Spinfield: Web marketing trends today, tomorrow, and beyond…

• Yahoo! news released a beta version of it’s news site.  In addition to making some design changes to better accommodate its readers, it allows the editors to incorporate more media in their articles, and even modifies its display depending on where readers come from. Try it for yourself. Visit Yahoo! news and click the link at the top.
• YouTube is now showing post-roll video ads, according to a recent article on NewTeeVee. If an overlay ad appears on a video and the user chooses not to click the ad, the ad will now automatically run after the video is viewed.
• In more YouTube news, Google announced a new feature for YouTube Insight, called “Hot Spots”. According to the official Google Blog:
  

  The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards.

• Microsoft announced SearchPerks - their new prizes for searches program. SearchPerks is open to the first 1 million people in the U.S. who sign-up before the end of the year. People who sign up and search using Live Search (and IE) will earn tickets for each search they perform, up to 25 a day, and can exchange those tickets for prizes.
• Google officially celebrated its tenth birthday Sept 27, and in addition to their celebratory Google Doodle, they also have a tenth birthday page with an interactive timeline.

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