Category Archives: companies

Kiko.com sells for $258,100 on Ebay today. No champagne glasses came with this deal.

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I feel bad for the Kiko folks even though they are but a handful of the millions of workers who live in the shadow of the search giants, hoping they’ll toss a golden bone or two out now and then. Kiko’s calendar application was probably the victim of Google’s free calendar, as some of the analytics programs are victims of Google’s brilliant plan to distribute Urchin (now google analytics) free to all. Brilliant because it lets you track PPC campaigns and will likely serve to increase Google’s PPC revenues even as people become more savvy about their traffic and PPC spend.

Of course at 258k somebody may be able to turn this around into something profitable. As with Real Estate “fiascos” that go broke sometimes it’s the second team of managers who can come in and, with a much lower capitalization cost, turn the biz around. I doubt it in this case though.

Me? Sue Yahoo!? Sure, what the heck.

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The “Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc.” of Florida has been sending me notices about why I should jump on the click fraud bandwagon and help them sue Yahoo! as part of their class action Yahoo! lawsuit because I have bought Pay Per Click ads over the years, and as everybody knows some of that money went to pay fraudsters.

With a name like “Checkmate Strategy Group” they must be good – or at least be good marketers, since I think the main goal on these suits is to pay out some pittance to the class masses and land several million for the firm.   Hey, you can trust those “Checkmate Strategy Group” guys in a way you would not trust “Vegas Craig’s $2 legal opinions dot com”.    Sorry, no offense to Vegas Craig.

Ha – it’s sort of like PPC in reverse where Yahoo will lose or settle and “return”, say,  five hundred million nickels and dimes and quarters to hundreds of thousands of advertisers in the form of $100 here and $1000 there, while the CheckMate Group gets to keep 100 million nickels and dimes and quarters which is a LOT of  cold, hard cash.  100 million dimes is ten million dollars – I bet that sure beats ambulance chasing.

As much as I like retribution for the shameful lack of oversight on the part of Search Engines since PPC ads took off,  I think Google rather than Yahoo’s been the overwhelming beneficiary of all those ill gotten fraudulent PPC gains in the form of a clicked nickel here and a dime there.   They got off easy with a recent $90 million settlement.

So, on second thought maybe I won’t sue Yahoo! cuz I like those guys.  They are doing great 2.0 stuff  all over the place and opening up data and maps and cool stuff.

On the other hand I sure could use a few of those shiny nickels back ….

Talent, Oregon Real Estate

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Here in lovely Talent, Oregon the real estate prices have been going up in spectacular fashion. Until now. As a favor to my pal Jack Latvala I’m helping him set up a PPC campaign over at Star Properties, the closest thing to an official real estate office for Talent we have here. They also cover Ashland Oregon and have a lot of Ashland Oregon Real Estate listings as well as Talent Oregon Real Estate. Jack and Lynn are great to work with and are one of those rare brokerages that are more interested in helping people and the community than in landing the sales commission.

We’ll start with the $50 in free clicks from Google from SES and see if they can get any action from that bidding on terms like Talent Oregon, Talent Real Estate, Ashland Real Estate, etc. I’m very interested in this from a Search optimization perspective as well. Star would very reasonably be considered the most relevant site for Talent Real Estate, but probably not for Ashland Real Estate. However, the listing at the top for Ashland has a PR of only 2 and is not one of the big players there. I’m thinking he may be the cleverest one though as that’s a choice spot. In these “longer tail” areas we see that Google often fails to deliver the type of result you’d get if you asked a very knowlegeable local from Ashland about Real Estate, and I think this bodes well for Yahoo’s more humanized social search approaches.

Microsoft ads will monetize Facebook Faces

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Nice play by Microsoft to capture future users, though I’m still very intrigued that all these models can thrive by giving users a very modest number of tools to put themselves online, providing common space for people, and then keeping all the money.    I don’t mind *sharing* some revenue with big players but I think it’s remarkable how people simply let the big players nab all the bucks that are the result of their collective …. efforts.

Even *current* Myspacers, most of whom are young teens, envy Facebook accounts which are more restrictive and targeted. I’d guess Facebook eyeballs will be worth 2+ times Myspace Eyeballs in terms of advertising value – maybe much more.

Why is everybody writing off MS and bearish on Yahoo? Once they stop being idiotic they’ll realize they have the same sized audience as Google and will monetize that viewership.

With Vista’s launch, MS will control viewers in ways only their lawyers know for sure.

Google’s at 60% of the search market.   That’s probably about as high as it will ever go.

CEO blogging brings CEO sympathy, so why not do it?

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New York Times notes that only ONE of the Fortune 500 CEOs is a blogger. That would be Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, who’s also a very cool guy for supporting MashupCamps in Silicon Valley and sporting very long hair.

Should the other 499 CEOs be blogging? Even if we leave aside the challenges they’d face from SEC and shareholder scrutiny of every post, leaving them and the company open to liabilities, I’m not at all convinced that blogging is suitable to old style business models.

However, it’s VERY suitable to new style business models and I think the early Corporate CEO adopters like Parsons at GoDaddy and blog Maverick Mark Cuban are going to see a lot of long term value from the practice, especially if they are ever challenged by the very forces that keep other company leaders from blogging. If, for example, ICANN or the SEC challenged Bob Parsons or Mark Cuban on some aspect of their business I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their side of things because I’ve read these guys and know they are straight shooters who often wear their business decisions on their sleeve. Without blogs they’d just be big shadowy Corporate insiders, with them comes a sort of friendly transparency that Robert Scoble and Shel Israel note in their excellent book about this topic, Naked Conversations.

Mike Arrington – Selling eggs and serving beer to the Web 2.0 miners

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In the California of 1850 the Gold miners rarely struck it rich, but many of the saloons, shops, and others who offered the miners a supporting infrastructure did very, very well.

156 years later things have not changed all that much.   Tens of thousands of people flock to Silicon Valley to make their fortunes.   They mine for electrons rather than gold, but only a handful strike it rich.

Enter Mike Arrington, the charming and very sharp fellow who runs TechCrunch, arguably the top Web 2.0 information watering hole in the blogosphere.

CNN Money has a great article about how Mike and a handful of other bloggers have launched publishing empires, rising from obscurity to international prominence over just the last few years.

Although Arrington has his hand and money invested in several Web 2.0 startups, I predict that, like the saloon keepers of 1850, his key contribution will be as a facilitator and information provider.

Cheers 2.0 Mr. Mike!

First Scoble, then Battelle! Web 2.0, are you bubbling?

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John Battelle, always insightful, is worried about Web 2.0 as a bubble.    Given that he’s one of the great 2.0 enthusiasts this comes as a bit of a surprise.    John writes:

… one of the really cool things about Web 2 is that you can keep making new companies, see if they work, then disassemble them and try again. Only, that won’t happen if the companies are kept falsely alive by a preponderance of venture capital and VC-related spending …

It’s a very provocative point, and I can see this happening during trips to Silicon Valley where some of the efforts simply … suck … yet they have enough funding to keep on trying.   I’m not even convinced some of these folks believe in their companies – they just show up at the trade shows and go through the motions until the money runs out, then head to a new gig.

That said I’m not as worried as Scoble or Battelle about a bubble, because I think this is what is going on right now and I think it’s a healthy and natural, though “new”, model for business development.

* The internet business ecosystem is inherently unstable and ripe with uncertain outcomes.

* This instability and uncertainty leads to an experimental, rather than “sweat equity” approach to  building businesses.

* For the Venture Capital community the best approach is to fund many Web 2.0 startups at modest levels, hoping that perhaps one in ten will become a solid business OR an aquisiton target and yield 10-100x the VC investment.

* For the big players like Google, MSN, Yahoo, the best model is to let the new 2.0 companies shake out on their own and aquire the successful ones as Google did with Keyhole maps, Picasa, etc, etc and Yahoo with Flickr, del.icio.us, etc, etc.

Ummmmm …. but what is the best model for aspiring 2.0 companies?    I think it’s to stay away from the VC fray and build lots of *inexpensive* experiments.     One of the best examples of this approach is the brilliant site PlentyofFish.com by Markus Frind, which started almost as a lark and has become a top tier site in a short time.

Top Online Advertisers for May 2006

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Vonage, Dollar, and Phoenix Online University top the list of the top 100 May online advertisers who spent a whopping $245 Million for online advertising. I’m not clear how this compares to the online ad spend total as this leaves out the mom and pops who buy a lot of adwords on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

You don’t need a degree from Phoenix Online U to say “Wow, that’s real money dudes!”.

GOOG 2006 = YHOO 1999 ?

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I think Google is a great company but I simply don’t get the stock price. Not sure if I’m in good or bad company pretty much agreeing with Henry Blodget on this. He’s the Wall Street insider who can’t give stock advice anymore, but gives some REALLY interesting comments in his new blog.

Interesting to me is the fact the ultimate Google insiders felt that $85 was about the “right number” for the IPO and the fact nothing really fundamental has changed since that time unless I missed something online. Of course they have great earnings from ads as the online ad market swells, but Google knew this would happen even if Wall Street was slow on the uptake of the implication of massively superior ROI from online advertising.

This sure reminds me of the Yahoo bubble of 1999.

Also interesting is the degree to which Yahoo can affect Google’s revenue by manipulating the revenue YAHOO shares from it’s Publisher Network which is in beta now.

What if Yahoo decided to pay out a 100% rev share for 6 months as an incentive for Adsense people to jump the Google ship? Google would see a HUGE drop in revenues. Simply HUGE – Adsense was 43% of total Google revenues for 3rd Quarter of 2005!

If this happened Google profit would not be nearly as strongly affected as revenues because most of this revenue goes back to publishers. 78.5 pecent of the total to be exact, thought the rev share varies among publishers. However I suspect even the savvy street folks don’t really understand where all this money has been coming from, and would be alarmed to see it dry up as suddenly as it appeared.

Yahoo could keep up this pressure for some time since they don’t get nearly as much from their publisher network.

Would it be legal for Yahoo to short Google and then announce this move? I assume the SEC would say “NOT LEGAL” and this would wind up as a complex case of stock price manipulation, but in any case what’s Yahoo going to do with revenue share?

Indications at the conferences and from my read of the company are …… they’ll keep them about the same as Google so both Yahoo and Google can turn a good buck, but seems to me if so Google’s buck is not going to grow fast enough to justify current pricing.