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Did you know that FAIL Blog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll).

Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. FAIL Blog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month).

It quickly dwindles down to very small numbers per show, but Viddler is hoping to change that with its new ad network, and get more of its partners to put more of their best videos on Viddler instead of on YouTube or Blip.tv or Brightcove. As big as FAIL Blog is for Viddler, it streams even more videos directly on YouTube, where it has the 7th-most watched channel.

For ads that Viddler sells directly it is offering video partners ad rates starting at $3 per thousand views (CPMs) for overlays and $10 for pre-rolls. A video show that attracts a highly-focused, affluent niche audience like WineLibrary.TV can command a $10 CPM for overlays. These rates compare to about 80-cent CPMs that video producers currently get for the Google AdWords ads Viddler places in their videos today, and will continue to use for any inventory it can’t sell.

The other attractive element of Viddler’s AdWorks is that video publishers can choose to sell their own ads if they think they can get a higher rate than Viddler. In that case, they pay Viddler a flat $2 CPM for overlays, and $4 CPMs for pre-rolls. So if AOL’s (or Engadget’s) salesforce can get better than a $5 CPM for overlay ads, it is better off selling ads itself ($5-$2=the $3 CPM they would get from Viddler selling the ads).

Video partners also have the option to sign up for a business account, where they pay per gigabyte and can either opt out of ads entirely or participate in AdWorks to offset their subscription costs. So Viddler straddles the video hosting space between a free ad-supported model (like Blip.tv) and a hosted subscription model (like Brightcove). A video producer will have to weigh that flexibility and the guaranteed CPMs Viddler is offering against the broader reach of a YouTube or even Blip.tv, which is about twice the size of Viddler in terms of videos streamed and can now place ads in YouTube as well.

Viddler remains a niche player in the online video hosting industry, but it’s never taken VC money and seems to be carving out a nice little business for itself.

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Twitter has just announced a new feature that is sure to excite anyone who has been waiting for the site to offer an alternative to its Suggested User List. Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users.

By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL. I won’t be surprised if we see some users vying to become the best ‘list makers’, offering comprehensive lists of celebrities, news portals, bloggers, and more. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter aggregates the most comprehensive Lists and includes them as part of the signup process (which would effectively just be the SUL in a different form).

Twitter’s post describing the new feature isn’t particularly detailed, but it seems like this may have a larger impact than just discovery — it could also potentially be used for Grouping, a feature that some third party apps have offered but that hasn’t been officially supported by Twitter. In short, this will let you group the people you follow into different list (say, one for News, one for close friends, and so on), and then quickly jump between them. Twitter will be supporting the new listing feature through its API, so we can likely expect this functionality to be extended to most third party applications that don’t already support grouping.

Also worth noting: a logical extension to grouping will be to support search within groups, which could help users weed out spam. Of course this is Twitter we’re talking about, so it could still be quite a while before we see this happen.

‘Lists’ may compete with sites like WeFollow that specialize in listing top Twitter users in various categories (on the other hand, these sites could actually become even more popular if they become the best places to find the most comprehensive Lists). It’s also likely going to replace TweepML, the open standard format for sharing groups of Twitter users.

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If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.

The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us.

The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it.

So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week.

But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well.

Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says.

The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links.

A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content.

“This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says.

As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin.

A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding.

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Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.

Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trend Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.

Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time.

We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan.

It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.

Part of Google’s strategy with Wave, and part of the reason they’re putting it out there early, is to see what developers and the users make of it. In that regard, it’s not all that different from Twitter, which started as a simple status-update side project, and transformed into something much different thanks to its users and the third-party developer community around it.

Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that.

I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time.

[images: Paramount Vantage]

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With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

There are a couple of key factors that could be attributed to Orkut’s recent drop in visitors. First, in India, Facebook has been pushing out an aggressive campaign on its social network to get users to import their friends from Orkut with a special Orkut import tool. It basically lets them find friends on other social networks, like Orkut, who are also on Facebook and makes it easy to send a friend requests to those contacts. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for users to quickly find new friends and establish their social presence on Facebook. The social network offers this in the U.S. for Gmail, AIM and other contact platforms. But this new tool in India is for Orkut specifically. Facebook users are also seeing is the Orkut contact importer in Brazil, Orkut’s home base and stronghold where Facebook is clawing for market share.

Another reason for Facebook’s growth in India could be the recent launch of Facebook Lite. India was one of the original target markets for the lightweight version of the social network, since it is particularly useful in developing countries where high speed Internet connections are sparse or non-existent.

Facebook has been eying India’s huge market and steadily adding features that help the social network establish its reach in the growing country. For example, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam, in May of this year.

It’s plainly obvious that Facebook is growing fast in India and could quite possibly overtake Orkut in the next few months. Meanwhile, other social networks are dropping like flies in the race; with Yahoo shutting down SpotM and MySpace considering layoffs in India because of the its lack of traction among users.

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Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it’s seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth. Today, Facebook has an answer: Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground.

Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends.

Deciding to put their little wizard to the test, I tried to implement Connect on one of my personal sites (note that I’ve never tried to implement Connect before so I really didn’t know what I was doing). And to my surprise, it worked: I managed to have a very basic form of Connect up and running on my site within all of two minutes. It will obviously take longer to make sure the new icons and buttons play nicely with your site’s design, but it’s really surprisingly easy.

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School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.

The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it.

There are countless potential uses for this, but the obvious ones are for personal blogs and for reports (you can see an example of what a Weebly report might look like here). Teachers can also create their own publicly available class websites, allowing students to easily upload assignments and giving parents a place to look to see what their children are up to at school.

At this point most of these features are pretty basic, but I see quite a bit of potential here. Imagine letting teachers build out individual student profile pages, where students would be greeted with photos, their recent grades, and maybe a personal note from their teacher (I imagine that would be more popular with younger kids). There are obviously some education products already out there, like Blackboard, but most of these are pretty spartan and data driven — Weebly would give teachers a new degree of customization and it’s more user friendly to boot. That said, schools are notoriously political, so Weebly may have some trouble getting its foot in the door.

Weebly is offering the product for free for teachers with up to 40 students, and then $1 per additional student account, purchased in packs of 10. Teachers can also sign up for Weebly Pro for $40/year, and all of the pro features extend to their students. There’s also a discount for teachers who refer each other.

As part of today’s news, Weebly has also announced that it has partnered with National History Day, a program held in schools across the country where over 500,000 students create a research project describing or reenacting a historical event. One option students have is to build a web site for their project, and this year Weebly will be the only officially sanctioned way to do that.

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The original Chumby was soft, cuddly, and cute. The new Chumby One is uptight, all-business, and commercial. I hate it. The draw to the original Chumby was that there was nothing like it on the market two years ago. You could load it up with all sorts of pre-made widgets like YouTube, weather, news, or one you made thanks to the open source hardware and software. Sure, the upcoming Chumby One still has the original capabilities if not more thanks to the upgraded 454MHz CPU, but it doesn't have the same crazy beanbag form factor. It's missing the "cute."

Social gaming startup Zynga is seeing some impressive traction. It now boats 129 million monthly active users across its portfolio of more than 30 games, according to both Inside Facebook’s AppData(see chart) and Developer Analytics. That’s up from about 50 million three months ago, and 30 million in April.

Zynga’s most popular games are FarmVille (the most popular game on Facebook with 50 million cumulative players), Mafia Wars (the second most popular game on Facebook with 25 million), Zynga Poker, and YoVille. The majority of Zynga’s users play its games on Facebook, but it also has games Bebo, Hi5, MySapce, and Friendster.

Heere are some fun stats about each of its top games:

FarmVille—sort of like a Sim Farm, where you grow your own crops and manage a farm, FarmVille users have built more than 40 million virtual farms (which is 20 times more than actually exist in the U.S.). Players buy 500,000 virtual tractors a day in the game.

Mafia Wars —Every month, 140 million “jobs” are done by aspiring cappos in this game.

Zynga Poker—This used to be calledd Texas Hold’Em. Every day about 150 million hands are dealt (more than ten times as many as are dealt on an averag day in Las Vegas), and on there are usually 250,000 concurrent players, so you can always find a game.

YoVille—A game where you furnish a virtual apartment, buy pets, and eat funnel cakes. The 17 million residnents of YoVille have bought 10,000 pets and 40,000 funnel cakes since August alone.

As Zynga continues to grow, so does the IPO talk (and the litigation). Its revenues, which is well above nine figures now, possibly as high as $200 million a year, comes largely from its virtual currency, as well as ads.

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Collaboration applications are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise space. Startup Huddle.net has been steadily accumulating innovative features to its business-friendly collaboration platform and quickly adding big name companies, including Samsung and Panasonic, as clients. Huddle is a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Today, Huddle is adding several more useful features to its platform—web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and a much-awaited iPhone app.

Huddle’s web conferencing feature, which is similar to web-ex, lets users set up meetings, schedule recurring events, and share their desktop and content with other members of their workspace. Huddle has also sent up a partnership with InterCall, one of the world’s largest conference call providers, to handle phone conferencing. Huddle’s web conferencing tool is integrated with Outlook or Google calendar and users receive free conferencing minutes as a part of their monthly package and can also access low-cost international service plans.

Huddle is also letting Microsoft office users seamlessly move between the productivity suite and the collaboration platform by launching a Microsoft Office plug-in that lets you save desktop files to Huddle save their desktop files directly into Huddle’s cloud-based storage, view and edit files, add new versions, request approvals and send notifications without opening a browser window. You’ll be able to access any edited Word documents that you’ve tweaked in the desktop app directly from Huddle. And this feature is enhanced by Huddle’s previous ability to use a Zoho-powered editor to work on Word and Excel files together directly in the browser. As a Microsoft BizSpark partner (we just announced Yammer’s BizSpark news a few weeks ago), Huddle is going to be developing a plug-in for SharePoint and and other Microsoft products in the near future. Currently, the MS Office plug-in works for the 2007 version but will be retrofitted to work with Microsoft Office 2010 next year.

There was some speculation earlier this month about the fact that Huddle doesn’t have a mobile presence. But Huddle’s new iPhone app lets users have full access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user’s personalized dashboard. Huddle can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr.

Huddle has also developed partnerships and integrations with LinkedIn and Ning to be included as apps on both social network. And the startup has a similar deal with Facebook, which allows you full access to all of Huddle’s tools within the social network.

And Huddle is affordable—there’s a free, ad-supported version available from the Huddle web site (which includes 1 workspace and 1GB of storage); three premium levels (which have increased workspace and storage) and an enterprise version with multiple managers, customization, advanced security, training, and increased support services. And Huddle allows for unlimited numbers of users for each account.

Andy McLoughlin, Huddle’s co-founder and director of strategic development, tells methat while 55 percent of Huddle’s users (McLoughlin says total users amount in the “Hundreds of thousands”) are based in the U.S., Huddle is making a big play for the U.S. in the coming year, opening up offices in San Francisco and other areas. Considering that many of Huddle’s big-name clients are based in the U.S. such as Edelman and Disney, this is a smart move. Because of the startup’s multiple services, Huddle faces competition from a variety of startups and tech giants including, Lotus, Box.net, and WebEx. And of course, Huddle faces competition from Google Apps and the launch of Google Wave. But despite the competition in the “Enterprise 2.0″ space, Huddle has been steadily gaining traction and should be able to give even Google a run for its money.

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