Revision3 Revenue Rising

With the exception of John C. Dvorak’s Cranky Geeks, every video podcast I download to my phone comes from startup production studio Revision3. That’s why I’m glad to hear their ad sales are going up, enough to triple their revenue in 2008.

I’m also not surprised advertisers are seeing the value in Revision3’s geeky shows. Founder Kevin Rose is no Oprah and host Veronica Belmont is no Britney, but the economic value of online video is not in mass appeal. It’s in audience engagement, the kind that translates directly into sales. Ads on Revision3 shows achieve 99.9% audience recall and — this is the moneymaker — 48% of the audience actually buys the stuff they pitch. Click here to continue reading “Revision3 Revenue Rising”…

DDoS Attacks on the Rise

Whenever I hear some newbie blogger whine about “online bullying”, I just roll my eyes. Kids, it’s all fun and games until some skiddie takes you offline with a DDoS attack. As The New York Times points out, DDoS attacks are on the rise.

…such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

A survey of 70 of the largest Internet operators in North America, South America, Europe and Asia found that malicious attacks were rising sharply and that the individual attacks were growing more powerful and sophisticated, according to the Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. This report is produced annually by Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks.

The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be overwhelmed by the most powerful attackers.

DDoS attacks comprise three percent of all the world’s Internet traffic. By comparison, all the world’s email comprises only 1.5%. Click here to continue reading “DDoS Attacks on the Rise”…