According to the Search Engine Journal, Google is currently in negotiations to begin offering paid movies and shows on YouTube. Hulu and Apple are already knee-deep in paid content. Amazon is now offering paid videos online, and Yahoo is exploring the possibilities. How long will it be before Microsoft gets into the game? Begun the video wars have.

Some of these services draw you in by giving lots of free content. Some just have a good pricing scheme. Each one of them is stepping directly into the “streaming” content that Blockbuster and Netflix have already pioneered via rental service agreements.

Rentals sound great until users look at their monthly bills and realize they’re being nickel-and-dimed to death. The word “subscription” is being thrown about wildly. After all, these companies have to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth to support the viewings.

Many web companies have tried to use advertising to avoid this outcome. Still, they’re all finding that it just can’t support everything as Joost found out the hard way. They’re going to keep the site running, but they’re joining Crackle in being one of the numerous video application providers.

This all comes down to the question over whether free online video content will eventually join the horse-drawn cart in the dustbins of history. If this comes to pass, video stars such as Thunderf00t, communitychannel, hotforwords, and even the lovable Fred Figglehorn.

Even if the signs are on the horizon, the winds of change won’t blow in overnight. So, in the meantime, let’s all enjoy the free video content throughout the internet.

Real-time search is one of the newest battlegrounds on the web. In fact, history may show real-time search as the development that saved social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as stand-alone entities.

You see, despite all of the growing attraction of web users to social media sites, the ugly truth is that most social media sites have never been able to show a long-term profit. Myspace has been the exception since completing a 3 year, $900 million advertising contract with Google in 2006, but there is no way to know whether Myspace will be able to maintain their Google contract or their profitability.

One common way of start-up companies making money is to auction their business to the best offer such as when Google bought Youtube. There have been rumors of numerous companies from Microsoft to Google and even Apple buying up Twitter.

Real-time search may just re-define how users use the internet. It is the ultimate combination of search and social media. Searching real-time information allows engines that provide the service to display as results that are happening across the web without delay. Since social media postings are updated frequently they are easily able to gain dominance in this sort of platform over traditional articles or blogs. Combining these results with ads seems to be the obvious sought after answer to the profitability questions. Below are some of the hottest real-time search engines across the web.

General Real Time Search

Collecta: This site has not quite reached beta, but the home page does provide two example sneak-peaks. The layout is likely to change before it gets to beta.

Google: Google recently launched a number of new features, and real-time search is one of them. This is found by doing a search from the Google main page, and then selecting “show options” directly under the Google logo. One of the options available is “Past 24 Hours”. Larry Page recently discussed real-time search at the Google Zeitgeist conference in the UK. It is difficult to imagine Google being left behind in anything search-related. The results from this page appear to contain very few, if any social media pages, so it is possible that Google is focused on displaying links that come from already trusted sources.

OneRiot: From the searches I’ve done this site also appears to show links indexed from posts on social media sites purely. They appear to rank the posts by popularity (re-tweets, diggs, ect. ) and how recently they were posted. Each link shows the original author’s logo or profile picture that posted the indexed link so that credit is given. While each of the sites give credit to the original posting author, this extra step may be the distinguishing feature makes OneRiot more favorable. The layout is a basic vertical format.

Scoopler: My favorite between each of these has been a toss-up between Scoopler and OneRiot. Scoopler appears to index any links it from posts all over the web as fast as possible, though I did not notice any repeat links. While this allows for seeing a lot of information this also allows for a site like Twitter to dominate the results. To combat one domain dominating the results the site provides popular searches and popular links that are posted throughout the web. The site also automatically displays the next result on the page without requiring the user to refresh or click a button. The layout is probably the best out of the four general real-time search engines.

Twitter-Based Real Time Search

Twitter Search: The search feature allows a user to search all of Twitter’s posts for the specific keywords. While the search is only for Twitter users it is a very powerful tool.

TweetMeme: This tries to display Twitter posts by popularity as well as organizing the posts by categories. It has a search option that mimics Twitter Search for the most part, and each link has a button that allows the user to re-Tweet the link in question. There also seems to be a lot of integrating features with Twitter, which may help it keep from being disregarded as Twitter Search expands.

Twitmatic: Much like TweetMeme, Twitmatic tries to integrate with Twitter by having a Twitter login link directly on the page. It only indexes videos posted on Twitter. I tried multiple attempts to search on two different days with no success after at least 10 minutes. This service will need to be at least serviceable to attract users.

The recession is making the change away from “old media” far more rapid than it would have occurred otherwise. While we are concerned about the downfall of some traditional companies, like the NY Times, the rise of some of the newer companies is being missed.

Hulu.com is now one of the best, yet legal sources for watching shows and movies. They have a wide array of videos ranging from over a half decade to some that were aired the previous night. Youtube is now following in their footsteps, and they have the backing of the all-mighty Google. The “old media” are just now discovering the importance of these, on-demand, sites. Watch the video to the right.

Each of these services, Hule and YouTube, are being paid by simply displaying ads just like on regular television. Why did the big media corporations like NBC miss this obvious opportunity? To be fair they actually are posting some of their shows, like Heroes, on their own site, and the imbedded video on the right is also hosted their, but they could easily have led the wave of the television merging onto the internet. They missed the opportunity because many “old media” executives don’t want to change their entire method of making money. They’ve made money the same way for so many years, and they’ve seen no reason to change it, now. Instead, they’ve spent most of their time trying to make television more relevant to the lives’ of the average person.

What they misunderstood was that the concept of television isn’t what is becoming less relevant. What is becoming less valuable is the medium on which television is being played across. The same is true in the music industry.

The music industry has tried punishing individuals that have illegally downloaded their music on the internet for years. The record companies successfully took down Napster in the early 2000’s and used the courts to fine thousands of its users. The backlash from the internet users was profound.

Swedish courts just sent four of the people running the Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site, to jail for allowing users to illegally exchange movies and music files. Alas, this will not stop the users either.

It should be noted that I am not endorsing the illegal sharing of files. I am simply noting that the number of people sharing files illegally has gone up significantly over the years, and stopping them appears to be a losing battle.

Two lessons any company must learn when approaching the internet are:

1. The spread of information cannot be stopped. One can only try to affect how people view that information.
2. People naturally follow the path of the least resistance. Rather than stop the way users act on the internet, take advantage of their habits.

With so many people needing to cut costs, they will inevitably cut the least important costs first. How about TV? It can all be seen online. What about land lines? Cell phones work perfectly fine. Don’t we need newspapers? We can get all our news and classifieds online as well. What will we do for entertainment? Maybe we’ll pick up a pack of popcorn at the store and spend a night watching episodes of The Family Guy on Hulu.com or read interesting information on Digg.com or Reddit.com.

The fact is that businesses are going to have to adapt to the internet users. They can’t continue to do business the way they always have, or they will no longer be in business.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target. ~George Fisher

Don’t let your desire for perfection get in the way of your marketing goals. Being hesitant and indecisive when forming ideas for your interactive marketing strategy can waste a lot of valuable time. It can also cost you some valuable leads that you would be generating if you had just committed to getting it up and running. Time is money, and the more time you spend not having an effective online marketing solution, the less money you are going to be making.

Some people will spend months or years polishing a business plan, making sure every single detail is examined and estimated, only to find that in practice, it’s not as they imagined it. That’s way too much time wasted planning and thinking, when they should have be doing and learning.

The same is true about your Interactive Marketing Solution. You know that you need to figure something out to stay competitive. All this talk about Web 2.0, corporate blogging, and social media is pretty confusing. It’s scary knowing that you need to do something, yet having no clue on what to do. How can you identify what is right for your company?

Well, the best advice is to let someone (I suggest MasterLink) help you formulate an Interactive Marketing Action Plan. Working with a collaborative Interactive Marketing partner to identify your goals and objectives is a great way to establish what your interactive marketing solution should be. By setting goals, it is then easy to work backwards to discover ways of achieving them. Hey, it turns out you don’t need that corporate blog or the fancy 3-d flash intro after all. Nice!

Marketing is an ongoing process. You discover that your favorite campaigns are not quite as effective as you planned, or that the one you had no hopes for, surprisingly has a high conversion rate. Because the nature of marketing is so volatile, the best strategy is to get it going and just test, tweak, test, tweak, test, etc.

You can come up with millions of excuses not to get a website up, not to set up a Pay-Per-Click campaign to drive traffic to your company’s product pages, or not to start utilizing Search Engine Optimization to increase your business’ online visibility and credibility. Stop it! Quit making excuses.

Your best option is to start right now before your competition leaves you in their dust. When you spend so much time looking for the “best” choice that you never actually do anything, you are sabotaging your company.

Even if the target is moving, it still is best to shoot. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.