A US court ruled yesterday that Viacom can get access to data about EVERYONE who has used YouTube including what they watched! Viacom has decent concerns over copyright infringement but for the courts to have made such a blanket judgment on access to so much personal user data is irresponsible!

Plaintiffs seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website. They need the data to compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos. A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiffs’ vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial non-infringing use defense.

The courts ruling means that Viacom will have access to the users login ID, time the video was watched, the user's IP address, and the unique identifier for the video. The court grants all of this access because it said that is the only way that Viacom can determine how many times their copyrighted material has been used. I say that individual viewing data is not necessary! Viacom should only be granted access to how many times a copyrighted piece of content was viewed, and absolutely no information on the viewer themselves. Unfortunately the courts do not define things as accurately as they should alot of the time.

Fortunately Viacom has put out the following statement:

In a statement, the entertainment giant said it did not ask for nor would it obtain "any personally identifiable information of any user."

And News.com has noted that,

The court's protective order stipulates that data turned over to Viacom by Google must be used for the sole purpose of proving Viacom's claim against Google that YouTube is a hotbed of pirated video content, the sources said. Viacom will not have direct access to the YouTube user data, the source said. Access is restricted to outside counsel and experts.

Whew, glad that is settled. Or is it? It appears as though Viacom will not be able to use personal identifiable data. But won't they still have it? And can't they still use it without telling anyone? I guess its useless unless they would have been able to target individuals like the RIAA lawsuits against illegal downloads of music.

Working at an agency I come across this scenario day in and day out. There is nothing that irritates me more than to see someone put thousands into marketing and then want a website on the cheap! I am not sure how this whole, "I can get a website for less than a $1000" thing all started but it is ridiculous. Having worked with various developers and designers before I know for a fact that maintaining a profitable web development company is VERY difficult to do. In part because of all these cheap, template, web design companies out there.

The Reality

Well I have news for everyone, you get what you pay for. And if you are serious about your online business then you will be wise to invest in a great website. Most "good" design/development firms will start at about $10k and go up into the hundreds of thousands depending on what you want. You especially need to have a great site design if you intend on doing search engine optimization. Having clean code, good CSS, an organized file structure, and the proper hosting among other things, will really help the search engine spiders index your site well.

Now if you are not too concerned with having your site rank and are simply looking for an online business card then going with a nice, simple, templated website or CMS is probably a good idea. But if you are going to start an e-commerce store or represent your company and gather leads then you will want to make sure that you set aside a good sized budget to get that done. Trust me, do it right the first time.

So many times each day, I peruse a client's website and think to myself, "why is this person paying me to drive traffic to their site when no one will buy from it anyways?" People! Please listen here, you need to have an effective design BEFORE you spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to it!!! Think of the opportunity costs lost by spending money to get a new visitor to your site only to have them bail because they find your navigation hard to follow or they feel that you asked too many personal questions in your lead generation form or the checkout process was too long. That visitor could now be possibly so turned off that they may elect to never come back to your site!

And most people are just missing the basics, like using colors that are not conducive to promoting purchases or having bad content with no calls to action. You need to make the process of signing up or making a purchase as easy as possible. This is Internet marketing and Web development 101 here folks! Take some time and money and invest it in a good design and some good content. And that will pay you dividends for years to come. Just because your current design is leaving you profitable does not mean that it is good. You could be missing out on so much more business that you have no idea about. One thing that everyone should have is an easy to find and use feedback section. You will learn more from your visitors by doing this than ANY analytics program could ever provide! I guarantee that you will be surprised from some of the comments that you get.

The other day I blogged about the announcement, by ICANN, that they will be offering custom domain TLDs. But the biggest thing, for me anyways, was the idea that they will start the bidding at $100,000 for a custom TLD. With that being said you can count out the small businesses and individuals when it comes to all of the new domain fun. And usher in the big boys. Think .bigmac, .ibm, .google, and .schick.

Many people have asked me over the past few days what my thought are on the subject. I think that it is an overall good thing. But what really grinds my gears about it is, how are all of the poor people going to get in on the fun? Well, it has been proposed by Barry Schwartz that Internet marketing professionals ban together under the wings of their trade industry organization SEMPO and pool money together to secure TLDs such as .SEO and .SEM.

What I think will happen is that companies, probably domain registrars, will snatch up as many popular TLDs as they can and will end up selling domain names with their custom TLDs to the masses. Of course I am sure that they will keep all of the best ones, or auction those off to the highest bidders. What will also happen is that large brands like McDonalds, Coca-Cola, etc., will be forced to secure their TLDs before someone else does! That should net ICANN a pretty penny.

Optimizing for keywords in your code is one of the basic tenants of SEO. But any professional SEO consultant will tell you that you need to support that with the proper keywords in your content. If you cannot properly describe the topic that you are writing about then the search engines will not be able to properly index and rank your post. The search engines are not as smart as you may think, that is why SEO people have jobs. That is also why it is important to both optimize your site on the back end, in the code, and to also optimize your site on the front end, in the content. The content and the code optimization must match up with each other, otherwise the search engines may get confused.

So when you are writing your next post you need to pause and think to yourself, "did I use the right keywords in my post?" You can use various keyword analysis tools like Wordtracker or the Google keyword tool in order to get a better idea of what users are typing in to Google when searching for information on your topic. And use many different variations of your main keyword in order to cover as many bases as you can. After all, you DO want people to find your post and read it, don't you?