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YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a “Call-to-Action overlay” on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.

The Call-to-Action overlays are available for Promoted Videos only. Promoted Videos, you may remember, are essentially the paid search of YouTube. They were once called Sponsored Videos, similar to paid search listings called Sponsored Listings.

In order to set up the overlay:

1. Set up your Promoted Video campaign like you normally would in YouTube
2. Under My Videos, go to the Video Details page
3. Fill out the fields for the Call-to-Action overlay section

You’re all set. Once the campaign is in full swing, you can check YouTube Insight to see how many people are clicking on the Call-to-Action overlay.

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StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing’s first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they’re making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June.

Overall, things are relatively steady, but there’s an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share.

The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April.

One percent growth over the last two months may not seem significant, but it could be the beginning of momentum.

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Plus, the 1% growth has come at the expense of Google. The search mammoth saw its search engine share according to StatCounter decline by 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June.

By the way, despite that first week of traffic for Bing, Yahoo! still retained its second place status for the entire month of June. Yahoo!’s traffic has remained fairly steady over the past three months in StatCounter data.

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Early stats from Statcounter show Bing taking off in a big way in the United States. As of yesterday, Bing was at 16.28% marketshare while Yahoo! hung out at 10.22% marketshare.

Meanwhile, Google’s market share has dropped about 6 points from 78.07% to 71.99%.

Of course, Bing has only been live since Monday. It could just be curiosity. But if people are truly liking Bing, these numbers will be corroborated by comScore and Nielsen data. If that’s the case, Bing may be a decision Microsoft got really, really right.

h/t TechCrunch

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Seems the Chinese government is not a fan of Twitter. Access to the social media site has been blocked in China, according to ASSME.

Free speech is not an option in China and the blocking of Twitter is another instance of this. One wonders what impact this will have on the user numbers globally. Over a third of the world’s population lives in China and they represent a major growth area for the internet.

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Google Scholar – in beta since 2004 – epitomizes the problems of the internet. It provides easy access to advanced research that can be used by students – but whether it is used for citations or to plagiarize is the deeper problem.

The site uses an academic approach to ranking. “Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.”

What plagiarists must know is that professors know how to use it as well to check if they are cheating. There are even sites like turnitin.com where teachers can submit papers and have them checked for originality.

Without a doubt Google Scholar helps improve access to academic research for students, and students are becoming well aware that teachers are tech savvy as well. If used properly it is a great example of the benefits the web provides.

Google Scholar has even released a toolbar plug in for Firefox browsers.

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Google has added a handy color filter to its image search. Simply conduct the search and then look for the color box to filter down the search.

Interestingly, you get different results if you actually type the color in with your search. The screenshots below show:

1. a general search for “bike”
2. a general search for “bike” with color filter set to “green”
3. a search for “green bike” with color filter set to “Show all colors”

(Also, color filter didn’t show up for a search for “ice cream”)

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Health search engine Healia will be getting some assistance from medical students to help answer questions in the community section of their site. The feature is a results of a partnership with the American Medical Student Association.

Between 75% and 80% of U.S. internet users have searched online for health information, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

If you’ve ever been in a health forum, you know that finding answers can get a little crazy. Oftentimes, it turns into a Worst Case Scenario portfolio.

Sites such as WebMD or MayoClinic.com provide good information, but if you have a nuanced question, they may not have what you’re looking for.

It will be interesting to see if having med students on Healia can fill this gap in online health information. At the very least, it’s great that tomorrow’s doctors will experience how their patients approach health care online. Hopefully it can help them incorporate technology, internet, and even search into their practices.

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After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.

The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

One security measure that I don’t understand is the 30 day expiration Google Health is placing on each Shared link. Unless users resend their link every month, it sounds like this feature would be effectively useless in the event of an emergency. I’d prefer a system that allowed me grant permanent access to a close family member, which I could revoke at any time.

For those users who’d prefer to go the low-tech route, the site is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol.

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Last year, Twitter acquired Summize, which was a Twitter search developed on the API. Twitter search is increasingly popular, especially for finding real-time chatter on a given topic. Recently, a Greasemonkey script was created to incorporate Twitter search into Google results (for those who install the add-on in Firefox).

But Twitter has bigger plans. They want to add a Q&A feature that harnesses the collective – and immediate – knowledge of the Twitterverse. Think Yahoo! Answers meets Twitter Search. Answers sites have been growing in popularity at a rapid pace. This could be a very smart move for Twitter.

Anecdotally, I’ve been seeing people using Twitter before checking with Google. It makes sense. Ask people from your trusted network instead of searching through tens or hundreds of results on your own – and then deciphering how trustworthy the information is.

If Twitter focuses on search, it’s easy to see how they could then monetize their network (finally): search ads.

It’s no wonder that Google has its eye on Twitter. From the CEO calling it a “poor man’s email” (postering??) to rumors that it may seek to acquire Twitter, this is an exciting space to watch.

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According to an email from comScore about their press release distributed on PR Newswire and posted on their website, YouTube has just surpassed 100 million U.S. viewers for the first time. Ironically, there was no online video with the announcement.

Nevertheless, this is big news. According to the January 2009 data release today by the comScore Video Metrix service, more than 147 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 101 videos per viewer in January. This means 76.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed 14.8 billion online videos during the month.

That’s more people than watched Super Bowl XLIII on NBC!

According to comScore, the duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes. This means that the average online video viewer watched 356 minutes of video in January — approximately 6 hours a month.

That’s more time than the Super Bowl pre-game, game and post-game coverage combined — including the half-time show!

Leading the way was YouTube. You remember them. The video sharing site that Google acquired for $1.65 billion back in the fall of 2006.

100.9 million viewers watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube.com in January — 62.6 videos per viewer that month. That’s makes YouTube the top U.S. video property. YouTube.com also accounted for more than 99% of the 6.4 billion videos viewed at Google Sites. This means the number of videos viewed at Google Video is now round off error.

And Yahoo! Video, which began as a video search engine, was launched in February 2008 with a new focus on Yahoo-hosted video only. In other words, it became a video sharing site — like YouTube.

So, I think it’s time to declare that video search engines are dead. They were killed by their siblings, video sharing sites. Even MySpace, which ranks second with 473 million videos viewed in January, is a video sharing site.

Since neither YouTube nor MySpace crawl the video on your website or blog, I think it is also time to declare that video search engine optimization is dead. You might still want to optimize your videos for YouTube, but if you don’t upload them to YouTube, they will never be found in a YouTube search.

And YouTube search is just one of many ways that people discover videos on YouTube. I talked about this at SES London 2009 — Li Evans of Key Relevance interviewed me about this surprising outcome afterwords. Check out the video interview below.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR discusses YouTube and Video Marketing

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