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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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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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 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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Twitter, as we’ve noted before, is a company in search of a business plan and to a lesser extent an identity. But the company is making strides on both fronts with new changes, including a revamped home page for Twitter.com, better search tools and possibly the rollout of brand pages for companies. The company is clearly trying to attract and engage more users by making it easy for them to get something out of the service, while also forging better ties with advertisers and companies who want access to them.

The most obvious change happened today with a new Twitter.com home page. While the home page previously offered a glimpse of top tweets and some notable users, the new page makes it clear what Twitter is about, at least to many mainstream users. “Follow your interests,” it proclaims, urging people to get, “instant updates from your friends, industry experts, celebrities and what’s happening around the world.” Previously, the home page beckoned new users with the promise: “The best way to discover what’s new in your world.” The new home page also features a ribbon of prominent users along the bottom.

The changes may seem superficial, but they fit into a larger push by Twitter to appeal to mainstream users, who are more consumers of information. By pushing them to follow their interests, it helps users get into the Twitter ecosystem and educates them on the process of getting up to speed, something Twitter executives have talked about the need for. In the same vein, Twitter on Monday also unveiled new search tools that make it easier for people to find who to follow based on their interests. Now when users enter in a search term, they don’t just get back users who have that term in their names — they get pointed towards relevant accounts that match what people might be looking for (Twitter is also offering an advanced search page for more in-depth searches).

This not only underscores Twitter’s identity as a place to consume information about specific topics, but could help the company appeal to advertisers, who want to target users based on those interests. Unfortunately for Twitter, the latest changes also seemed to cause some glitches for users, which caused company to disable the new Twitter for a time on Tuesday.

Twitter is also reportedly looking at appealing more to business by offering brand pages, similar to what Facebook does with Facebook Pages. The service already has profile pages for companies like Coca Cola and others, but according to a report by Sarah Shearman of BrandRepublic, Twitter is looking to offer more expansive brand pages that allow for more communication with users. Twitter said it didn’t have news to announce in that area but ReadWriteWeb talked to a few brand executives who say the move makes sense, and Twitter investor John Borthwick of Betaworks called it “smart and necessary.”

Twitter has some basic monetization tools in its promoted accounts, tweets and trends — and this week expanded access to its data firehose through a partnership with Datasift. But the company has also gotten flak for its hamfisted Quick Bar feature on the latest iOS app, which was later pulled. That episode highlighted the perils for Twitter as it looks to build a business model out of its business while still holding on to its central appeal with users, who see the service as utility and a information platform. And it has run into criticism about its moves to control the Twitter ecosystem including its warning to developers not to create new Twitter clients.

With Twitter founder Jack Dorsey back in the mix as chairman, providing a counterweight to CEO Dick Costello’s more business-minded emphasis, we may see some more thoughtful moves by Twitter as it looks to balance its core mission with the increasing need to make money. Indeed, many of these latest changes seem more modest in scope and less likely to prompt criticism from users and developers. But this is an ongoing process for Twitter, so expect to see a lot more moves as the company firms up its business plans and its identity.

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When you decide to get online discount magazine subscriptions, you will find that there’s a variety in the written content of online magazines, and there’s a superior chance of you finding what you look for. If you are a subscriber of the cooking magazine, getting an internet mag subscription on foods may serve you better. Publishers of online magazines have good ways of getting the info through than paper magazines. You are free to have an overabundance pictures, if you are the addict who needs the maximum amount of visual as he can get, and more details.

Paper magazines are limited to some pages and you may want to make outside references and private looking for ways to effectively do what you really are bent on doing, specially when it’s a do-it-yourself mag. Though it could be true that there are some things you will find in paper magazines that aren’t for sale in online discount magazine subscriptions yet, the likelihood of you finding something better is high. If one reason why you decide to forego getting an internet mag subscription for your paper magazine is due to discount coupons you get involving the pages, online magazines also has some things to match that. You can also get freebies and discounts from your advertisers of online mag subscription web sites.

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Now when you have decided what online mag subscription services to avail, you’ll be able to grab that rebate card and pay for your subscription. Some online magazines offer free access to their contents. But you may sometimes be limited to some paragraphs and clicking for the next page will only provide you with on the member’s log-in page, although some online magazines offer full use of their site however for a restricted trial period. If you are considering the cost, getting an internet mag subscription is much more cost-effective. Paper magazines have an overabundance circumstances to it that constitute to its price.

The material as well as the delivery method are a handful of the things which affect its cost. Having an online magazine, the publisher only will pay for his team, the electrical company, with his net connection. Of course there are a few more circumstances to this, but you have the visual. Online magazines don’t limit one to accessing the exact website to read its content. You may also download e-books and PDF files that one could store within your laptop or mobile and study it whenever and wherever that suits you even without internet access.

The best reaction you can have before you input your card number and pay for your online mag subscription is verify whether or not this offers a trial period and lower price should you get more months of membership. A great try out will show you whether the online magazine can meet your expectation. And if you think that it is gonna be an extended relationship, rather than pay month-per-month, do bulk and you also would most probably have a discount.

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