Amr Awadallah Blog

Currently I am faced with a strong puzzle trying to explain why did YouTube tip much faster than any of its competitors, even competitors that were well established before YouTube appeared on the scene.

The chart below shows the Alexa rank for YouTube versus a number of other competitors in the video hosting space (this chart is on a log scale):

Notice how the YouTube growth (the cyan curve) is very fast and in a few months it surpasses MetaCafe, StupidVideos, and aBum, that is despite YouTube having a rather strict policy against adult content (which is more prevalent in all the other sites).

Many folks believe that the popular SNL “Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia” video is what made YouTube tip. That claim is negated by the chart above and also from the PV chart below, since the SNL clip was live on YouTube around Dec 17th, 2005, and notice that YouTube was well ahead of its competitors before that date. The video was pulled around mid Feb 2006 due to a nice letter from NBC lawyers, you can see the video on NBC’s site):

So really, I am puzzled by the YouTube growth, the only theories I have are the following:

• A product that is designed from ground up to be super-viral, lots of support for email, community, online badges, and positive networking effects (ala Flickr), though MetaCafe had very similar features and did not grow this fast (they are the second fastest, but still way behind on the pv curve).
• Strong initial association with MySpace. This was kind of a naive move by MySpace to let them fill that role, but as you know, MySpace is trying to take that back now (they started hosting videos a couple of months back).

Do you know of any other possible reasons for why YouTube strongly outpaced its competitors ? please shoot them my way by commenting on this blog entry.

Before I close, I happen to agree strongly with a blog posting by Mark Cuban, in that posting he initially expresses some jealousy of the YouTube success (note that he is truly the first person with such a vision for broadcast.com, just many years early to market), but then later on in that post he comments on how these sites will not be able to make enough advertising money to cover all the bandwidth costs.

— amr

This is a list of my favorite firefox extensions.

I divide the list into two groups, the first group is misc stuff, and the second group is specific to search:

1. Misc Extensions

• AI Roboform Toolbar: I really cant live without Robofom, it keeps track of my logins/passwords across Firefox, IE, and Netscape (yes, I use all three browsers, one for each of my personalities (home, work, school), this way I keep the cookies separate.
• Live HTTP Headers: An invaluable tool for debugging what is going between the browser and the server. I need this frequently to track how different sites are tracking their visitors, for example I can easily see if the Google Urchin beacon is triggered, etc.
• GreaseMonkey: You all know what this one does, it allows you to easily write scripts that can dynamically change what the pages looks like. For example, after you install GreaseMonkey extension, install this script “Evil Google Logo” then visit Google for a nice surprise (to install the script, right click on the link then select Install Script from the context sensitive menu that pops up).
• IE Tab: This is a cool extension that lets you open IE tabs inside Firefox :), for example, I use it so that I can open adcenter.msn.com in firefox (since it only works with IE).
• Extended SatusBar: This extension gives you a bunch of additional information in the status bar at the bottom of the firefox window, for example it tells you the size of the page, the average download speed and the time it took to download the page.
• Extended Link Properties: Lots of additional info for the properties sheet you get by clicking on properties from the right-click menu.
• FasterFox: Lets you fine tune firefox for super speed. Its very easy to use, mostly plug and play, and gives you choices from “default” to “Turbo Charged” performance (advanced features include prefetching, block flash popups, and many others)
• FlashGot: Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page at the maximum speed.
• DOM Inspector: Inspect the DOM of HTML, XUL, and XML pages

2. Search Extensions:

• CustomizeGoogle: Allows you to change the Google SERP by adding extra information, e.g. you can add numbering for the results and remove unwanted information (like ads and spyware tracking)
• GooglePreview: Adds website image thumbnails to both the Google and Yahoo SERPs
• Aggregate Yahoo! & Google: Whenever you do a query on Google, both the Google and Yahoo results will be interleaved together (so you get the first result from Google, then the first result from Yahoo, and so on)
• Advanced Dork: You can highlight a word or phrase, right click to get the context-sensitive menu, then choose from over 15 Advanced Google Search Operators.

If you frequently use any other firefox extensions, then please let me know by commenting on this post.

Thanks,

— amr

I got an interesting link from a comment at my blog, while typing a reply for that comment I figured its really good enough to be a posting of its own 🙂

The link is for a short youtube video (below) illustrating how some sites abuse the Google adwords program to buy clicks for cheap (or do black hat SEO tricks to show high in natural results) then turn around and make money from high value adsense ads on phantom gateway pages that have no real content to speak of (in many cases these pages are just a bunch of adsense listings or another google adsense search).

Google is not incentivized to track down those fraudsters since Google double benefits from this situation, not only do they get paid for the adwords placement from those fraudster sites, but they get paid again from the adsense ads on those sites.

Without further adieu, here is the video clip:

This is another example of a horrible adsense page:

http://mathoon.aldokkan.com/

All that this page has is photos for a couple of well endowed Arab artists (actors, singers, belly dancers, etc), however, the only clickable links on that page are Google Adsense ads (please do not click on any of those ads, don’t want that fraudster to make any more money than they already getting).

This site (single-page really) has been live on Google for ages, not only are they live in the adsense program, they are also the number one natural (algorithmic) web result when you search for some of those Arab celebrities, for example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=hayfa+wahby

Hayfa Wahby is the name of a new Arab pop singer, note that yahoo search does not show that fraudster site as number one and correctly shows a good content site (makes you wonder whether Google boosts web result relevance for sites that use adsense, that would certainly make them more cash).

I am sure the creator of that page is having so much fun getting all the rev share he can get without doing any real work.

How big of a problem is this for Google ? I think its big, and it will soon bite them in the behind.

— amr

PS: I think yahoo does have some similar issues, but since our content-match program is not as widespread as Google’s we do not have as much abuse (yet!). Also, we have the luxury to fix this problem before the cash from it becomes an oozing honey pot (as it is for google now).