Google Inc yesterday launched an integrated video network in Taiwan that allows advertisers to display ads on five video-sharing sites for a single fee to help clients increase their marketing efficiency and reduce costs.
“Advertisers only need to pay once and then the Google Video Network could help them expand their ads’ reach to more Internet users,” Google product marketing manager Teresa Huang (黃寶萱) told a news conference promoting the 10th anniversary of the YouTube Web site.
The integrated network would also help clients to avoid collecting one user’s data multiple times, which is a key to reducing marketing expenses, she said.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
The video-sharing Web sites that have partnered with YouTube, which is now owned by Google, include the Apple Daily’s, Amazon.com Inc’s live-streaming platform Twitch, Chinese streaming firm Youku Tudou Inc’s (優酷土豆) Youku.com (優酷網) and Tudou.com (土豆網) and Sohu.com Inc’s (搜狐) sites, Google said.
Huang said it was important to launch the Google Video Network in Taiwan, as statistics showed that the number of hours people in Taiwan watch YouTube jumped 80 percent annually in the January-to-March quarter this year, outpacing a global growth rate of 60 percent.
According to Google, YouTube attracts 9.3 million unique viewers per month who spend an average of 25 minutes per visit.
Globally, YouTube has more than 1 billion users, Google said.
The statistics suggest that watching videos on video-sharing Web sites is increasingly popular among Taiwanese Internet users, Huang said, adding that the cross-video site service and YouTube’s TrueView technology would help clients refine their marketing strategies and target specific consumers.
Google Taiwan general manager Stanley Chen (陳俊廷) said TrueView would display the ads for five seconds and then allow Internet users to choose to carry on watching an ad or stop it.
“The technology is an effective way for clients to catch target audience as only users who are interested in the ads keep watching them,” Chen said.
“When there are so many ads displayed in our daily lives, consumers only want to focus on things they are really interested in, so this is a very important way to get their attention and not to waste marketing,” Chen said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained