these numbers.

According to an article by Johnny Diaz in The Boston Globe entitled, “Sitting this one out,” the 2009 Super Bowl was the most watched game ever, with 98.7 million total viewers tuned in to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the Arizona Cardinals 27-23.

Diaz adds that a 30-second spot for this year’s Super Bowl game costs between $2.5 million and $3 million — and that doesn’t include more than $1 million that companies will pay to produce the spot.

So, YouTube alone will get you a Super Bowl sized audience month in and month out. And if you have a budget between $3.5 million and $4 million, then you might join PepsiCo Inc., General Motors Corp. and FedEx Corp., who are reevaluating how they spend their advertising dollars.

Chinese search engine Baidu is planning to launch a Hulu-like site. The site will offer licensed online video content and be supported with advertising.

The site will be set up as an independent company. Providence Equity Partners, an investor in Hulu, is teaming up with Baidu for the venture.

Yu Gong has been named CEO. Gong was formerly CEO of China Mobile’s 12580 business.

Baidu stock is traded on NASDAQ in the US, who was happy with the news, boosting shares by 1.48% at the time of this post.

The Conference Board has released data showing online job listings rising by 255,000 last month. The average monthly increase of jobs for 2009 was just 60,000.

“Employers’ modest increase in demand for labor in the second half of 2009 is a nice way to end what has been a very challenging year,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board.

Online job listings still remain below average. While the total number of vacancies last month was 3,642,000, the average for 2008 was 4,481,000.

“The gap between the number of unemployed and the number of advertised vacancies is still very high, but the recent six months indicate that things are slowly moving in the right direction,” noted Levanon. “The gap between the number of unemployed and the number of advertised vacancies is about 12 million, with 4.5 unemployed for every online advertised vacancy.”

Meanwhile, Yahoo! HotJobs has released data from a survey about job outlook and attitudes.

Job satisfaction is low, even among new hires.

• 38.3% are “very satisfied” with their jobs and are not looking for a new job. That’s just about the same as 2008 (38.5%)
• 44.6% are satisfied with their current job, but would consider a new job if the right opportunity came along. This is a big increase since 2008 (38.2%)
• The most unsatisfied make up 17% (down from 23% in 2008) and are new hires. 34% have applied for jobs they’re overqualified for and 30% have accepted lower salary and/or fewer benefits.

“For employers, the statistic about unsatisfied recent hires is a warning sign,” says Tom Musbach, managing editor for Yahoo! HotJobs. “This is the same group that potentially took on the job while sacrificing salary or growth, and these are the people who could leave once the economy turns.”

While most workers are pessimistic about the immediate future, employers are more hopeful. 42% of hiring managers expect to maintain the same recruiting levels while 32% expect to increase recruiting in 2010.

“Job seekers and hiring pros don’t have high hopes for a job market rebound in 2010, but our survey also shows many companies intend to hire more than they did last year,” said Musbach. “It’s incumbent on job seekers to remain resourceful, persistent, and positive to succeed in getting a job today.”

Yesterday, we learned that despite the economic times, Zillow saw a record year at their real estate search site. Now, Trulia is reporting similar results for their real estate search offering.

“We dedicated 2009 to delivering a great consumer experience. Looking back on the engagement data makes me believe we are delivering on what the consumer wants. Consumers have told us over and over that they are looking for a real estate site that can deliver relevant and personalized results,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder Trulia.com.

In 2009, Trulia experienced a total of 62.3 million unique visitors, their largest ever. Here’s what else happened:

• Visits grew by more than 45%
• Total page views grew by 105%
• Property views grew by more than 130%
• Consumer questions doubled over 2008 on Trulia Voices
• Nearly 1 million home buyer inquiries were sent to real estate agents
• Trulia became one of the Top 5 Real Estate sites on the web, according to Hitwise

Trulia also saw a shift towards mobile, something we keep hearing about from various retailers and sites. They updated their iPhone app, which thus far has been downloaded more than 300,000 times. Also, Trulia launched a mobile version of its web site, m.trulia.com, which can be accessed via any mobile browser.

“Mobile and local information will be two areas of focus for the coming year. The world is becoming more mobile and real estate information on the go is a very natural combination,” said Flint. “On the weekends, 5 to 10 percent of our overall traffic comes from mobile handsets. Deep local information, data and insights is also key to consumers interested in real estate and we will introduce more data and local knowledge during the next year.”

It’s anybody’s guess as to what the economy will bring this year, but sites like Trulia are finding ways to create a valuable experience no matter what.

You would think that 2009 was not a great year for a site like Zillow. After all, the housing market was rough, as it was one of the driving forces behind the global economic downturn that began in 2008.

“2009 was a wild year for real estate, with continued home value declines, government intervention, record low mortgage rates, and an enormous amount of consumer uncertainty about what the future holds,” said Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s chief operating officer.

In spite of that, Zillow saw it’s traffic records broken in all sorts of ways. Perhaps, as people prepared and planned for a hopeful recovery, Zillow was turned to as a resource in a confusing market.

“People flocked to Zillow for information and advice,” noted Rascoff. “Uncertainty always benefits information providers, and 2009 was the year that Zillow solidified its place as a clear leader in providing millions of people with real estate information.”

Here’s what uncertainty created for Zillow in 2009:

• An average of 8.2 million unique users per month in 2009, up 57% year-over-year
• 37% growth in page views year-over-year
• 3.9 million for-sale, rental and Make Me Move listings, up 43%, the result of more listings feed partnerships with brokerages and Multiple Listings Services.
• 550,000 loan requests were submitted on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace in 2009. 46%, or 253,300 were for refinance loans as mortgage rates. Lenders responded with more than 10 million custom loan quotes. To date, over 7,000 lender ratings and reviews have been submitted by borrowers.
• 171 U.S. newspapers partnered with Zillow to use their search and listings technology

Zillow also experienced a boost in mobile, similar to what we’ve learned about eBay during their recent holiday shopping season. Zillow launched an iPhone app in April, which has already seen over 870,000 downloads. Over 2 million homes have been viewed on the app, and it’s the most popular real estate iPhone app. O’Reilly Media named the Zillow iPhone App “Best App for Real Estate” and a “top pick.”

“We saw a real shift change in how people consume and find real estate information,” said Rascoff. “It’s clear to us that more and more people want Zillow’s real estate information on location, while touring neighborhoods and homes, and we expect this trend to magnify in 2010.”

New year’s resolutions is usually about going back to basics, but it should not be reserved just for your personal life. Here’s some search marketing ones to consider.

1. Be a Nice Link Builder
Stop bulk emailing people. Instead, commit to contacting them directly with genuine points of interest. Offer sites you’d like to be getting links from, something genuinely useful for their sites. Think pimp. Other webmasters want bling websites, so offer simple but impressive enhancements in return for a link. For example, make a widget with a newsfeed. A salary checker, mortgage calculator or a countdown timer are all useful gadgets. Whatever you do, always be driving value in your discussions with other webmasters. Freely offer useful information and insight in your correspondence with other webmasters – help them with their own stuff.

2. Invest in the communities that support you
Do real ‘link bait’ by making something cool. A marketer might fund some research, or just do it themselves, and publish the findings. Or commission a blogger or journalist to conduct an investigative report about something that matters to the communities you are in. A business owner could encourage their developers to contribute back to the development community – and create an awesome firefox plugin for example. Lots can happen for a company when it broadens it’s work ethic. For example, Google’s 90/10 policy of encouraging employees to allocate 10% of their time to ‘blue sky’ and innovation projects – led to their latest collaboration product, Google Wave.

3. Get others to make sense of analytics data for you
To achieve this, you’ll need to stop wasting your colleagues time with data they are not interested in understanding. If you can perfectly match the data to their needs, you might have some amazing discoveries as they start to bring their own insight and experience to web analytics conundrums. So, aim to give them only the choicest golden nuggets sifted from web analytics data, rather than taking them to the river and just giving them a pan. Meet with them immediately and find out exactly what they’d like to know. Go and find out a bit about their role in the company. Talk to them about their job, but with the explicit aim to REDUCE the amount of data you send them again. Below are the type of questions you might ask every stakeholder in the project.

• (Director) Do you care about offline sales? If yes, would the online sales metric be useful to you?
• (Marketing) Do you need to know why people buy your products? If so, would keyword analytics or paid search campaign metrics be useful to you?
• (Sales) Do you need to know how people find your products? If so, would website referrer report be useful to you?
• (Web Development) Do you need to know how people are consume the site? If so, would a browser/operating/screen resolution report be useful to you?

4. Promise yourself a fun year ahead
Be content, create great content. Start posting regularly, or at least schedule some “creating great content” opportunities on a calendar. Build an audience through regular updates, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly or just a special event of the year that you always engage with, such as Valentine’s day, Easter or Advent. Failing all other ideas, blog that new year’s detox you promised yourself!

More clues as to how you might schedule your content is to look at the seasonal traffic patterns of your website. Divide the year up into 4 quarters of 3 months each and see whether site usage peaks in summer or winter. Do any days stick out? Think laterally and creatively about what days could be an opportunity to “create something great” for your website that features just for a single day- for example, mother’s day? Birthdays? Word of the day? Thought for a day? Even something simple like planning ahead and scheduling a daily thought for the day from writers you love, could do great things for your twitter account, let alone your blog!

You could also reflect on the year by making your own website performance audit. Think about how much was achieved in a single year, both ‘on stage’, namely from what events and changes occurred on the website, and ‘behind the scenes’, namely the internal operations of your company, and see what insights emerge as to how project time could best be spent and which people are the best people to deal with in 2010. Get them involved in your idea now.

5. Give free training to your clients
Having empowered team mates in your search marketing campaign plans is the difference between success and massive success. Teaching someone to do your job as well as you is not talking yourself out if your role in the company or your clients’ business. It’s actually expanding your own role AND finding them the talent to meet the next generation of challenges ahead. It shows enthusiasm and passion for your work and is what “being indispensable” is all about. Unshackle yourself from the chains of command!

Here’s something quick you can do right now, to free the knowledge and expertise in the team:

Make an email mailing list or Google Groups thread dedicated to a topics and resources that are useful to the project at hand (or the company as a whole). E.g If your business sells virus software, then have a ‘virus update’ mailing list for any news on the subject relevant to your business or your customer.

Such a mailing list keeps conversation alive in the company and makes it easy for team mates to have a safe place to send stuff that is not directly relevant to the project at hand, but might only be vaguely useful or maybe really useful one day. A mailing list saves everyone in the team from worrying about interrupting other people’s workflows by bothering them with off topic and related content.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or undergoing a digital cleanse (John Mayer), then you’ve probably heard something about Google releasing its own mobile phone, dubbed the Nexus One. Today, the Nexus One moved from rumor to reality with a big announcement out at Mountain View.

Here are the specs and details:

• Manufactured by HTC
• 3.7″ OLED display (the iPhone’s screen is 3.5″), 800 x 480 pixels
• Thin (59.8 mm thick) and Light (130 g w/ battery)
• Runs Android 2.1
• Voice-enabled keyboard lets you speak into any text field
• 5 mp camera with autofocus, zoom and flash
• Video capture 720×480 pixels at 20 frames per second or higher
• Wifi and Bluetooth-enabled,
• GPS and Accelerometer included
• 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM, 4GB Micro SD Card (Expandable to 32 GB)
• Removable battery, talk time about 7 hours on 3g, standby 250 hours, audio playback 20 hours, video playback 7 hours
• Flash Player 10.1 (eat your heart out, iPhone)
• Available on a Google-hosted web store, Google.com/phone
• $179 with T-mobile contract; $529 without service (you can insert your own SIM card).
• Will soon be available on Verizon in the US and Vodafone in Europe
• Pre-installed with Google Maps (including Navigation), Google Voice, YouTube, and GMail.

The Nexus One is just the beginning of a new mobile venture by Google. Expect the mobile web store to add additional devices and carriers in the future.

With anecdotes of success coming from eBay and Zillow recently on the upswing in mobile use, Google’s smart to push forward in this space.

Nielsen Online has released data from a new survey suggesting that premium content just might work, but it depends on the type of content.

27,000 consumers in 54 countries were surveyed. I don’t know how this survey found people who actually said they would pay for things such as newspaper articles that they currently get for free, but they did.

Survey participants were most likely to shell out the dough for music and movies. Least likely was blogs.

Ironically, the reality is often the opposite, with consumers ditching premium newspapers for free, ad-supported ones while bloggers often monetize special pieces of content (courses, e-books, etc) for profit.

A while back, Google launched an extensions gallery for its Chrome web browser. Ad-blocking add-ons are among the most popular for Mozilla’s Firefox, so it stands to reason that they will be for Chrome as well. With Google’s primary source of revenue being its ads, a lot of talk has surfaced about Google letting people block its own ads with its own product.

Is Google was smart to allow ad-blocking extensions for Chrome? Discuss here.

A recent article from the New York Times has elevated the discussion, calling the allowance of ad blockers a "test" for Google.

Google wants people to use Chrome. For that to happen, it has to give people what they want. One point of view would be that the people who are most likely to block ads would just as use another browser that allowed them to do so if Chrome didn’t.

Google doesn’t think that ad blockers will have much of an impact on advertising anyway. In December, Google Engineering Director Linus Upson participated in a panel discussion about the subject. He, Charles McCathieNevile of Opera, and Mike Shaver of Mozilla discuss it in the following clip:

Upson says it’s "unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying." He thinks the market will sort it out. The others appear to take similar stances.

The real question is how many people are really going to make the effort to block ads? As Wladimir Palant, who runs Adblock Plus on Firefox, told the NYT, ad blockers are still used by a "tiny proportion of the Internet population, and these aren’t the kind of people susceptible to ads anyway."

Based on what Upton had to say in the panel discussion, Google is pretty confident that it can deliver ads people actually want, and that people (for the most part) will not want to block them if they see that relevance.

What could hurt Google more is if Microsoft or Firefox implemented their own ad blocking capabilities by default. This would lead to average users browsing an ad-less web, because just as most people don’t go out of their way to download ad-blocking add-ons, they are unlikely to go out of their way to allow ads in such a scenario. However, it is pretty unlikely that this will happen, particularly on Microsoft’s end. They of course have their own ads to worry about.

If ad-blocking from the browser actually did become a big problem for Google, one would have to wonder if the company woulnd’t find some kind of work-around. For example, what would stop them from serving ads directly in the Chrome Browser itself (in a toolbar area for example)? One could envision sponsored link-style ads like those served via Gmail. With Google’s interest-based advertising, relevance would still be at the forefront. But it probably won’t come to that anytime soon (at least not as a solution to the perceived issue).

Wondering how many people actually use Chrome anyway? Ad-blocking from the browser does after all only matter if people are using that browser. Well, the latest numbers from Net Applications have Chrome’s market share surpassing that of Apple’s Safari browser. It’s worth noting that Google just released Chrome for Mac last month as well.

As Doug Caverly  mentioned, "Chrome’s only been around for about 16 months, after all, and Safari’s had something like six years to make friends."

Google’s Chrome OS is set to make things interesting later this year, as well. Chrome use is growing and will continue to do. Ad campaigns from Google may ease that growth along.

Google made a bold move when it opened up its extensions gallery, allowing for ad-blocking extensions. Could this turn out to be a huge mistake on the company’s part or is Google’s confidence completely justified? Only time will tell for certain, but Google has long stood behind the promise of trying to deliver the best user experience. If users want to block ads, Google is going to let them. Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Chrome Cruises By Safari

> Chrome Ad Campaign Nets Positive Results

> Google Pushes Chrome With Newspaper Ads

Happy New Year, SEWatchers! Hope you had brilliant holidays and a chance to relax. Now time to ease ourselves back into the driving seat and plan the year ahead. Here is one approach to get you started.