OMG. Pinterest now has over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users, according to Inside Network’s AppData tracking service. With gorgeous photography, and links to shopping sites, Pinterest is becoming an obsession for flocks of women. And they’re not afraid to show it, I mean, Like it. AppData and Facebook’s advertising tool show that over 97% of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women.

The stunningly feminine fan base could be a telling proxy for Pinterest’s actual user base, which totals over 10.4 million considering that’s how many users follow the official “Pinterest” account.

Even though it was co-founded by three men, the site’s not shy about courting women. It’s About page describes that “People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.”

Sure, dudes can do all those things too, but they’re probably not addicted to pinning tuxedos and power tools like women pin brides dresses and bundt cakes. Pinterest’s easy-to-use Pin It bookmarklet and the joy of curation is keeping ladies and gentlemen engaged.

Over 1/5 of its fast-growing Facebook-connected monthly user count use Pinterest each day. At the start of 2012 the daily user count was just 810,000, but now its at 2 million according to AppData. This week comScore said Pinterest hit 10 million U.S. monthly unique visitors faster than any independent site in history.

There are so many beautiful things to share, and they don’t deserve to slip into obscurity at the bottom of our Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles. Pinterest gives people the chance to say “I love this, and not just today. This helps define me.”

[Image Credit: Married To The Sea]

Only about 5% Facebook gamers pay to play freemium games. If Facebook could up this percentage, it and its third-party app developers could make a lot more money. That’s the idea behind a new promotion Facebook announced today where those who’ve never bought Facebook Credits virtual currency before will be offered $4 in free Credits when they buy $1. This gets users to set up their credit card and experience the rush of paying for an enhanced gaming experience.

Years ago when Facebook first launched its Credits virtual currency, it offered free Credits to some users. While this might have got them hooked on spending virtual currency, it didn’t addict them to paying for it.

Facebook needs credit card numbers badly. Apple has amassed an enormous collection after 10 years of iTunes Mp3 sales, which is now helping it easily sell apps and in-app purchases. If Facebook wants to grow its revenue to satisfy outside investors and be a competitive mobile gaming platform, it needs to get users ready to pay.

But like the street corner pusher says, “this ain’t no charity”. Facebook is only surfacing the promotion in sidebar ads, and TrialPay in-game promotions and offer walls to those who haven’t already bought Credits. User than have to set up a credit card or connect a PayPal account and pay $1 to get the extra $4, or 40 Credits. And next time, they’ll have to pay full price. Facebook wisely does not provide any way to reach the promotion directly in order to deter users from trying to cheat their way to free currency.

If you want to claim your own free Credits, your best bet is to play games by clients of Facebook’s official offers partner TrialPay, such as those by Playfish, Playdom, Kabam, Crowdstar, and iWin. These include The Sims Social, Gardens of Time, It Girl, and Kingdoms of Camelot. Then visit the offer wall or click through Deal Spot signs within games.

With any luck, Facebook will be able to up the percentage of users who monetize, and thereby discover new whales — gamers who spend orders of magnitude more than the average payer and drive the bottom lines of both indie developers and giants like Zynga. Call him Ishmael…Zuckerberg.

[Image Credit: Screenrant]

When you listen, read, or watch through a Facebook Open Graph app, a few of your friends hear about through the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. Starting this week, Facebook is allowing advertisers to pay for more exposure of listen, read, or watch stories that mention them by turning the stories into a new form of Sponsored Story social ads.

Open Graph action Sponsored Stories could further Facebook’s goal of turn all ads social, and boost revenue by filling the new inventory from Facebook now permitting Sponsored Stories ads in the news feed.

Facebook tells me that for now this is a small pilot program being tested with just a few advertisers, but it could blossom into the ability for advertisers to sponsor any Open Graph action. Above you’ll see a mockup of what the ads could look like in the news feed.

Previously, advertisers could only turn actions taken by users on their own Pages, apps, and local business Places into Sponsored Stories. This excluded plenty of advertisers whose content was being interacted with through apps owned by others. For example, a record label could Sponsor Likes of their artists’ Pages, but not listens of those artists through Spotify.

Now, a band could sponsor listens of their songs, and TV studios could sponsor watches of their episodes on Hulu or Netflix. Catering to a wider range of advertisers, anyone featured in a news article could pay to expose a link to it to the friends of those who’ve already read it. These action Sponsored Story ads complement Open Graph activity ad targeting that lets advertisers reach users who’ve taken a selected action with traditional ads.

Facebook sees Open Graph applications as the soul of its future ads business. Rather than letting advertisers bombard users with irrelevant pitches based on general biographical data, ads show the actions of friends and are targeted by a user’s own behavior. This creates a win trifecta — more relevant ads for users, better - and conversion rates for advertisers, and more money for Facebook and its future investors.

It won’t stop with Google Search Plus Your World. When asked if we should expect more integrations of Google+ into Google products, G+ director of engineering David Glazer said at today’s Inside Social Apps 2012 conference, ”Yes, where it’s good for the user. I think there’s more places to make people happy by showing them content they care about.” At the first major speaking engagement about its social network, Glazer also discussed user acquisition, monetization, and support for brands.

Regarding Google+ expanding into more Google properties, Glazer said “I don’t think of it in the sense of cross-promotion or the importance of the product to the company. It’s the importance of users to users. People care about other people, and that should be baked in to what you do online. With Google+, we  don’t want another product, but we can make everything you do online better if we have some idea of your identity, your connections, and have some mechanism to have conversations.

Glazer explained the slow roll out of the apps platform as a desire to “find the balance between people saying ‘I hope they never let anyone make a game on Google+’ and people saying ‘I can’t wait for games on Google+’. Google is taking this controlled approach to avoid the influx of spam that hit Facebook when it opened viral channels after its platform launched. Glazer said “If too many [developers] jump in, it could change the character of the platform.”

Plans for helping developers gain users will for now center around organic discovery. Glazer noted that Google+ games can also be accessed from the Chrome Web Store, and when launched will open an experience in Google+. Google has also created a “Play Now” button that developers can embed on their own sites to promote their Google+ apps.

Brands shouldn’t expect the equivalent of Facebook Page tab applications any time soon, unfortunately. During the Q&A I asked Glazer how brands will be able to drive their brand Page visitors to branded apps, for instance if Google will add the ability to feature links to apps on Pages. Glazer responded “We’re considering it. It’s a reasonable request but not one we’re prioritizing right now.”

The most exciting thing to developers about Google in 2012 may be video. Glazer said “The Hangouts API is under the radar in beta, [but it will offer] a lot of opportunities for people to do cool things.  The trend is that now you can, then you couldn’t. There no cognitive friction, no technical friction, and there’s huge scale. What could I build if I assume I have cheap, interactive, easy-to-embed video, that lets me do silly things where everyone who tries it smiles.”

Television is in trouble. Americans streamed 43.5 billion videos in December 2011, up 44% since December 2010, according to comScore’s 2012 US Digital Future In Focus report released today.  The study also showed that 105.1 million Americans now watch videos online each day, up 43% from 73.7 million in 2010.

comScore says YouTube is largely driving this, and that average minutes per video view, average videos watched per user, and total ads streamed are way up as well. TV and film studios should take notice and consider how they can create companion content to engage this growing audience and promote their traditional offerings.

Note that these stats are from an independent measurement service, and other measurements and internal traffic stats from the companies discussed may vary.

Other key statistics on American video watching habits in December 2011 compared to December 2010 include:

• The average video view length is up from 5 minutes to 5.8 minutes, showing an increasing willingness to watch longer form content
• The average viewer watches 239 videos per month
• Video advertising volume is rising faster than total videos streamed. The ratio of the number of video ads to total videos grew from 12.8 percent to 14.1 percent, with video ad volume up 20% to 7.1 billion ads served this year

• YouTube and other Google sites account for 21.9 billion of the 43.5 billion video view in December –50.4% of the total market. VEVO ranked 2nd with 801 million (1.8%), Hulu was 3rd with 777 million (1.8%), and Netflix was 4th with 431 million (1%)
• YouTube’s partner channel program has been a success, pushing more professionally developed content to viewers. In December, VEVO’s channel had 53.5 million viewers, Warner Music had 31.7 million viewers, and Machinima had 22.7 million viewers, indicating strong interest in Justin Bieber and watching people kill each other in Call of Duty

In a few months time, here’s what the world will be fighting to get its hands on, or get rid of depending on your confidence in Facebook’s business plan. The image of a Facebook stock certificate was included in the amended S-1 Facebook filed today with the SEC. It’s sure to become coveted by Scripophiliacs, or people who collect historic stock certificates, alongside those from Google, Apple, and Yahoo pictured below.

At first glance, the designs in the certificate’s margins appear similar to the insignia found within the Facebook hoodie Mark Zuckerberg has worn. That’s just a coincidence though, as you can see Apple’s certificate has similar margins.

And a real collector’s item:

If you find yourself intrigued, One Share has pictures of hundreds of popular stock certificates, including those of many tech companies.

[Image Credits: Patrickandmonica.net]

Facebook has just filed an amendment to its S-1 that exhibits the agreements between it and Zynga. These 2 developer agreement documents are the same as those filed in Zynga’s own S-1 amendment from last year and don’t include significant new information.

The exhibits do spell out how Facebook has promised to help Zynga with advertising on Zynga sites such as FarmVille.com, and share revenue from such a partnership. This should not be confused to mean sharing ad revenue from Zynga’s games on Facebook.com. Facebook also included its 2005 stock plan, and employment letters to key executives.

The developer agreement documents appear to have the same redactions as when Zynga filed them. Last year, TechCrunch writer Eric Eldon reported on these docs explaining how they show that:

Facebook also appears to have guaranteed Zynga certain growth targets in exchange for continuing to invest in games on the platform, whether web or mobile. Facebook has given Zynga permission to create some sort of “Zynga Platform”. It also has given the developer access to new features, including a proposed “Game Friends Protocol” API, apparently offering a new way for social gamers to find and play together.

Regarding ad revenue sharing:

At first glance, the terms read as if Zynga had a special deal with Facebook, where it gets a portion of the ad revenue from Facebook ad units that run alongside its games in canvas apps. However, the terms specified that it is not canvas app ad revenue — instead, it’s referring to Zynga web sites [also known as Zynga Game Pages, which do not include Canvas Pages or any other pages on www.faceboook.com.].

We asked Facebook about the matter and got this response: “We don’t have agreements with any developers, including Zynga, to share revenue from ads next to their Facebook canvas apps. We did agree with Zynga to work together in the future on providing ads on their properties beyond Facebook, but we have no current timeline for when we might start working on that.”

This could be the first sign of a future Facebook off-site ad network, in which sites could host ads that employ Facebook’s own targeting system to present relevant ads to visitors that are currently logged in to Facebook. This could become a huge revenue stream for Facebook if it ever rolls the system out to sites beyond Zynga’s.

Some specific points from the agreement:  the Facebook Platform will be integrated into the Zynga Mobile Games and Zynga Properties and FB will be the sole and exclusive Social Platform

• For Zynga’s own websites, “the Facebook Platform will be integrated into the Zynga Mobile Games and Zynga Properties and FB will be the sole and exclusive Social Platform”. This permits Zynga to build games on other social networks such as Google+, but not to use other identity providers to power games on its own sites.
• “FB shall not offer or otherwise make available on the Facebook Site or the Facebook Platform any Facebook Game”, meaning Facebook can’t create its own first-party games that could compete with Zynga.
• Zynga will exclusively use Facebook Credits as its in-game purchase processing method on all its “Covered Zynga Services”, including Mafia  Wars, FarmVille, and any other games that utilize Facebook data.
• Zynga is responsible for “all content and materials, maintenance and operation” of its own gaming websites, except for the Facebook ads it hosts
• Zynga will not “remove, minimize, frame, or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Page” such that it could obscure Facebook ads hosted on its sites or overlays that pop up when these ads are clicked.

All smartphones do not depreciate equally. 18 months after purchase, iPhones can be sold for 53% of their original price, while Androids can only be sold for 42% and BlackBerries for 41% on average according to a study by Y Combinator second-hand price guide startup Priceonomics.

That frown on Android fanboy faces gets even larger the quicker they try to resell. 12 months after purchase, iPhones can pull in 63% of their day 1 manufacturer suggested retail price, compared to 46% for Android. Early adopters who must have the latest model would do well to stick with Apple. 6 months after purchase iPhones claim 89% of their original MSRP, while Androids fall to just 66%.

Priceonomics says “We examined all iPhone models and the 70 most popular Androids and 30 most popular BlackBerry models. iPhone is wiping the floor with Android and BlackBerry in terms of resale value.” This study doesn’t take into account the high, off-contract price of iPhones or the economical options for Android buyers. It’s based on hardware alone, doesn’t compare carrier charges, and may be skewed towards American resale values due to the location of Pricenomics’ user base.

The numbers indicate enduring confidence in Apple hardware, and that a liquid iPhone resale market could make the device a wiser purchase. Carriers, on the other hand, aren’t doing so well selling the iPhone. Verizon, AT&T, and especially Sprint are seeing profits shaved down by subsidizing iPhone purchases, CNN Money repots.

Some other interesting findings include that paying for extra memory hardly enhances resale value, breaking your contract and paying the termination fee is cheaper than buying off-contract, and pre-paid Android phones are cheap and hold their value quite well compared to contracted Androids. The lower resale value may make some Android models more expensive to own per month.

Finally, Priceonomics composed some fanboy location indices showing where the highest volume of certain phones were being resold on its site. Long Island, New York, Miami, and New Jersey have the most BlackBerry resales , while Santa Barbara, Anchorage, Orange County, Boulder, and San Francisco see the most iPhones changing hands. Looks like the adages are true. Smug cities full of supposed cool kids love their Apple products, while bro’ed out popped collar-types are propping up RIM.

During the lackluster moments of this year’s Super Bowl, we turned to our second screens. A study released by Flurry today shows that during great ads and the half-time show we kept our devices stowed, but returns from commercial breaks, boring ads, and waning interest in the 3rd quarter caused spikes in mobile app usage.

This means advertisers and TV producers need to get flashier, because every viewer has a wildly engaging device in their pocket. Subtle, conservative, slow-building ads just don’t cut it any more. 

Overall, the Super Bowl was still more popular in the U.S. than apps, with 111 million people watching the game, while 98 million people accessed mobile apps in the same time period.

Flurry employed a clever new way to measure how entertaining broadcast content is by charting how our often our fickle population moved to check Facebook, Twitter, and play games. The chart above shows dips in app usage during eye-catching ads for Battleship, Coca-Cola’s polar bears, Madonna’s half-time show, and the tense final minutes of the game — which means the only thing people were doing as the clock ran down was updating social media. Tweets spiked to 10,000 per second in the last 3 minutes, the 2nd highest frequency ever.

Hulu, General Motors, and General Electric had the most boring ads according to the study, as app usage spiked while they were on screen. Meanwhile, Verizon’s Droid Razr and TaxAct.com’s ads inspired the least compulsive app usage of the tech companies and websites paying for airtime.

This year’s Super Bowl was the most watched television program in history and more people in the US watched it than opened apps. Next year the NFL might not be so lucky, though. It will have to analyze what moments caused spikes in app usage, and consider how to jazz them up. The streaming experience could also use some refinement, considering it didn’t show the half time and made users click around to see the commercials.

The TechFellow Awards is the Oscars of high-tech entrepreneurship. As selection committee member Sean Parker puts it “We’re shining a spotlight on individuals who are on the cusp of bringing us something revolutionary.” On February 22nd at the SFMOMA, 20 innovators will be presented with $100,000 grants to invest in startups of their choice. Nominations are open through February 17th at the TechFellows website.

Today, the TechFellow Awards announced that Emmy-winning nerd hero Jim Parsons, star of hit tv show The Big Bang Theory, will host the awards ceremony. Marissa Mayer, Dave McClure, and Terry Semel will also join the all-star selection committee, which includes Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway.

The TechFellow Awards are presented by Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) to honor visionary technology leaders with the opportunity to support the next generation of innovators. 5 winners will be selected in each category – Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation.

Along with the $100,000 grant, the winners will join an elite technology community think tank of past winners including Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; Maria Thomas, former CEO of Etsy, Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora and former CTO of Facebook, and Paul Graham, co-founder and Partner at Y Combinator. They’ll attend quarterly dinners, livestream events, and Q&A sessions where they’ll receive expertise and insight to help them shape the future through investment and their own projects.

Visit the TechFellows website now to nominate who you think are the most disruptive figures in tech, and check back on February 22nd for live coverage and interviews from the awards ceremony. Here’s the full list of selection committee members for this year’s awards:

• Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder, Andreeseen Horowitz, Netscape)
• Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch)
• John Battelle (Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media)
• Ron Conway (Managing Partner, SV Angel)
• Chris DeWolfe (Co-Founder, Myspace)
• Esther Dyson (Chairman, EDventure)
• Caterina Fake (Co-Founder, Flickr, Hunch)
• Shawn Fanning (Founder, Napster, SNOCAP, Rupture, Airtime)
• Reid Hoffman (Co-Founder, LinkedIn)
• Joi Ito (Director, MIT Media Lab; Chairman of the board, Creative Commons)
• Max Levchin (Founder/CEO, Slide; Co-Founder, PayPal)
• Marisa Mayer (VP Location & Local Services, Google)
• Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups & Partner, Founders Fund)
• John McKinley (Founder/CEO, OurParents)
• Jonathan Miller (CEO Digital Media, News Corp)
• Tim O’Reilly (Founder, O’Reilly Media)
• Sean Parker (Co-Founder, Napster, Plaxo, Causes, Airtime; Founding President, Facebook; Managing Partner, Founders Fund)
• Geoff Ralston (Former Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!; Former CEO, Lala)
• Terry Semel (Chairman/CEO, Windsor Media; Former Chairman/CEO, Yahoo!)
• Danny Sullivan (Founder, Search Engine Land)
• Peter Thiel (Managing Partner, Founders Fund; Chairman & Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies; Former Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, PayPal)
• Jeff Weiner (CEO, LinkedIn)
• Michael Yanover (Business Development, Creative Artists Agency)
• Mark Zuckerberg (Founder/CEO, Facebook)

It’s beautiful, it’s addictive, and now Pinterest is having its glorious hockey stick moment. TechCrunch has attained exclusive data from comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history.

In fact, users are spending so much time sharing their favorite images that now only Facebook and Tumblr have more social media time on site than Pinterest. Who’s propelling its rise? 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland. Maybe we should call it blow-dryer growth.

According to comScore, the average Pinterest user spend 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. If you don’t count sites like Google+ or new Yahoo channels that have built in user bases, comScore’s data shows Pinterest would be the fastest site of any kind to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S.

[Update: comScore reported to us that Pinterest was the fastest independent site to hit 10 million monthly uniques in the U.S., and that according to its data, Formspring never reached 10 million monthly active users in the U.S. and instead peaked around 8+ million.

Formspring's founder Ade Olonoh shows that according to Google Analytics, Formspring reached 10 million monthly global uniques in 2 months, faster than Pinterest.

Unfortunately it's not really possible to directly compare separate traffic measurement services such as comScore and Google Analytics as they frequently differ. Other sources of data than comScore might show Pinterest and Formspring's growth differently. This article is based on comScore's data in the U.S. alone, and the headline and article have been updated to reflect this as it wasn't entirely clear at first.]

This proves the power of the interest graph, and could convince more startups to build around what people care about instead of the social graph of who they care about.

Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.

Next, the question will be when should Pinterest start to seriously monetize. branded pins, and brand pages are all options, and the site may already be earning money through affiliate links. Suddenly, it seems the investors that got in at that rumored $200 million valuation, and especially that $40 million valuation from September pinned a real winner.

[Image Credit:ElevateStyles]

If you want to slay orcs and elves, there’s plenty of options, but the millions of car racing gamers out there have few places to chase the checkered flag. That’s going to change because today, Ignite Game Technologies closed a $5 million Series C round from private investors bringing it to $17.5 million in funding. It will use the cash to speed up development of its recently launched Simraceway freemium game, as well as its skill matching technology.

Ignite plans to hook users with high-profile licensed content, accurate physics, and addictive gameplay to get users paying to race or buy cars.

Simraceway is a free to play, downloadable PC client-based head-to-head racing game. It sits in the realistic driving game space, less hardcore than true simulations, but deeper than arcade racers. Most realistic racing competitors like Gran Turismo and Forza are disc-based where you pay up front. Simraceway is looking to fill the average revenue per user gap between casual, social racing games and these competitors with a high-end freemium model.

Racing games present a particular development challenge not found in massively multiplayer online role-playing games or first-person shooters. To be fun, gamers have to be extremely well-matched in terms of skill level, otherwise one person spends the entire race far behind and doesn’t want to play again.

Ignite is solving this problem with its proprietary skill quantification technology that eliminates mismatches. Ignite will use the new funding to refine the system, and CEO Jonathan Haswell tells me it might license the tech to other developers. Ignite has also found a way to let players race each other asynchronously. Its ghost lap system that could keep players engaged even when their favorite opponents are offline.

To attract auto enthusiasts, Ignite has secured licenses from 600 brands. These include the full car catalogs of manufacturers such as Bentley, McLaren, and Mitsubishi, with each car featuring simulation-grade driving physics. Four-time IndyCar Series winner Dario Franchitti is working with Ignite’s physics development team to do R&D at the Simraceway Performance Driving Center, a real-world racing facility based at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California.

Users can play Simraceway with their keyboard, a full wheel and pedal set, or Ignite’s own S1 motion-controlled steering wheel that’s affordably priced to draw users into Simraceway. There they spend real cash to buy better cars and enter big online races where they can win real prizes such as driving lesson vacations to Infineon.

Auto racing is one of the most popular forms of sport, and its one where fans are accustomed to spending big money to attend races, trick out their own cars, and buy gaming controllers. If Simraceway can grow to host more match-ups than any other racing platform, network effect will kick in and keep in-game purchases flowing. One day, Ignite could become a gaming revenue powerhouse like Activision-Blizzard, whose World of Warcraft helped bring in $754 million in net revenues during Q3 2011.

Yelp built its ad business by attracting users that know what they want, just not who to buy it from — exactly when ads are most effective. That’s why I find today’s VentureBeat piece by Rocky Agrawal titled “Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers” to be ridiculous. His sources say Yelp charges a $600 CPM, or 1,000-times the standard online CPM rate.

Yes, these ads are expensive, especially for low-end restaurants. But for lawyers, dentists, jewelers, and mechanics with a high lifetime average revenue per customer, turning someone searching for their services on Yelp into a loyal customer is no rip-off, it can drive big ROI.

Yelp sits at the end of the purchase funnel in the demand fulfillment stage. Users often already have a need for a business’ services and are prepared to spend. They go to Yelp to determine which service provider will get their money. When a user searches for “dentists in San Francisco”, Yelp local ads let advertisers put their own search result with a link to their Yelp profile at the top of the results.

For restaurants, a conversion could bring in $20 to $50 in revenue, and that customer will eat somewhere else tomorrow where they could get hooked. For a high CPM to provide ROI, restaurants need lots of customers to be swayed by their ads and turn into regulars. Yelp local ads might not work for them.

However, for more expensive financial, medical, automotive, real estate, travel, home, and professional services, these stakes are much higher. A single visit from a customer could earn an advertisers hundreds of dollars, their long-term business could be worth thousands, and they’re unlikely to switch if satisfied. If their local ads on Yelp net them just a few or even 1 new customer, they could earn significant long-term ROI.

Agrawal compares Yelp ads to Facebook ads, which doesn’t make sense because Facebook users aren’t actively looking for the service the advertiser is selling. He also says Yelp is overcharging advertisers. It’s only overcharging if the ads don’t produce results, not just because they’re priced much higher than less-targeted display ads.

If you want proof that Yelp provides value to advertisers, just look at Yelp’s S-1 filing to go public. It notes the massive growth and return-customer rate for its local ads business:

from the quarter ended December 31, 2010 to the quarter ended December 31, 2011, the number of active local business accounts increased by 109% from approximately 11,300 to 23,700. Of the approximately 23,700 total active local business accounts for the quarter ended December 31, 2011, approximately 15,800, or approximately 67%, were existing advertisers from which we recognized local advertising revenue in the immediately preceding 12-month period. (Page 56)

Yelp had a 67% return advertiser rate, and that would have been much higher if it hadn’t DOUBLED its local advertiser count in that year. If Yelp ads are such a rip-off, why are advertisers coming back for more? Yelp can’t say because it’s in its pre-IPO quiet period. It shouldn’t need to, though. It charges justifiably high CPMs, and is going to IPO, because its ads appear at the perfect time. And they work.

Want to win some extra visibility for your brand on Facebook? Post about current events. Brands grabbed 99.7% higher engagement on their Page posts by talking about the Super Bowl yesterday, and 60% higher engagement over the past 6 weeks compared to the average post. The data from a Buddy Media study of 1,400 of the world’s largest brands indicates they should make sure to post about holidays, sporting events, breaking news, and other trending topics.

Why does this work? Because Facebook’s news feed sorting algorithm EdgeRank shows posts to a wider audience if they get high levels of engagement (Likes, comments, and shares) from those who have already seen them. In this case, posts about the Super Bowl were inherently more eye-catching to users and got more engagement, and were therefore shown to more users, netting them more engagement…

EdgeRank also gives more prominence to posts that contain the same keywords as other posts from a user’s network, generating “Brand X and 8 others posted about Super Bowl XLIV”. The feature can help brands posting about current events to reach the news feed, even if  users do have to click to expand these aggregated mention stories.

Tons of brands are missing out on this engagement bonanza, though. Just 30% of the brands Buddy Media analyzed posted about the Super Bowl. So tell anyone who handles social media marketing about this strategy so they can cash in on the upcoming Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day, and Canadian Junior Curling Championships. Well, maybe skip that last one.

Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar.

Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases.

The Facebook mobile app platform launched in October to help the social network start monetizing mobile through in-app payments on which it collects a 30% tax. Apps run through an internal web browser within its iOS and Android apps, allowing it to circumvent Apple and Google’s tax.

However, the platform hasn’t gained serious traction with developers or users, and that’s a serious risk the company noted in its S-1 filing to go pulbic. Some developers don’t want to re-fork production to support HTML5 in addition to iOS and the various Android versions, at least not until Facebook’s platform is a proven money maker. HTML5 also needs time to mature before it can handle the most advanced native apps.

With limited choice, and no ads to promote third-party apps within Facebook’s own mobile apps and HTML5 site, users aren’t installing them in the first place. Since bookmarks for the HTML5 apps are only found at the bottom of the Facebook mobile site’s nav menu, and have to be located through the search bar in the Facebook iOS and and Android apps, users aren’t reengaging with HTML5 apps either.

But Facebook has been pulling its punches. It has hundreds of millions of daily active mobile users who first see the news feed where these bookmarks are being tested. Facebook says similarly styled bookmarks on the web interface’s games canvas page have been proven to drive traffic.

The small percentage of m.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone users in the test could click bookmark and after some confusing lag an internal browser would launch Words With Friends, The Washington Post Social Reader, CityVille Express, Warimals, or another game or app. The test may have run on the Facebook for Android app as well.

Facebook is likely testing to see if users click these bookmarks, and if their presence decreases news feed engagement or session length. If Facebook can get more eyeballs on third-party app bookmarks without degrading the user experience, it may have found a way to leverage its natural assets to begin the steep uphill battle against Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

Want to watch the big budget Super Bowl commercials, but can’t wait till Sunday or don’t care about football? Facebook and USA Today have just launched Ad Meter, a Facebook app where you can watch many of the TV spots right now. Then from kickoff until Tuesday night you can vote for your favorites. Traditionally an offline poll done live with handheld meters, USA Today has finally brought Ad Meter online so you can judge ads both in real-time and post-game.

Facebook tapped Involver to build the app, and has secured early previews of roughly 20 commercials. The rest of the ads will become available through the app at game time. On Tuesday night at 6pm EST the results of the voting will be announced.

Several Internet companies have plopped down the big bucks this year in an attempt to court the mainstream. Arrested Development’s Gob plugs Hulu, and Teleflora.com touts the lovin you might get if you use it to send a Valentine’s Day gift. Etrade, Careerbuilder.com,

Investing in Super Bowl ads makes more and more sense for web services as the general public becomes more internet savvy. They should tread cautiously, though, considering past ads from Salesforce, Groupon have been voted most disliked and caused PR crises. Let’s hope no one gives our industry a bad wrap this time around. Oh wait, GoDaddy’s ads filled with body-painted models and angels in the cloud are just as sexist as ever.

Temple Jump, Tiny Birds, Numbers With Friends. These are not the apps you love. They’re fakes designed to scam you out of $1.99 when you go to buy Temple Run, Tiny Wings, or Words With Friends. Today Apple took a stand against plagiarism, kicking these rip-offs out of the US App Store. Good riddance, but how can platform owners stop these developers before they rob users of thousands or even millions of dollars?

This morning, The Guardian wrote about how Anton Sinelnikov who made the fakes listed above and other scam developers are essentially stealing money from hardworking independent studios like Imangi and Andreas Illiger, as well as industry giants like Zynga. Temple Jump even reached the top of the paid app chart.

Apparently that was the last straw, and since then Apple has removed many of Anton’s apps so they’re no longer available for download. This morning, Keith Shepard, found of Temple Run maker Imangi Studios tweeted that several other rip-offs had been removed as well.

https://twitter.com/#!/kshepherd/status/165449912270589953

In the past, Apple has gone after developers who cheated the review system, booting 1000 apps by one developer back in 2009. The problem has continued, though, with scam developers relying on curiosity stemming from outraged tweets and Facebook messages to drive sales, as seen in this off-hand graph submitted by developer Kode80.

The App Store and Android Marketplace are too big to be entirely policed without the help of users. That’s why Apple needs a new predefined option in its “Report A Problem” button shown on App Store apps.

Right now there’s only “This application has a bug”, “This application is offensive”, “My concern is not listed here”, and an open comment field. “This app is a fake version of another app” or something similar should be added. Android, Facebook, and other platform owners should ensure they have similar ways to specifically report fakes. But where is the line drawn between copying another app’s gameplay and releasing an out-right fake?

Zynga was itself accused of copying developer NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower with its app Dream Heights. But Dream Heights has a distinct name, typography, and logo. It’s trying to win users with similar game mechanics, not by duping them into thinking they’re downloading Tiny Tower.

paidContent wrote about Cut The Birds, a now removed mashup of Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja that topped the free App Store chart. While it has unique gameplay, it originally used an icon and characters with a blatantly copy of Rovio’s birds. Cut The Birds has returned with a 3D version that doesn’t steal Rovio’s designs. In addition to games, apps and whole websites are also being ripped off. The Next Web reports that Google was commendably quick to pull a fake “Siri for Android” app, and then there’s the Samwer brothers and their Pinterest clone.

Platform owners needs to lay out clearer rules around the issue, and create a transparent system for enforcement. For example, a developer whose app receiving a certain threshold of “fake” reports, with names and logos that reach some threshold of similarity should be given a warning and certain number of days to clear up infractions before being removed from the store. Facebook launched a new anti-spam enforcement system in July after apologizing for sudden app takedowns by its automated system.

By giving users an easier way to report fakes and having an enforcement protocol they can point to, platform owners could protect users and honest developers, and make pirates walk the plank.

Facebook is testing a new photo viewer layout that mounts engagement buttons and comments to the right rather than beneath images. See, Facebook doesn’t want you to just view comments, it wants you to start a conversation. Apparently the company doesn’t care about being accused of copying Google+, since the viewer’s layout is very similar to that of its competitor.

The fact is that this is good design, though, so it makes sense for Facebook to integrate whether or not it has appeared elsewhere. Currently when Facebook users view photos, they see a big blank space on the right but can’t see the comments below with scrolling past the fold and away from the image. That makes users more likely to leave the photo viewer before engaging. The blank space is better filled with comments that lend context to a photo, as a small percentage of Facebook users are now seeing.

Facebook hasn’t been shy about taking inspiration from other products. In the months since Google+ launched, Facebook has added features found in Google+, including an asymmetrical Subscribe option, video chat, enhanced friend lists, and near-infinite post length. Facebook’s goal is the best user experience, and Google got a lot of that right. Google+ certainly wasn’t shy about using Facebook’s design as a starting point.

Facebook employees have repeatedly assured me that product teams aren’t thinking about ad revenue when they design products. Still, convenient repercussion of the tested photo viewer design may be an increase in ad clicks. Rather than displaying ads beneath photos, the tested design shows them more prominently in the comments sidebar. Finding these types of synergies between business and user experience will be key to Facebook honoring the interests of its future investors.

So why does this small change matter? First, encouraging conversation aligns with Facebook’s goal of driving connections between people, such as friends of a photo’s owner who might interact in its comment reel for the first time. Second, these comments drive notifications for all other commenters, which inspire more return visits and time on site. I bet the test will show increased engagement, and Facebook will implement some version of side-mounted comments.

[Thanks to our anonymous tipster for the screenshots]

Say what you will about The Huffington Post and AOL, their merger has given HuffPo the resources to conquer the online news aggregation business. Today HuffPo dropped some big stats about the year since its acquisition, most importantly a 47% growth of monthly unique visitors to 36.2 million. Next it’s aiming to take down CNN and the cable news industry with The Huffington Post Streaming Network, which will stream content live on the web for 12 hours a day.

HuffPo proudly announced that it added 170 editors and reporters, as well as 9,884 bloggers. Omitted was the fact that it laid off 120 editorial staff members earlier this year, and that swaths of Huffington Post freelance bloggers got the axe in favor of full-time journalists. On a brighter note, the site launched 44 new verticals, including HuffPost Green, and HuffPost Gay Voices, which are topping the comScore unique visitor charts for their categories.

The Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN its abbreviated, will be “a never-ending talk show” to “mirror the Internet experience” says HuffPo founding editor Roy Sekoff. 100 employees in HuffPo’s NYC and LA office will work on the project which launches next quarter, and it will bump up to 16 hours of streaming a day next year.

Hollywood Reporter says there will also be on-demand clips, that the live stream will include a news ticker at the bottom, and that viewers will be encouraged to video call in and participate. Regarding the potential to become a full blown cable tv network, Sekoff said “We are happy to have it happen as long as we stay true to our format. We do not want to become like everyone else.”

YouTube recently announced partnerships with 100 content providers including Reuters, Slate, and SB Nation to create original web tv series. Unfortunately, you still have to make an active choice of what to watch next when you finish a video, as shown above.

HPSN is another example of the tech industry disrupting the inefficiency of old world media. Right now, news junkies have to pay enormous monthly cable bills to get a constant supply of video content. Sure they could go online and bounce from news clip to news clip, but that experience is exhausting. HPSN’s relaxing, laid back experience will work on the web, but it could be a big winner on internet-capable televisions.

Disclosure: The Huffington Post is owned by AOL, TechCrunch’s parent company.

Image Credit: Shutterstock – Arcady

For those not from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there’s only 1 thing you really need know about Facebook’s plan to become a publicly traded company: Your Facebook won’t be suddenly overrun with ads. Facebook bluntly warns greedy investors “Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results”, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

This is a huge win for the user base, which depends on Facebook as a communication utility.

Facebook even put its conservative stance on monetization in its assessment of Risk Factors for investors:

“we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions are consistent with our mission and benefit the aggregate user experience and will thereby improve our financial performance over the long term.”

When rumors first emerged that Facebook was planning to IPO, I shuddered at the thought of enlarged ad sidebars, banner ads on mobile, and timid product development. I’m not worried anymore. Facebook seems determined not to let outside investors narrow its long-term vision. Just look at this photo Mark Zuckerberg posted of his desk yesterday.

Check out our full coverage of Facebook’s filing to IPO, including its $1 billion in profit, 845 million monthly active users, and Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of “The Hacker Way”.