Category Archives: facebook

Kevin Rose to Newscorp: Digg this $150,000,000 price tag?

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It now appears that Digg probably won’t be sold to Newscorp and may simply go for another round of financing. If so Rose and Zuckerman over at Facebook may be sharing some pizza in a few years thinking “wow, we turned down HOW MUCH?” One uncertainty with Digg appears to be traffic. Comscore shows a small fraction of what Digg claims and Alexa traffic seems to support. However Alexa is notoriously unreliable, often showing huge swings where none exist and seeming to favor tech sites, probably because the toolbar Alexa uses to count visits is more often on the computers of tech people. For Digg, itself a high page view high tech site, Alexa is a questionable measure.

The Comscore traffic discrepancy is so huge that either Digg or Comscore’s credibility should be at stake. Not so in this new bubbling time where nobody seems to care much about the facts, just the hype. Like YouTube, Digg offers little of substance, a lot of page views, and not much revenue. They are lucky the pockets are so deep and the rationale so thin for these megabuck deals.

Prediction: Google will buy Facebook for about 1.1 billion

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Irrational exuberance in the dot com shopping aisles?

No, it’s a chess game and Google’s winning….again.

I’m really starting to understand what seems like irrational exuberance on the part of Google and the major players. A Google aquisition of Facebook would be consistent with what Robert Scoble suggested is happening: Google is building a moat around it’s advertising business.

Steve Ballmer also suggested this notion in his recent BusinessWeek interview, ironically fretting that Google could monopolize the media business. Yikes, Steve would really run out of chairs then?

I can almost hear Ballmer to Schmidt:
“Hey Cowboy, there’s only enough room in this here internet for ONE monopoly you, you, you dirty monopolistic sonofabitch BASTARDS!”

Schmidt to Ballmer:
“HEY! DROP that chair and step AWAY from the Vista Browser!”

Google, with tons of cash to burn and a staggering market cap, has far less to lose in the high stakes internet poker game than Yahoo, Ebay, or even Microsoft. Microsoft is bigger than Google and theoretically richer, but unlike Google Microsoft has yet to figure out good ways to monetize their (improving) search services and (not improving) content services.

Ballmer’s juggling how to preserve his big ticket MS Office and Vista projects. Yahoo’s worried about plunging valuations and people leaving and the fact that a billion represents a lot more to them than it does to Google.   This is almost certainly complicating the Yahoo Facebook negotiations right now.  Ebay’s pretty fat and happy where they are. Meanwhile, Google can focus in laser-like fashion on keeping Google in the driver’s seat with it’s superb contextual advertising monetization.

The best defense is a good offense, so they are buying up properties to increase their control over the advertising space and keep those hundreds of millions of eyeballs out of the hands of MS and Yahoo.

Will this work? I say probably not for similar reasons it was stupid for Yahoo to buy Broadcast.com years ago. Video is junky and won’t monetize well. It’ll be more of an encumbrance to Google’s core competencies than an asset. But … things change, and in the meantime it’s fun to watch this high stakes game of chess unfold.

It’s a show you won’t see on YouTube.

Facebook worth more than YouTube? Don says “yes”

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Don Dodge over at Microsoft has a great little thumbnail analysis of the business prospects of YouTube and Facebook, and concludes both are way overpriced at current valuations and Facebook is more valuable at 700 million. He cites Scoble’s latest thinking on the topic as well though it seems to me Robert seems too supportive of buying anything that even smells like Web 2.0 and is still feeling a bit hostile toward his ex employer.   I don’t blame him for that since he was way ahead on the new web and blogging and Microsoft’s failure to “get it” must have been really frustrating.

He’s not doing an extensive analysis but this is the best actual math I’ve seen regarding these deals, which as Don indicates with his little summary, appear to be valued more like Granny’s china than businesses. Given the uncertainties I think he’s generous to go 20x expected earnings. The landscape is changing daily and it’s not clear people will stick to favorite sites the way they stick to favorite brands (I predict we the people will not show much in the way of online brand loyalty, and this will shake it all up a lot in the coming years).

Kawasaki on new trends in marketing

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Here is a nice summary of insights from Guy Kawasaki, clever marketing guru, about what young people are doing online and on phone.    Supports the ideas that the future is highly mobile and must be highly “permission based” in it’s marketing.

Won’t it be interesting if the new age of marketing becomes a lot like 1800 style marketing?   There, you’d go to the hardware store or the grocery and ask the retailer to hand you things.    In the new age this is becoming a trip to trusted niche sites (or Costco.com and Wal-Mart?) for information and shopping and then asking the computer to fetch stuff for you and add to your electronic shopping cart.

Blog readers and blog writers redux. Cicarelli still rules

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Gee, the top blog search is still Cicarelli.

 

My earlier post with these technorati search terms seems to be getting a some attention for the term “Assparade” rather than the post I thought entitled “Cicarelli“, but I don’t have good stats yet.

 

I shall say with great pride and elitism that at Technorati this morning I was the top search result for “Assparade”, apparently simply because I put up the technorati list on my blog.

 

Today’s technorati terms are different but still indicative of the chasm of diversity between blog readers and blog writers.

 

 

Top Technorati Blog Searches September 23 (or maybe Sept 22?) – what are blog readers trying to find?

  1. Cicarelli
  2. Jonny
  3. Xing
  4. Pinky
  5. Openbc
  6. Bin Laden
  7. Bitacle
  8. Hugo Chavez
  9. Assparade
  10. Asian
  11. Axis of Sketchy…
  12. Grey’s Anatomy
  13. Richard Hammond
  14. Daniela Cicarel…
  15. Google

Top Technorati tags – what people are writing about.

  1. Bush
  2. Islam
  3. Pensieri
  4. Comedy
  5. Microsoft
  6. youtube
  7. Amore
  8. iPod
  9. sexy
  10. fashion
  11. foto
  12. Politica
  13. wordpress
  14. Politik
  15. torture

 

Although I do understand the diversity to some extent, particularly interesting is that “real” news like “Hugo Chavez” is not getting written up as much as it’s getting searched for.   I’m guessing that the blog writer demographic is still very narrowly “tech focused” but I wonder how it is politically?    Probably polarized, such that people with “strong” political views are far more likely to blog in that space.

If you are in it only for the money you won’t get as much … money.

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When he’s not coming up with self serving pseudo communities like Squidoo, (am I too harsh? maybe…) , Seth Godin has lots of excellent marketing insights such as this one that suggests the big innovations come from passion about the topic and not from the quest for the holy big buck, which Seth suggests forces people to *stop innovating* too early.  He cites Apple Computer, Google, and others that really do support the hypothesis.

I don’t think this is the *main* story of success however.  I still prefer to view success as an evolution of ideas where 99.9% become “extinct” and .01%  survive due to forces outside of the control of the company – forces like global economics, weather, personalities, lucky timing, zeitgeists, etc, etc.

We tend to look only at “survivors” and forget that an analysis of corporate success would take a large number of company starts and follow them to their demise or success and then look at the factors that led to their fate.

Flickr  even suggests an evolutionary model both as idea and within the company.   Flickr started as a game maker rather than a photography sharing community.   Flickr’s evolution seemed to be a combination of luck, serendipity, brilliance, and (Caterina Fake might say most importantly) her realization of the potential of the “little idea” that became a huge online community.   Also important is that from Yahoo’s perspective Flickr probably needs to generate a LOT more cash before it’ll be considered worth the $20-30 million they paid for it.      Hmmm – I wonder if founders Caterina and Stewart are eyeing Yahoo’s possible 1 billion dollar offer for Facebook with any envy?

“Dear, we should have held out for a hundred million more!”

But as Seth suggested these innovators are not in it for the money so no worries there I’m sure…. hmmmmmm……

Blog readers are not blog writers.

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Check out the top Searches at Technorati for today:

 Top Searches

  1. Cicarelli
  2. Pinky
  3. Facebook
  4. Chavez
  5. Onewebday
  6. Hugo Chavez
  7. Bitacle
  8. Grey’s Anatomy
  9. Black
  10. Daniela Cicarel…
  11. Myspace
  12. Melinda Duckett
  13. Youtube
  14. Assparade
  15. Sophia

 Now look at the top Tags, which I would think are a reasonable proxy of what bloggers are writing about:

Top Tags

  1. Bush
  2. youtube
  3. Islam
  4. Microsoft
  5. Politica
  6. Pensieri
  7. Iran
  8. torture
  9. vlog
  10. chavez
  11. Riflessioni
  12. Terrorism
  13. Amore
  14. Segway
  15. Israel

They are totally different, which is very interesting for several reasons.   Readers are clearly a very different blog interest demographic from writers.  The two groups are not even close in the subjects that interest them.

 

It also suggests that bloggers are not after viewers as much as they are writing their own interests.  I predict this gap will narrow  as the barriers to entry approach zero and the advantages of blogging things of interest to the masses goes up (ie blogs are better monetized than now).   However I doubt it will ever close completely since the guy who just wants to surf for blog porn is unlikely to become much of a wordsmith.   It suggests that bloggers have a more ‘refined’ set of interests in the sense that “assparade” is lower brow than, say “Segway”, though I suppose some would indeed call a Segway convention an ass parade if they were trying to double entendre the scooter crowd.  Hmmm – maybe I’ve got this all ass backwards?

The death, and rebirth, of user generated content is coming to a home theater near you

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I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.

User content contributions to  Facebook,  travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info.   When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users.    It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site.   It’ll be interesting to say the least.

To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*.    When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!).   Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.

The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more.   However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the  consolidation of that content.

You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites.   However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket.   Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.

John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.

However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”

Facebook to open to everybody soon

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Hey, just a few days after I took the time to set up a UW Madison Alumni email and forward it to my Google mail and I’m feeling all special and elite because I have a Facebook Account,  Forbes reports that Facebook will open up to anybody very soon.

This will be really interesting to watch.   Facebook is much, much smaller than Myspace but has a far more “elite” reputation among the college crowd.   Will Myspace users move to Facebook?  Run multiple accounts?   Which service will new users choose?

Facebook turned down huge money recently, wanting a lot more for what they think is the most valuable social network environment.   If I had to predict things I’d say they made a mistake turning down that money and opening up to all.  They’llsee slower growth than they are expecting, reducing the perceived value of Facebook to less than what was offered.