Kudos to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s watchmojo, one of the biggest web video producers in the world, which announced they’ve reached viewership of 33,333,333. Ashkan has obviously a sense for communication and show. I’m sure he’s could work in the PR department of General Motors and still find a way to put a positive spin on things:

It took the company two and a half years to reach the milestone. To put the 33 million figure into perspective:

• Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude have all sold 30 million copies since being published in 1936, 1960 and 1967 respectively.
• Nintendo has sold 30 million Wii consoles since 2006.
• The Grand Theft Auto video game series have sold 30 million copies since launching in 1997.
• The average Friends or Seinfeld episode and the finales of American Idol garnered around 30 million viewers each.
• Each year at baseball stadiums, 30 million hot dogs are eaten.
• Each week, 30 million people visit Starbucks.
• Canada, Uganda, Morocco and Algeria each have just over 30 million inhabitants.

We were 200 marketers with a passion for internet communications at MIXX Canada yesterday. I came back home with some nice takeaways even if some presentations were more sales pitches than passionate speeches.

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Michelle Blanc just finished her conference at MIXX Canada. I’m sitting next to Patrice Guy Martin and Adele McAlear. We are using the tag #mixxmtl on Twitter. Jacques Hervé Roubert from Nurun is next on stage. Video: 5 Ways panel is starting now.

- Adrien O’Leary

Bloom Digital has launched officially late this week, with the announced goal to address the current issues in online advertising.

The Bloom Digital team comes straight from Cossette, a leading integrated marketing agency, and as such, their team is composed of communication, advertising and marketing experts, as well as key technologists (Yves Poiré, Vlad Stesin, Bosko Milekic among others) . On their initial blog post, they’ve recognized the failure of current advertising platforms, unapplicable because of media hyperfragmentation and the very nature of social media, blogs and social networks. It’s well known for instance that Google AdWords is the worst for focused blogs or web startups. It’s often irrelevant, un-engaging, and can even bring a negative value; unless you have a mass audience, with millions of pageviews.

Saying that their vision is a new paradigm would be far-fetched, but it’s quite refreshing to see that one of Canada’s biggest communication agency recognized the problems of the market and launched the BloomDigital upstart. I’m especially looking forward to the platform they are building for blogs. Web publishers, startups and web entrepreneurs building online audiences and looking to monetize via ads should also be on the outlook for their platform. Of course, building this platform is a challenge in itself. Traditionally, leading brands frown upon advertising on small “unnaccountable” web destinations, preferring established websites such as newspapers. But if there’s a team in Montreal who can do it, it’s this team, with their expertise in putting together technology/publishers/ad networks and its advertising expertise.

If you are feeling benevolent today or have 5 minutes to kill, Marc-Antoine Lacroix, Msc student from HEC Montréal, is conducting a survey of needs of website owners for his final research project.

I have created a very short online survey that requires less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is confidential and contains no personal questions.

To take the survey, follow the link below:

http://www.hec-questionnaire.com/index.php?sid=12

Thank you very much for your collaboration!
Marc-Antoine Lacroix

If you have any questions:
lacroix.marcantoine@gmail.com
phone number : 514-393-3955

The survey is bilingual and the HEC system does not make it possible to identify who answered what.

This weekend, I stumbled into a review of ma-bimbo from Le Soleil, which apparently is one of the hottest websites in Québec right now.

The website is actually from a french company, with a french and an english version, but due to its popularity, I thought it would be interesting to mention it here.

So Miss Bimbo caters to *girls* teenagers, and is an online game where you “grow” a virtual character, with the objective of being the most popular and richest. The characters can get on diets, go to tanning salons, get breast implants, find a wealthy and handsome man to marry, do some esthetic surgery, become a social starlet, etc. In the article, the website’s founder compares it to a modern day version of the Barbie doll, and says it’s really an innocent virtual game.

Whether it’s “ethical” or not is a judgement I’ll leave to you; what’s interesting is that they’ve tapped into a niche that works very well in Québec (and in Europe as well). In just the past month, the website had a total of 893.000 visits from Québec (in a province with 7 million population !!!), with 130.000 visits from Outremont and 112.000 from Ste-Foy. And this is mostly word-of-mouth, as I haven’t noticed any advertisements in any media about the website.

I’ve spoken in the past with other entrepreneurs if a website catering to a local audience was viable, and most of their replies was that it had to be “generalist” — looks like this isn’t true anymore, if you’ve got enough imagination.

Picture taken by Alistair Croll

A Net Neutrality Rally was organized yesterday midday in Ottawa, where customers of Internet provider Bell Canada and sympathizers gathered to protest traffic throttling by large ISPs.

The rally is a consequence of Bell Canada admitting that they were throttling P2P traffic, even if the traffic was in fact managed by third-party resellers. These companies, and customers alike, felt abused by Bell Canada. Their position is that ISPs should not monitor or throttle Internet traffic; or in other words, that it should be “neutral”.

The Net Neutrality movement was in fact started in the US when cable companies and other ISPs voiced that Internet companies like Google, and applications that consumes a lot of traffic, like Bittorrent, should pay a fee to ISPs for the heavy use of their telecom infrastructure. Companies like Google argued that it threatened everything on how we view the Internet.

Bell Canada’s case is exacerbated by the fact that they are the dominant telecom company in Canada, and also they advertise their Internet service as “unlimited” and “consistently fast”.

Furthermore, P2P is 100% legal in Canada; and that’s why p2p throttling looks like a complete arbritrary move. Come to think of it, it also doesn’t make sense to throttle plans when you offer plans with download speeds of 16mbps. Of course people are going to use it to view and download videos and bandwidth-intensive apps, otherwise they would have taken the slower plans.

More photos of the event

Standoutobs, which aims to help companies find key talent, announced they have now a new partner, CUhire, a company dedicated on helping credit unions on their recruiting efforts.

I thought that this was a smart business move, in the sense that CUhire is certainly more knowledgeable and more resourceful when it comes to their industry — decupling then Standoutjobs’s sales effort. If they are capable of offering customized portals and features, this opens up new opportunities for Standoutjobs. The company’s main product, RECEPTION, is now free, but there is certainly business to be done here when they will decide to introduce a paying plan.

Ben Yoskovitz has also been busy putting together a podcast show focused on recruiting. OK, I admit I stopped listening when there was a 20 seconds pause at the beginning, but the show and the partnerships makes me think they are on the good track. Hope they will come up with similar creative initiatives next.

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, aka SEO and SMO, are relatively new fields in marketing, and as such, are often overlooked by most people when launching a new service or a new product. I also know quite a handful of web people in Montreal who don’t understand SEO and see them as gimmicks designed to “fool” Google and other search engines, and as a consequence, are completely unnecessary if you have a good website.

Needless to say that these words come from engineers who believe in the motto “build it, and they will come”. For me, experience shows this motto is true but what’s also true is that this happens after a very long period of time. Marketing is then necessary to speed up adoption of your product or service, and also reach out more efficiently to potential users.

In Montreal, there seems to be now a very active community of people working in Internet marketing and “pushing the boundaries”. This is a topic I am interested in, however, this is not a topic I am looking into covering in MontrealTechWatch, due mainly to lack of time. If you want to keep track of this though, Nicolas Cossette runs a very good blog named Montreal Social Media. He covers this week the Third Tuesdays meetup, a gathering of social media practitionners. I also find interesting his monthly tracking of companies doing Internet Marketing in Montreal.

I find those reports excellent, and hopes he continues — I am looking for instance into more reports about blog and social media adoption in Quebec and in Canada.

yulbiz, which started as a regular meetup for bloggers writing for business purposes, has now an official website and become an official organisation.

Like other similar meetups in Montreal, yulbiz uses the acronym yul — representing Montreal’s aiport code, and was started to extend online conversations between bloggers to an “offline” setting. The formula prooved to be popular, with profesionals in marketing, consultants, web entrerpreneurs, head of media and pr agencies attending the meetups.

The initiave sparked for instance the bloggers advertising network by Transcontinental Media, and it’s also the place where the co-founders of startup praized met. Their latest venture was publishing a book entitled “Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires”.

The initiative was so popular that it’s now also hosted in Quebec city, in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels and even Warsaw, in Poland. This is where yulbiz.org comes, as an organisation which would “manage” the growth, and also promote blogging, social media and networking.