Here’s a quick data point from Google’s fourth quarter earnings call that could have massive implications for the way do video advertising: When talking about YouTube, Google SVP of ads Susan Wojcicki said that 60 percent of all video ads that appear on the site are TrueView ads. That means that when it serves up a video ad, more than half the time viewers can skip it and move on to the video before watching the entire ad.

The TrueView format, which launched a little more than a year ago, has quickly taken over as the dominant unit for video ads that appear on the site. With TrueView, ads generally play for about five seconds before viewers have the opportunity to skip them. The beauty of the TrueView ad is not only that viewers can ignore them, if they don’t find them relevant or appealing, but that advertisers don’t pay for skipped creative.

The incentive is then on advertisers to make good creative, and on YouTube to target the ads appropriately to increase engagement. So far, that appears to be working: Wojcicki said engagement ranges from 15 to 40 percent when viewers choose to actually watch an ad all the way through.

As a side note, CEO Larry Page noted that YouTube still had a lot of growth ahead and expected an increase in advertising on the site. But Page said that growth wouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of TV budgets, as advertisers generally weren’t shifting spend from other parts of their video budgets when committing to YouTube.

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Facebook’s under pressure once again from European authorities over the amount of data it collects, according to a string of reports that hit over the weekend. In particular, the focus is on an meeting this week between data protection officials from across the continent that could spell trouble for the world’s most powerful social network.

According to the U.K.’s Telegraph, the signal is that they will move to curb Facebook’s collection methods: a move is led by Viviane Reding, the commissioner in charge of human rights. She is already pushing hard to stop all sorts of services collecting too much data on users… even if that data is held outside Europe.

In a report suggesting that Facebook “faces a crackdown on selling users’ secrets to advertisers”, the newspaper quotes Reding as saying that social media services are being watched particularly closely:

“I call on service providers – especially social media sites – to be more transparent about how they operate. Users must know what data is collected and further processed (and) for what purposes.

“Consumers in Europe should see their data strongly protected, regardless of the EU country they live in and regardless of the country in which companies which process their personal data are established.”

The story has sparked a fresh wave of coverage of Facebook’s data policies, though it’s fair to point out that European authorities have long had their eyes on the data collected by social networks.

Scrutiny of Facebook in particular has increased as the site has become larger and larger. And in addition, the questions have stepped up a level in the last month or two since the case of Austrian student Max Schrems highlighted the amount of data that the company stores on users.

Schrems, a 24-year-old law student from Vienna, filed a request to get a copy of all the data that Facebook held about him — and received a stunning 1,222 pages of information in return.

So does this sudden spurt of stories tell us anything new? Not really.

My information is that this week’s meeting is unlikely to surface anything radically new, but merely another step forward for the already-controversial EU privacy directive, which is slowly coming into force across the continent.

But it does underscore the struggles between technology companies and the authorities over the way data is collected and used online.

Facebook admitted as much recently when, in testimony to a German parliamentary committee, the company’s top European lobbyist Richard Allan (previously an elected politician in Britain) that it would “do more” to work with them. The question is what “doing more” really means.

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Facebook’s advertising machine is growing fast, and it’s growing big: estimates put 2011 ad revenues at some .8 billion. But it’s also a system that is always being tweaked as the company tries to turn its vast trough of users into more cash.

The latest changes, you may remember, are an attempt to convince advertisers that they should be focusing on engagement more than click-through rates — what Mathew characterised as an appeal to “forget about clicks”. From the outside, it may be difficult to understand why this matters — but here’s some data that might shed some light on what Facebook is doing and why advertisers love fan pages so much.

Courtesy of social analytics firm Campalyst, we have information on a campaign run for Blue1, a Finnish subsidiary of Scandinavian Airlines. Through August and September, Blue1 ran a campaign across three different channels: a Facebook page with regular status updates; Facebook ads targeted on potential customers; and more traditional display ads.

Here’s what they found: branded fan pages — and the updates that users see — are vastly more successful than other ways of advertising on Facebook.

To be more exact, Facebook Pages convert people into customers at a far higher rate than other forms of advertising. The conversion rate is four times higher than ordinary display ads and more than six times higher than traditional Facebook ads. And when they do convert into purchases (airline tickets in Blu1′s case) people who are fans spend more: an average of 30 percent more in this case.

This makes sense, of course: somebody who visits a fan page has already declared their interest in a given topic, and so they are clearly more likely to purchase. But it’s also interesting in terms of how Facebook limits access and visibility, because the most important way to get people to visit a fan page is through status updates that appear in news feeds.

Here’s another intriguing stat: these click through rates are achieved despite the fact that — at best — only a third of fans actually see updates in their feed. On an average day, just 14 percent of users who are already fans of a brand will actually see updates that brand makes.

Given all of this, it’s not hard to see why Facebook has been slowly expanding the data available on fan pages and encouraging people to look at engagement stats while at the same time reducing the ability of those pages to inject themselves into the news feed. Now it can charge advertisers to get into people’s streams with what it calls Sponsored Stories.

“What Facebook did with the Sponsored Stories was give brands a tool to pay for reaching more people and boost the reach of their fans through the fan pages,” says Campalyst CEO Jevgenijs Kazanins.

“Effectively, they are saying that reaching fans in the stream is hard (and it became even harder due to changes in the stream) but there is a way to increase it by buying Sponsored Stories.”

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The web’s governing body has embraced the “Do Not Track” header, which might one day stop advertisers from following your every online move.

Wired Top Stories

Gamification is growing up. First it’s got its own conference, a new certification program and now consolidation. BigDoor, a gamified loyalty platform, is announcing that it’s buying up web check-in rewards provider OneTrueFan.

The purchase price was not disclosed but BigDoor CEO and co-founder Keith Smith believes it’s the first big acquisition in the gamification space and shows that there’s growing momentum behind companies looking to add game mechanics. Or it could mean that the opportunity is not just big enough yet to support a host of players. Time will tell.

Seattle-based BigDoor got started in 2009 and has been one of the leaders in the gamification space along with Badgeville and Bunchball. It has several hundred clients who are using a free product to add badges, levels, leaderboards and loyalty programs to promote engagement. By scooping up San Francisco-based OneTrueFan, it can reach thousands of more websites that have installed OneTrueFan’s web check-in tools. It also gets a big social component from OneTrueFan, which rewards visitors with points and badges for sharing content on social networks.

Smith said BigDoor is poised to release a new product called Engagement Economy next month that will incorporate technology from OneTrueFan, which will also continue on its current form for now. Engagement Economy will reward visitors for participation with virtual currency from publishers, which can be redeemed, and BigDoor will take a cut of that. The company will also implement quests sponsored by advertisers, who will pay to have consumers complete certain tasks on a site.

Smith said while some detractors still roll their eyes at the term “gamification,” it is actually paying off for companies that employ it. He said publishers who participated in a private beta of Engagement Economy found that participants are 300 percent more likely to return to the site than those who don’t use a loyalty program, and their overall engagement increases on site by 30 percent. And he said there’s a 200 percent increase in sharing by users of BigDoor’s reward programs.

“There’s an incredible need by publishers and the web community for increased engagement on site and to give people reasons to come back,” Smith said. “We’ve been shocked at how positive the response has been from the marketpace for our product offering. It’s a sign that gamification and our program is in massive demand.”

BigDoor not only picks up a potential competitor but also acquires a solid team of entrepreneurs. OneTrueFan is founded by Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, who co-founded social network MyBlogLog before selling it to Yahoo. Marcoullier also co-founded gaming site IGN.com in 1996 and social data provider Gnip in 2008. Sampson also co-founded Cloudspace in 1996. OneTrueFan has previously raised .2 million from Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, First Round Capital, David Cohen and Bob Pasker. BigDoor last year raised million from Foundry Group, bringing its total to .7 million.

I’ve pointed out some of the pitfalls of gamification when implemented haphazardly, but I think it’s more than just hype. These days it’s all about engagement, whether on websites or in apps, and the fact is a certain amount of people respond to game mechanics. It might be manipulative or shallow at times, but when done well, with hopefully tangible rewards, it can really motivate people. We’ll have to see if BigDoor can take its acquisition of OneTrueFan and make good on this opportunity.

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Jason Baptiste, co-founder and CEO of New York-based startup OnSwipe, has a slide in the pitch presentation that he does for VCs and others interested in the company that simply says: “Apps are bull****.” That’s a succinct expression of OnSwipe’s view on apps for content. Baptiste believes that dedicated iPad and mobile apps make sense for games or specific tasks, such as looking for a restaurant, but for content, “they suck,” he says. So OnSwipe gives publishers the ability to mimic many of the user interface and features that apps provide, but on the open web — and it wants to do the same thing for advertisers too.

For a company that hasn’t even been around a year, OnSwipe has had a pretty exciting life so far. It started as an experiment launched last June, a WordPress plugin that would allow bloggers to make their websites look nice on the iPad. Baptiste and his co-founder Andres Borreto, who lived in Miami, and a programmer in Mexico came up with the idea and created it in a matter of months. A second version came out a few months ago, the company did a deal with WordPress, and then venture capitalists came calling: OnSwipe raised a million seed round earlier this year from Spark Capital and Betaworks, as well as individual investors such as Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot, and the company joined the TechStars incubator program in New York.

“We started out based in Miami, then we were based sort of part-time in both Boston and San Francisco, and now we’re based in New York,” Baptiste said in an interview recently in the TechStars office in New York, which OnSwipe shares with half a dozen other startups. The company is currently working on closing a Series A funding round — which Baptiste says he likes to call “Series Awesome” — and expects to close it soon, the OnSwipe CEO said.

Baptiste’s view is that publishers got sucked into creating apps for a number of reasons: partly because the iPad was so new, and they didn’t really know what to do to take advantage of it, and apps seemed like the easiest way to go about it — but also because Apple offered an easy route to get the content on the tablet and potentially monetize it. But what publishers give up, the OnSwipe CEO says, is the interactivity, ability to customize and other features that the web allows, plus they have to create multiple versions of their apps for multiple platforms.

With HTML5, however, content publishers can have the swipe features, the page movement, the rich graphics and all the other things that apps provide — and still be open and easily portable to other tablets or platforms. “The web has always been kind of ugly,” says Baptiste. “No one wants to admit it, but it’s true. We wanted to make it look and feel like print, but with the best of the web’s look and feel.”

At first, the company figured it would just license its software platform to publishers who wanted to create a quick app-like experience for the iPad. “But that would just be a services business, not a really big company,” says Baptiste. “Not that that’s bad, but we wanted to do something really big — there’s so much potential there. So we decided to give the software away, and have as many people publish in an infinitely customizable way, and we would build a thread that pulls them all together.”

The idea now, Baptiste says, is to create a kind of networked layer on top of the OnSwipe publishing tools, to turn those tools into more of an ecosystem. So the team built their own version of Instapaper, the service that saves webpages, so that users of OnSwipe could save their pages for later — and the potential there, he says, is to provide recommendations based on what people save (something that YouTube’s founders seem to think is a good idea as well, judging by their recent acquisition of Delicious from Yahoo). Baptiste says he somewhat jokingly thinks of this as the “reader graph,” in the same way that Facebook has popularized the term “social graph.”

The other part of the plan, Baptiste says, is to give advertisers the tools to take their existing print campaigns and turn them into full-fledged app-style pages and features that can be used on an iPad or other tablet. “We want to make beautiful ads too,” he said. OnSwipe is currently testing this idea with “a very large publisher,” said Baptiste.

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