With the statistics data showing more and more people spending their time on video games, it’s not surprising that TV audience numbers are plunging. Movies are doing a little bit better than TV, but I’m pretty sure Hollywood moviemakers don’t feel safe. Looks like we are witnessing an interesting shift in people’s preferences.

A couple years back they used to release pretty successful videogames based on movies. Examples: Medal of Honor (3 more series released after the first one’s success), Matrix, Lord of the Rings. Nowadays exactly opposite is happening: Doom, Hitman, Max Payne – all of these are movies based on the same-titled video games.

Hitman, would be the great example illustrating this trend. It’s a complex game that requires thinking, strategy and precision. Game had a great success and currently has four series (first one released in 2000)

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I’ve heard some rumors around new Social Mediaspace here at MCDM program. I assume that the creation of some kind of a collaboration platform would be a necessary part of this project. I know that there is a group of people working on it. That’s pretty much all I know about it.

For some reason, not too many people talk about it here, on Flip the Media blog (which is a little bit surprising). Thus, I’m going to fill this gap…

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Last year Yammer won the TechCrunch50 prize for most innovative startup. It seemed to be promising because of its very viable subscription model that was intended to simplify interaction among peers within a “closed garden” environment. Unfortunately, I don’t have any examples of Yammer successfully entering corporate environments (that doesn’t necessarily mean those don’t exist) due to natural corporations’ unwillingness to give up their potentially proprietary data to third party managed services, especially free ones.

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With the enormous volume of information available on the Internet the question of who would organize all of this data used to be a tough one. Websites like del.isio.us and Stumbleupon provided great tools for people to do that, giving the answer on the question above.

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Google ad serving solution was praised to be the most successful advertising model in the age of Internet. Google Adwords made online advertising available for everybody, despite of the budget. It’s easy to use and it’s really working. However, not too much people ask himself or herself the question how do these Google algorithms serving sponsored results work. It doesn’t really matter for most of the users, until system malfunctions.

It’s usually really hard to observe the performance of each click if you get thousands of impressions every day. Weird things started to happen when I consolidated my Google Adwords budgets and started spending money more wisely, watching each click and continuously monitoring the performance of my online campaigns. I’ve got one case, which made me think about ad serving system malfunction few weeks back.

Lets call it The best CTR (click-through rate) ever.

If you have your ads out there, you’d definitely like to know how they are performing. That’s exactly what CTR is for. A lot of online marketing guides will teach you how to get a 5% click-through rate. What about 200%? You say impossible? Just take a look at the screenshot.

Google ad serving solution malfunction

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There is a new surprise from Google…

I was working on the creation of a new text ads set for one of my Google AdWords accounts just 10 minutes ago. Suddenly, I’ve got a notification that one of my newly created ads was disapproved because it “didn’t appear to comply with one or more of their editorial guidelines”. That happens time to time, but this time I was really surprised!

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posted by Ivan

I was doing a little bit of online research yesterday. I’ve noticed one little trick Google does.

I picked a number 5 or 6 result on a first page of Google search results.

20 minutes later I did type exactly the same key phrase, Google returned the result I previously clicked on on a first position.

Did anybody else notice that? Or that was just an accident?