Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

What is the Amazon Monitoring Service? I am confused. I have it as a report in my interface but that’s it. Service is unavailable it says when I try to generate a report, and it is nowhere to be selected.

Does anyone out there have something like this?

Here in Germany there seems to be a little money day today. First of all, congratulations to the friends from Sevenload for having closed with Burda Digital Ventures.  A great partner for Sevenload, and with mother Burda, one that truly works had to understand where the world is going! And as Nico already put it,  this means that Heiko might come by Cologne a bit more often. Here is the official blog post.

It seems that the big media companies really want to make sure that they have their own stakes in the growing video market on the internet. It will be really interesting to see how all of this turn out. The biggest an most interesting thing with all of this is really cost, and I can only suggest reading the last posts from Cringely. The thing is that each new viewer ads costs, and if you go with a P2P system, there is a lag involved, it only works with highly popular files and the cost is really with the ISP which they will surely not like. Check out this post by Cringely to see another option: Neokast. Read the blog

Next up is eConozco joins OpenBC. With the acquisition of the leading spanish social network (ok, Orkut seems to be really big in Brazil with like 20 million members, … no spain, but ok… never mind) they want to push further into their internationalization.

The most interesting thing is actually Experteer. It all started with me watching the interview with Martin Weber on Gründerszene today. I can only agree with Lukasz that Holtzbrinck Ventures is one of the best, and/or most active, VCs in Germany at the moment. Truyl a great team. The interesting thing is that in the interview Martin Weber talks about Experteer (min 7:56), which they founded 6 months ago. It’s fully built on Ruby on Rails it seems (looking forward to seeing another scaling proof) and a little bit different take on the recruitment market. In Experteer you as a user pay to become member, and Headhunters and companies can pitch 60.000 EUR plus jobs to you.  Interesting. Even more interesting, now Christian posts that BV Capital and Wellington Partners have invested!

Now I don’t personally know the team behind Experteer, but with the investor team now behind them, I am looking forward to seeing a good growth curve.

So we have Xing buying stuff, Sevenload getting big cash to extend video with Burda, and then the young Experteer getting money from the big guys. This round goes to Experteer I’d say. Looking forward to what happens next.

I have been wondering how they do it for some time. The thing is that I can easily use a group of hacked PCs to randomly click ads through a normal IE. I am not really sure how Google would be able to find out which clicking PC is a bot and which is a real person.

There is one other solution though, which seems to gain credibility through this post on Webby Thoughts.

It makes me wonder whether Google has algorithms in place to notice when certain posts get traffic spikes and consider a higher percentage of those clicks as invalid clicks.

That is exactly the thing and the only thing how this can work. They will just monitor traffic over the entire network and they for one know that distribution of ads and distribution of content will remain relatively stable, so if something spikes in the distribution curve then they will presume it to be fraud and remove the spike. That seems what has happened in the above case.

This also means that if you suddenly have a short spike in your traffic this will probably not result in too much additional revenue, which will only come if the spike is not a spike but a real continuous growth in traffic.

How do I know?

Pretty simple.

Currently the site is down.

And it is getting on my nerves.

Loic posted his Dead Sea Podcast. It’s an interview, or rather a chat, with Ola Ahlvarsson from Result.

Thanks for a few light minutes in the office.

Looking forward to seeing a few Result people again at Expand this week.