In a way, today is a big day for Hulu. The popular video site will soon likely attract a huge number of views based on two shows that return to television this evening – NBC’s The Office and FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. These two have been huge hits for Hulu in the past, and that will likely continue as the two programs begin pushing out new episodes.
Football, News, and School Drew Big Web Traffic in August
Compete has released the Compete 250 for the month of August. This is the firm’s monthly ranking of the top 250 trafficked Web sites. The categories that stood out the most during the month were Back to School shopping, Football and news searches for pubs like TheStreet.com and Businessweek.
Key Findings include:
eBay Petitions EU Over Brand Rules
eBay called on the European Union today to amend an EU competition law to stop brands from restricting the sale of their products on the Internet.
The company has given a petition to the European Parliament, signed by 750,000 Europeans’ calling for reform.
Bonanzle Surpasses Milestone User Number
eBay competitor Bonanzle recently told us the company was approaching several milestones, one of these being welcoming its 100,000th registered user. The company announced today that they have surpassed that one. In fact, they did it earlier this week on September 14, just barely a year after the site launched.
eBay Named Most Trusted Brand in America
TRUSTe has released the results of its analysis of the privacy practices of the largest brands in the US, and found that eBay is the most trusted company. Other web brands in the top ten include WebMD, Yahoo, and Facebook. Interestingly enough, Google didn’t crack the list.
Here is the top ten:
Google Wants You to Be Able to Leave if You Want
Data portability is an important issue for users and businesses alike. In this age of cloud computing, where so many web users have valuable data hosted by web services, we can sometimes find ourselves vulnerable to the will and occurrences of these services. Let’s say for example, Twitter is one of the key components to your marketing strategy, and one of your main sources of traffic. When Twitter goes down, as it frequently does, this can present quite a problem.
Google Trying to Differentiate Between Blogs and News?
Google News is now labeling certain publications as blogs in search results. I’m not sure exactly how long it has been like this, but I noticed it for the first time today. In the past they have separated "news" and "blogs" on some results pages, but in what I’m talking about now, the results are mixed together, but some publications have "(blog)" written beside their names.
You can see a few examples here:
Internet Users Spend Majority Of Time With Content Sites
Content sites continue to grab the attention of the majority of Internet users, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009, a 24 percent increase, according to a new report by the Online Publishers Association (OPA).
Google Acquires CAPTCHA Company
Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web.
Perhaps you’re thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.
Google Introduces Web Elements to AdSense Publishers
Google has introduced what they call "Web Elements," which let users add their favorite Google products to their website. The company spins it as a way for AdSense publishers to "spice up their site" and help increase their revenue. This was first announced back at the Google Developer Conference.