Just landed. Everyone knows Google crushed it again. But the stock seems to be priced already for crushing performance, because it did not pop in after hours. In fact, it dipped.
Seeking Alpha has the transcript of the earnings call. It's really worth a read if you want to geek out - esp. Larry and Sergey's comments on search and advertising, and the Q&A from the analysts.
Google reports earnings today.
Bear Sterns sent me an earnings note which declares:
Strong Paid Search Growth and International Market Share Gain Reaffirm Positive Outlook
· Paid Search Data Indicate Strength for Google. comScore released the December domestic paid search data yesterday. Google.com had 1.27B sponsored clicks in 4Q06, or a YoY growth of 63%. On a sequential basis, Google.com grew sponsored clicks by 22%. We think the solid sponsored clicks data reaffirm our positive outlook for the quarter. We are projecting $2.22B for Google's 4Q06 total net revenues, or a 71.9% YoY and 18.9% Q/Q growth.
I will be on a plane for the earnings call, so I'll ask you all to let me know how it went in comments. I can only imagine another crushing quarter. With the leverage Google has, it strikes me the real danger is knowing when to pull back.
Earnings call webcast will be here.
I don't get it.
Now, that doesn't mean it's not brilliant. I mean, in 1996, I told my fellow senior managers at Wired that the world didn't need another search engine (we started Hotbot anyway and I'm pretty sure that's the main reason Lycos bout HotWired).
From GigaOm's coverage of Yahoo's media day:
Throughout presentations from the Yahoo Media Group, a part of the new “Audience” division, the key word, uttered more times than we could count, was “promotions.” And so, in both overt and subtle fashion, Yahoo is a company transitioning itself into what’s essentially a marketing platform.....
The most obvious example of Yahoo’s increasing bent towards marketing is its new “Brand Universe” initiative, announced in November. The company will tie together its disjointed properties — such as search, groups, Flickr, Answers, avatars — to lead back to pages about a certain pop culture topic — for instance, Nintendo’s Wii.
..Yahoo says it will launch 100 such pages by year’s end; next up are the Sims, Halo, Lost, the Office, Transformers, and Harry Potter.
It feels off in some way, but exactly how has not struck me yet. Also, the new person who comes in to run the Audience group - a person not yet hired - might not like this idea. Then again, there is something to it that strikes me as an accurate read of today's culture - brands are the new water coolers. Hmmm.
The Yahoo Wii page. More coming soon....
From ReadWriteWeb:
On Monday Google released a relatively minor, but useful, feature. It's worth examining a bit more closely, because it's yet another signal that Google is quietly pecking away at Microsoft's lunch in office software. Now I know that Microsoft Office has a lot of advanced functionality that the online office apps don't have, but hear me out...
I should have a regular roundup of new search startups, but for now, consider it noted: Digger. Release. More on Cnet's investment here.
Update: More on Digger at VentureBeat.
Read this. (ZDnet)
The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.
Steve Ballmer gives an interview to the FT, the summary is here. From it:
Microsoft’s next big challenge is to address the threat posed by advertising-supported business models such as Google’s, Steve Ballmer, chief executive, signalled on Monday as the software group launched Vista, its new operating system.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Ballmer said that, having focused on the threat posed by open source software over the past few years, the company had now turned its attention to advertising-funded business models.
That means, I presume, that all those Vista engineers have now been tasked to focus on search. Ballmer spend a lot of the interview talking about search. In short: The order has come from the bridge of the aircraft carrier: Turn toward search and advertising models, full steam ahead!
We'll see how the USS Microsoft has fared in three years, when that turn is complete....
Man, I wish I smoked weed like I used to in graduate school. I'd have a 24-hour party to watch the sunset across the globe on Google Earth. No, really. I mean....wow, man.
When Live Search launched, I was happy to see how the company positioned search as in the early stages of development (sure, they quoted my book, so that helped). But since then, it's been mostly bad news for Live Search. A reader (thanks Michelle) pointed me to this Cnet story. In it, the author describes what most of us already know - that Microsoft has continued to lose search market share, and further, that some analysts believe that the Live brand has confused the public.
"Microsoft's Live branding has been tremendously confusing and has hurt the company, and it is very likely contributing to the situation they are in right now," said David Smith, an analyst at Gartner. "They've created another brand and have not differentiated it."
It's too early to pass "final judgment" on the strategy, Smith said. But now is the time for Microsoft to clearly explain its strategy, he said.
Now, whether or not you agree with this statement (and I have to say, I found the Live brand rather confusing myself when I first encountered it), when a story like this breaks, and folks start commenting on it, it's time to join the conversation. Microsoft is still Microsoft, and I agree with the analyst, the company needs to have a voice responding to this marketplace meme of lackluster performance. Or maybe, just maybe, the launch of Vista will obviate it all? I sure hope that's not the long term strategy.
I think in the end this has to do with the company's massive brand equity in Office and Windows. Consumers totally get what Microsoft means to them - it means the desktop, and it means the main desktop applications they all use (I can say they, I'm a Mac guy, remember?). But when a new brand is launched - "Live" - that trades off Windows ("Windows Live") and Office ("Office Live") but fail to do what those things do online, well, it's not going to work as a brand. Recall when I rather frankly suggested that Microsoft split into two companies? This is why.
I can't believe I am saying this (I was a total Mac partisan in the early 90s Mac vs. PC wars), but I really, really want Microsoft to succeed in search and in Ray Ozzie's vision for service-based applications. I also want Yahoo to shake off its funk, as I've written before. It strikes me as important to have as many innovators as possible in this field, as we are at a very critical moment in the development of this young industry. It's too early for one company to win, and I sense that the folks over at Google would agree with me.
One of the more news-making moments of last week's Davos event, at least as it relates to our little corner of the world, was Chad Hurley's revelation (BBC) that it would soon be rolling out a system to share revenues with the folks who create its videos (Jarvis has the video). For me, this was sort of a "no shit, Sherlock" moment, I mean, did anyone really expect Google was going to buy YouTube and *not* make ads available inside the core product - the videos themselves?
But the way it was spun really struck me as impressive. Instead of "YouTube to Run Ads," the headlines were "YouTube to Share Revenue With Creators." Well played, my man!
I spoke to Chad briefly at Davos, and I am certain he and the folks at Google are deeply studying the best models to roll out ads on the site. My guess is there will be any number of units available (one might be just three seconds long, he told the BBC), and when folks upload their videos, they'll be presented with a choice of the kind of ads they might want to roll into their video, and also, various placement options (ie, before, after, middle, above (?) etc). There will probably also be some kind of passive AdSense play a la Revvr, and for sure, the more aggressive units will also be some kind of AdSense video mashup, as the company hinted at in this recent post on Google's blog:
Google will support YouTube by providing access to search and monetization platforms and, when/where YouTube launches internationally, to international resources. YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and the rest of the YouTube team will continue to innovate exciting new ways for people to "broadcast themselves."
Earlier this week, we announced one example of innovation in monetization and distribution with a new AdSense video test. We'll be working with a wide set of content providers, grouping together high quality video content from providers with high quality ads and offering them as playlists which publishers can select from and display on their AdSense sites.
This was not a simple non-sequitor, even if it reads like one (the "innovation" references are not parallel). Google is working hard to figure out how to apply the rules of AdSense - write (algorithms) once, read many (dollars) - to video. There's a massive audience out there, and there's a lot of money to be made "sharing revenues" with it.
Ultimately that audience will determine, through its attention to videos, whether YouTube succeeds or fails at this new ad gambit. After all, producers of high quality video have plenty of options when it comes to hosting content these days, it's cheap, and it's easy. No one has to post content to YouTube, unless of course they want the distribution engine it has become (sound familiar? You don't have to be spidered by Google, either, but who are we kidding here?)
The real question I have is whether, over time, YouTube will require that folks run some kind of advertising in order to gain access to its massive distribution engine. If you want to use YouTube to establish your brand, the way, say, the Coke and Mentos or Ninja guys did, will Google require that you cut them in for using the YouTube platform to do that? Will it ban other kinds of ads, ads competitive to its new units, that creators have inserted into their uploaded videos? What about 
videos which are, in essence, entirely ads, like the Dove Evolution phenomenon? The Dove folks LOVED that success story, but YouTube didn't make a dime on it( and the agency folks who made the ad aren't quite sure how they'll get paid as well - they usually make money on the media buys, after all). As for denying competitive ads, the precedent is certainly there - AdSense bans competing ad platforms.
Huh. Innaresting. Worth some more thinking, when I'm not jet lagged and posting at 3 AM on a Monday morning. Till then, g'night...
I have to admit, I'm skeptical about Hillary as a presidential candidate. Why? Well, she kind of rubs me the wrong way, and I'm eager to have a Democrat in office, and I fear that the bad guys (ie Rove) will make mincemeat of her when it comes time to really get down to brass tacks.
But while at Davos I had dinner with a good friend of hers (I can't name names as I don't have permission to do so), and she encouraged me to be open minded. OK, I'll be open minded. So then, I saw this. The original Wired News story:
The issue of digital-era privacy did not make it to the top of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's legislative to-do list at the Saturday launch of her presidential campaign. But for those who look, the New York Democrat has clearly staked out her positions on the esoteric subject, and they're sending electronic civil libertarians' hearts a twitter.
Clinton, the presidential front-runner among Democrats in way-early polling, addressed electronic privacy issues at a constitutional law conference in Washington, D.C. last June. There she unveiled a proposed "Privacy Bill of Rights" that would, among other things, give Americans the right to know what's being done with their personal information, and offer consumers an unprecedented level of control over how that data is used.
Now, those of you who keep track of my rants, know that this is a big issue for me. Huh. I'm listening now...
Pal Steven Levy is hoping you all can help him figure out the best tech writing of 2006 to add to a collection for a book. I've not written a lot of long form stuff this year, as I did mostly interviews for Business 2 and shorter stuff for the site, so I encourage you to find what you love out there and help Steven. But if you feel like logrolling your pal Battelle, I am fond of these: Conversational Media parts one and two.
I know that I owe you all parts three and four, that fact weighs on me each day. I would like nothing more than to write. Sigh.
Neat idea, a search engine that can find music when you hum it. It's called Midomi.
Cnet reports:
Launching in beta mode on Friday (this past week), Midomi allows people to search for a song by singing, humming or whistling a bit of the tune. The site then offers search results that include commercially recorded tracks or versions of the song recorded by others who have used the site. The technology also lets people listen to the exact section of each of the results that matched their voice sample.
(thanks, Scot)
TellMe has launched the first step in what may well be a very important new era in mobile search - Tellme by Mobile. TechCrunch covers it here. I got to play with this in early beta, and it is really impressive. A caveat - TellMe is an FM advertiser, and I agreed to give them my unvarnished input as part of TellMe's FM program (they have a feedback forum on the new product, a very good idea, here).
As I opined for three years, I've been waiting for a mobile app that finally uses voice to drive search on the go. This could be it. For now, it's just the equivalent of Yellow Pages 411, but if this works the implications are clear - the underlying voice recogniction technology paired with very 
smart structured search could be a killer app. It's a little odd getting used to a voice-command-based local search experience, and the system does not always work, but then again, neither does text-based search.
But here's why I think TellMe is well positioned - this java app is carrier independent. Let me say that again - carrier independent. Now that is a breakthrough.
Won't someone like Yahoo or Google just buy Tellme, and swallow it? Could be, but the price will be dear. The company has nine-figure revenues, is profitable, and has a very respected leader in Mike McCue, who I have stayed in touch with for over a decade. Mike has really stayed true to his original vision of voice-driven telephony (you most likely use his stuff if you call information, which I am sure you do). He's seen the ups and downs of the past ten years, and he's built an impressive set of IP assets, including a huge database of phonemes (basic word parts) and related associations. His company is clearly on an IPO track - another thing that makes it unique - and I for one am thrilled for him.
I'm on the plane home, and I'm punchy. Davos affords you about three to five hours a sleep a night, what with the endless networking events, jet lag, and my general inability to sleep anyway. I may be telling you things you already know, but then again, they bear repeating. This past week, Google and Yahoo did a few things I found interesting.
First, while at Davos, Google's senior management owned up to screwing up in China (I was at the event where this was discussed). I spoke to a very large customer of Google's, who shall remain nameless, who knows the fellow who was tapped to run Google's media business there. That fellow, Johnny Chou, lasted about a year and left in mid December. (Hey, Johnny, if you'd like to talk, you know where I live). Loyal readers will recall my recounting of Google's tortured decision to enter the China market. Clearly this subject continues to haunt the company.
Second, Google made it possible for publishers to carve out "premium" advertising spots on their sites. Does this matter? Well, not much when it comes to CPC advertising, after all, with CPC it's all about performance, and publishers will put ads wherever they perform best. But when it come to branding and CPM ads, placement is *everything.* Watch this space, literally. Google is priming its publisher network for a major push into branded, site specific sales. That's where the big money is, the non direct-response money that is moving from TV and print.
Third, Yahoo announced earnings, which were not very interesting (they met estimates and then lowered expectations. Kinda like a blind date your Mom might have set you up on). But more interestingly, they announced Panama would be ready a full month early (though they emphasized that would have no effect on earnings whatsoever). Still and all, that's a good sign. Yahoo is well and truly positioned to be the comeback kid this year. That's not to say it will happen, but...
And lastly, Google released a new algo that helps kill Google Bombs. Sigh, no more miserable failure. Well, it's not much fun to kick a fellow when he's down anyway. From Google's post on the subject:
The next natural question to ask is "Why doesn't Google just edit these search results by hand?" To answer that, you need to know a little bit about how Google works. When we're faced with a bad search result or a relevance problem, our first instinct is to look for an automatic way to solve the problem instead of trying to fix a particular search by hand.
Recall, of course, what Google has said previously (NYT) about Google Bombs: Craig Silverstein, Google's director for technology, says the company sees nothing wrong with the public using its search engine this way. No user is hurt, he said, because there is no clearly legitimate site for "miserable failure" being pushed aside.
Moreover, he said, Google's results were taking stock of the range of opinions that are expressed online. "We just reflect the opinion on the Web,'' he said, "for better or worse."
One of the big buzzy facts of Davos life this year was Second Life. Reuters was busy interviewing folks for the Second Life audience (yeah, OK, I did it), and nearly everyone at Davos who was NOT in the internet industry was busy talking it up as important (and many who were as well, but for different and deeper reasons).
Now, another buzzy fact of Davos life was Google. Eric Schmidt co-chaired the event this year (they select a few industry leaders to do so), and Larry and Sergey plyed the floors like regular folk (well, regular folk with a 767 and billions in net worth, but at least at this event, they were not the only ones).
This led someone to ask me - will Google, with Sketchup now firmly part of the empire, take a run at Second Life? And will it win?
Others are also asking this question (TechCrunch, Benchmark partner Michael Eisenberg). But I think it's the wrong question. Second Life is all about play, and fantasy, and alternative realities. I'm going to guess that Google's version is going to be all about reality, and mashing up AdWords, Google Earth, Sketchup, and the Yellow Pages/Google Local. The two will live quite nicely one next to the other, and most folks who use one will probably not see using the other as even vaguely competitive.
I keep hearing about Krugle from developers. They tell me it rocks for looking up stuff. Need shopping cart code? Search for it on Krugle. Now compare that to Google/Yahoo/MSN.
Now, I can hear you now “developers don’t matter to search engines.”
Oh, yeah? When I visit Google there’s a huge plasma screen that shows every Google search done in real-time (it only shows that a search was done, not what the search was about). Everytime I look at that screen Redmond, WA does more Google searches than most other large cities in the world and does more Google searches than the entire continent of Africa.
Hint: there’s not much in Redmond except for Microsoft. So, what are all those Microsofties doing on Google?
Hate to say I tol' ya so but...from an email from Google PR:
Google's strength -- and its history -- is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.
Google search results already include links to content that's hosted on YouTube. Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when users click on YouTube thumbnails, they will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where users can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.
The screen shot at left show a search for Ninja videos, the top link is a YouTube hosted episode. The url:
http://video.google.com/url?vidurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOEmss2lg-ug&docid=4055962825990929128&ev=v&esrc=sr1&usg=AL29H23MropJLXK1wakFId20-r3MdlOmTw
From my predictions post:
3. Google will integrate YouTube into its main services. YouTube will be promoted via the "video" tab on Google's home page. YouTube will keeps its name and domain, but the business/sales end will be interchangeable.
Is that nearly every session I attended where I got that unmistakable "Shit I have to post on this" feeling was, unfortunately, off the record. Last night Larry and Sergey sat down with Charlie Rose for an intimate chat at a private event. Off the record. Before that I spoke to a room full of Media Governors - the folks who run just about every major media company in the world. Off the record. Before that, a gathering of influential editors and journalists from all over the globe. Again, off the record.
You'll have to trust me that the insights, conversations, and information I gathered will certainly inform the musings I post here. I just can't be specific to the who, what, and where. Stay tuned...
UPDATE: Lots of comments take me and the WEF to task, and I need to clarify. Most of Davos was in fact on the record, I was noting that the stuff where I found the most insights tended to be off the record. And I am investigating whether some of what I heard was in fact subject to looser "Chatham House" rules where just the speaker cannot be identified. Overall, I do defend the practice of getting leaders together from time to time in an off the record environment, it allows them to share experiences openly and learn from them. I will be posting more thoughts on all of this over the coming week.
Joints After Midnight & Rants, Media/Tech Business Models, Policy
Reed Business Information is launching business-to-business vertical search portal.
Reed is using proprietary categorization, entity extraction and taxonomy management software from Teragram, provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies. The software automatically organizes content from hundreds of Internet sites into a vertical search engine.
Joe Kraus, a co-founder of Excite (image credit), recently sold his latest company, JotSpot, to Google. I’ve known Joe for quite some time, and thought a quick email interview might be in order given his long history in search and Internet media. (Joe introduced JotSpot at the Web2.0 conference two years ago.)
Did Google buy JotSpot, or your team? If the former, what is the plan for the company? If the latter, what's the plan for the team?
Simply put, I think Google bought both the technology and the team. In *most* acquisitions, you are acquiring both and ascribing value to both.
Google has invested substantially in collaboration (Groups, Docs&Spreadsheets, Google Apps for your Domain) and JotSpot is a part of that trend. In my opinion the first wave of productivity apps (seen in the 80s) was about making an individual more productive. Word, Excel, Powerpoint were all about making me, as a worker at my desk, able to create more work per unit of time. But, I think we've eeked out the last bit of individual productivity gain at this stage. I mean, does the new ribbon on MS Word make me more productive as an individual? Probably not. It's a great interface, but it's unlikely that there is a massive gain in personal productivity.
This next wave that we're in is about productivity gains achieved NOT by making the individual more productive, but by making groups more productive. The massive penetration of email means that we're in touch with one another like never before and dependent on teams like never before. That means that there is a huge opportunity for productivity gains through more effective collaboration. That's what Google is trying to do in their efforts and that's the theme in which the JotSpot acquisition fits.
I can't talk specifically about product plans, but I hope that the above gives you a general sense of direction.
It does, thanks.
Now, personally, isn't it kind of a mixed emotion joining Google? I recall a conversation earlier - 2004 or so - in which you expressed some reservations at the giddy growth and presumptive optimism of the place. I think like many of us you felt perhaps Google was due a needed, well, life lesson, one that you learned at Excite, and I learned at The Standard. What say you now to such sentiments?
Well, I have to say that I think "the rumors are true". Google has collected the smartest group of people I've ever encountered under one roof.
In terms of emotion, you know, it's an understandable question, but honestly, there's no mixed emotion -- I'm honestly just excited to be here. I think that comes from two things -- more than the former founder of Excite, I was most recently fully occupied as the CEO of JotSpot. I had 28 employees that were working very hard, who had given up other very good opportunities and and for whom I wanted a great outcome. There's no better outcome than to be at Google (it's a wonderful nerd paradise -- a place that nerds like me can thrive in) and there is great satisfaction in that. Second, I left excite 6 years ago, and at a personal level, my life has gotten a lot more rich and fullfilled from a variety of sources -- marriage, kid, non-profit work (as well as my for-profit work). So, it's not that I don't love my work and feel very passionately about it -- it's just that I'm not defined by it the way I was when I was in my 20s.
What can you do at Google that you can't do outside of Google? And a follow up, what can't you do at Google that you "gave up" to be there?
What can I do at Google that I can't do outside of this place? I think there is a lot here, but the short answer is the pretty obvious one. Google operates at a scale that startups don't approach. And, while that provides its own challenges (making sure your stuff can handle high numbers of users), it provides a ton of opportunities to get your ideas exposed to a large number of people and get a large amount of feedback. Also, if you are pursuing very forward-looking ideas then a larger company like Google provides staying power in the market. There's that old adage in startups "being early is the same as being wrong". In a startup, if you're too early for the market, it feels like there is no market at all. It's hard in a startup to really tell the difference between early and wrong and in most cases it leads to startup death. Google is a place where there is strong interest in the long term and that is a very unique thing.
Thanks Joe!!
Very interesting, noted on SEL: Gogole now includes paid links you've clicked on as part of your search history.
Every couple of years I am invited to the World Economic Forum at Davos, and even better, they give me a reason to come - an honor, or a club to join, or some such. This year I was invited onto a media council and am moderating or sitting on panels on Beyond Web 2, Privacy, the Future of Talent, and more. I'm very pleased that some of the folks at the WEF came to our Web 2 conference last year and were inspired to start the WEF "bloggregator" - part of an ongoing effort to open up the WEF to all comers. Jeff Jarvis, Arianna Huffington, and many others are involved. Check it out.
And I hope to be posting on my experiences there, though having been before, I'll admit it's quite a trip, and it's not always easy to stop and get perspective while on the merry go round. I'll do my best.
If anyone reading this is going, please do let me know in comments or via email. Thanks!
Catching up on stuff I've missed last week...The Wired piece, and the response to it, strikes me as perfect for Yahoo - it really can't get much worse. The bar has been lowered. Now jump over it, folks.... I mean, you have the resources. The brand. The technology. The good will. Go. Do. It.
Update - Wired posted Yahoo's response to the piece, and Henry adds some thoughts.
The approach the NYT takes, editorially, to describing "user generated content" (what I prefer to call Conversational Media) is so dismissive, so backhanded, it makes me want to scream. Here's how Richard Siklos defines it in today's paper (the piece is entitled "Big Media’s Crush on Social Networking").
User-generated content is basically anything someone puts on the Web that is not created for overtly commercial purposes; it is often in response to something professionally created, or is derivative of it. So, it could be a blog, a message board, a homemade video on YouTube, or a customer’s book review on Amazon.com.
Richard and his editors so deeply want to believe that conversational media is dependent on "professionally created" media. But it's not, any more than it's "not created for overtly commercial purposes."
Certainly, conversational media will comment on packaged goods media, and lord knows the reverse is certainly true these days (The Times is the biggest commentator of them all, it can't get enough of covering this space.) But there are so many examples of great conversational media that is both commercially driven and entirely independent of "professional media" (in our industry alone, there's Om, there's Matt, there's Mike, there...and, and, and....), that making such a sweeping statement seems either ignorant or simply wishful thinking. Harumph.
Google's Adsense service is totally dominant in the marketplace. Yahoo's YPN - so far anyway - has proven feeble, and Microsoft's AdCenter has failed to move out of early stages. Game over? Hardly. Hardly at all. Both these major players are going to push hard in 2007 to win in syndicated paid results, and then there's Ask, AOL, and many others who have intentions in this space. Not to mention all the other folks who hope to out-Google the leader - from Tacoda to Quigo, and back again.
So, with that in mind, Google is shoring up its defenses. Laying down some new rules while it can, so to speak. What am I talking about? Well, nothing less than this:
Competitive Ads and Services
In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.
Google has "updated" its Adsense policies, the above is new. The industry is noticing, trust me (though apparently, there's some upside to this too). And do you remember this debate? Uh huh. Thought you did.
But wait, isn't the blue, green, and black on white approach, well, pretty much diluted by now? Isn't the way Google displays text ads, well, isn't that so industry standard as to be, well, indefensible?
Good question. Watch this space. I am guessing Yahoo and Microsoft are. One thing I do know. Most folks who surf the Internet care not at all about this. Which is why it's such a Big Deal.
GenieKnows.com is Awarded $2 Million for Personalized Local Search
Introducing BrightSale.co.uk - Estate Agency 2.0
Focused Searching on the Most Popular Searches
New Content Added to EarthTrends Database
New GPO Federal Depository Library Offers First-Ever Digital Collection of Civil Rights Documents
Dave founded Tacoda, a behavioral ad network, six years ago now, and recently inked a deal to add Comscore demographic information to Tacoda's network. Tacoda is an FM partner, so read with that caveat, but I found our email back and forth interesting, and hope you do too.
Like Tacoda recently did, Google incorporated Comscore some time ago. Why is yours better?
Because TACODA is capturing and can target ads against anonymous browsing behaviors from more than 15 Billion page views per day on 4500 of the top news, entertainment and information sites on the web, from NYTimes.com to MSNBC.com to Orbitz WSJ.com to FM Publishing. This gives TACODA the broadest, deepest and most diverse database of user content browsing anywhere - more than Google or Yahoo! - though they certainly have a lot more search data.
By matching this browsing data to anonymous ComScore data, we now know not only what content they surf, but marketer sites they are visiting online and what e-commerce categories they are buying online. Since we can associate this with time, we can see users much higher up the purchase funnel than search marketing. We can see the users when they are still in the brand consideration phase. By the time that users get to Google, like yellow pages offline, they generally already know what they are going to buy, it's just a matter of price and vendor.
Will there be any change in how you charge for this?
We sell on a CPM basis only, since our efforts are focused on brand and branded response advertisers – folks that care who sees their ads and where they see them – rather than direct response. We see video as a big part of this future, whether it is on the computer, of IP-driven television or on mobile devices. Nothing beats sight, sound and motion for delivering brand advertising.
Given that you sell on CPM, but are a network, don't advertisers still want to buy site by site? Will you ever get into that business, or do you think all the behavioral and demographic data obviates site-specific selling?
I expect advertisers to buy both behavioral networks and site-by-site in their media mix. They buy individual sites for the strong, integrated branding opportunities, but they have to live with limited inventory and premium prices. Buying behavioral is a nice complement to that. With TACODA’s behavioral network, they get the audiences that they want on clean, well-lit sites. They get a lot of scale. They get lower prices. However, it will never replace site=specific selling. When someone wants a Wall Street Journal reader or a Boing Boing reader, the only place that they can be certain to reach them, and the only way to fully-leverage the sponsorship value of a great publisher brand, is to buy it site-specific.
As a behavioral network, I do not expect TACODA to get into the site-by-site selling business. It is much better served by direct or specialized sales forces working on behalf of the sites. We are focused on selling people, not pages. When advertisers want to talk to certain types of people, TACODA will be there. When they want to their messages on certain kinds of pages, that will be for other sales organizations.
So how is business at Tacoda? Can you give us a sense of your scale in terms of revenue and margins?
TACODA is doing great. As a private company, we don’t release specific numbers on our revenue or margins, but I can tell you that our last quarter’s revenue was up several hundred percent year over year, our margins are strong and growing, and our team has grown from 25 or so a year ago to more than 90 today, thanks in large part to the work of Curt Viebranz our CEO, who was our COO for the past two years and was the former CEO of HBO International and Time Inc. New Media. Over the past year, our publisher network has grown by 10X as have the number of marketers and agencies that advertise on our network. 2007 is starting out very well and we expect the strong growth to continue.
Can you be more specific on the size of the publisher network?
TACODA’s network today has more than 4500 branded content publishers – folks NYTImes.com, Dow Jones/WSJ.com, Orbitz, Cars.com, NBC, Tribune, BusinessWeek.com, Technorati and FM Publishing. These sites deliver 15-20 Billion page views per month to an unduplicated US audience of more than 140 million unique visitors and deliver real-time anonymous content browsing behaviors to TACODA’s servers with virtually every page and person that they serve. Since TACODA’s market focus is brand advertising, not performance and direct response, its advertiser customer base is quite different than other online ad networks. Among its top advertisers in Q4 were Coke, Snapple, American Express, FAO Schwartz
In your estimation, what are the hurdles/gates in the online advertising business right now?
Advertisers need more scale and less friction and there is a looming shortage of quality inventory at cost-effective prices. If General Motors wanted to appreciably increase their online ad spend this year, they would have a tough time doing it economically and efficiently. All of the substantial auto content sites are largely sold out for 2007. Search usage is growing, but not nearly at the rate that online ad spend is increasing, and the rates for the best search terms are already pretty high. The vast majority of web pages viewed every month – probably 80% of them – can’t currently support premium advertising. They either lack an intuitive and valuable commercial context – they have news, social, email, photo and video sharing content, not technology, travel, cars or health – or they have unsuitable content. Unfortunately, these non-premium content pages are growing much faster than the premium pages. The majority of ad view growth on the web in 2006 was in social and photo and video sharing. Finally, while the “sight, sound and motion” of video advertising on the web certainly offers an attractive vision for the future, it is going to take years for it to truly come to fruition.
Any other thoughts for 2007?
I think that the big online ad stories in 2007 will be brand dollars, targeting and scale. This should play very well for all networks, but particularly those that they serve the needs of brand advertisers – who care about who sees their ads and where they see them. I think that we are going to see a lot of attention, and a lot of money, flow to sites further down the food chain than those few that have dominated this sector historically. The really big guys will do fine, but the mid-size and smaller folks will do even better.
Thanks, Dave!
Friend or foe? The media industry's struggle with this question is its defining story. Here's another beat in the ongoing drama, a Hollywood Reporter interview with Google's VP of content partnerships, David Eun. It seems clear to me that Google is trying hard to position itself as a friend, a non-threatening friend, to the content industry.
From it:
The Hollywood Reporter: A company of Google's size is going to invite controversy. Do you think the company is misunderstood?
David Eun: Yes, but not by everyone. I think there's a lot of questions, but if you take a step back, we're an 8-year-old company. So we're still very young. Things move quickly for Google as well as the space that we're in. So when you get into a space like content, and you come at it from a technology perspective, I think what we haven't focused on as much -- and this is something I'm trying to do -- is really explain in (plain) English what it is we aspire to do and what frankly our objectives are. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there's a lot of noise out there about us trying to get into certain businesses or having designs to do X, Y and Z.
Eun is a key player in this. Prior to joining Google, he lived in the belly of the beast: Chief of Staff for the Media & Communications Group at Time Warner. His job is to explain Google's intentions in the media/advertising space. He seems quite articulate and clearly experienced. But something he says here make no sense to me. He says:
THR: How much of the TV advertising business does Google aspire to take?
Eun: We paid out over $780 million last quarter alone to the Web sites we've asked to have relationships with. We do that not by going after the big advertisers. You've heard of the long tail of content -- there's a long tail of advertisers, too. There's the successful entrepreneur who owns 20 different retail establishments who would love to find a way to advertise online, through newspapers and perhaps local TV, but they don't know how or it's just too difficult or it seems scary or inefficient. It will go as far as the people who want the inventory want it to go.
Excuse me? Google is NOT going after big advertisers? Now, that may be what the major content companies want to hear (their business model, in the main, is cutting multi-million dollar advertising deals with American Express, GM, Intel, etc), but man, it's certainly not true. Perhaps the interview was edited poorly?
As I posted yesterday, Peter Horan (image credit) is heading to IAC to run a suite of its media and advertising businesses, including Citysearch, Ask.com, and IAC's other media assets. I emailed him three questions, here are his answers.
So, what drew you to this job?
The door was opened by a personal relationship. Jason Rapp lead the team at The New York Times that acquired About.com in 2005. During that process and the integration, we came to know, like and respect each other. Jason joined IAC in the fall as SVP of M&A and suggested that I talk to them about this job.
As those conversations progressed, I was very impressed with IAC and realized that this job would let me focus on several things that I am passionate about: the evolving relationship between search and content; developing mobile solutions; and local web products that work. We have the resources, the team, and the brands to really advance the state of the art in all of these areas. There's also a proven sales team to help with the monetization.
It's a unique opportunity.
Did you have a vision for what IAC needs, or is it more that you're there to manage what already exists?
I am fortunate to be going into a situation where I can focus on growth and adding strategic value. There's nothing to fix. Under strong leaders, the individual businesses have been doing well. The goal now is to bring together IAC's amazing array of resources in new ways that benefit the consumer (and drive IAC's share). Mobile and local solutions will be high up on the priority list. I will also be working to find ways to use search to help power other IAC business units.
Early this year, we will also be evaluating our options for monetization and distribution. I expect that to be a vigorous process. The initial overtures have been very interesting.
Hmmm. Can you unpack "evaluating our options for monetization and distribution" a bit more?
IAC's Google contract comes up for renewal at the end of the year. The company has already started to explore options.
It will be one of my top priorities to make sure that we get the best deal for the company.
Economics will be a big part of that but so will distribution and other factors. Because this will be one of the most valuable parterships in play this year, we expect this to be a very vigorous process.
I'm late to this, (Board meeting, travel, bleagh) but it's fun to note Google' patent application for display of ads on digital billboards. More here and here.
From ClickZ:
If patent filings are anything to go by, contextual advertising powered by Google will start appearing on digital billboards in a shopping mall near you.
The Mountain View, Calif. search marketing giant has filed a patent application for technology that lets local stores tie their stock control computers to a Google-powered ad network, a strong hint that the company is planning to expand expansion beyond Web, print and radio advertising.
The patent, filed December 21, 2006 with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), covers systems and methods for allocating advertising space in a “network of electronic display devices.”
Put another way: the web will be everywhere, and everywhere there might be an ad, Google will be.
Late last year, in my predictions post for 2007, I mentioned something I called, quite uninventively, "Blog 2.0." More specifically I wrote:
"10. "Blog 2.0" will become a reality. By this I mean that Version 1.0 blogsites, of which I think Searchblog is a good example, will begin to look dated and fade in comparison to sites that employ better approaches to content management, navigation, intelligent widgets and web services, etc."
Well, that entry caught they eye of Martin Nisenholtz, head of NYT Digital. I was in NYC this past couple of days visiting colleagues and attending the wonderful "Evening of Wonders," run by FM partner author Josh Foer. Upon hearing I was coming to town, Martin asked me to stop by. He wanted me to unpack what I meant by that brief reference. Turns out, we had a fascinating conversation, and it led me to want to think out loud with all of you about a problem I think most folks who either write or read blogs have.
Blogs are wonderful for reading a stream of consciousness, the ongoing dialog of the author(s) and the audience (though I have to say reading comments is far more of a pain that it should be.) One of the major strengths of blogs is their conversational immediacy, when one becomes a reader, and knows the flow and grammar of the site, the ongoing postings become far more accessible.
BUT...
A brief dip into nearly every blogger's referral logs shows that a very large percentage of readers - nearly 40 percent in some cases - come directly from search - someone who put "steve ballmer throws chair" into Google, for example, and lands here.
Now, this person doesn't have any frame of reference about Searchblog, or its grammar, audience, or ongoing conversation. He or she is most likely to hit the post in question, read it (perhaps), and move on. This site loses a potential new reader, and this community loses a potential new member, because, in the end, I, as the publisher of Searchblog, have done nothing to demonstrate to that reader the wonders and joy that is Searchblog. In short, I've failed to merchandise my site.
Now imagine instead, that when that person comes from search, they are greeted with a box that pops up and is informed by the search referral information that we all carry with us as we click away from Google or other search engines. That box surfaces a smart search based on the referral - perhaps it shows the reader other posts I've written about Microsoft, or Google and Microsoft, or senior executives in the Internet industry. Perhaps it shows me the top five *other* posts folks read who *also read* that Steve Ballmer Throws A Chair post. You know, the kind of merchandising a good site like Amazon does all day long (from what I can tell, search referral boxes were pioneered by Cnet, for credit where credit is due). Now, wouldn't that be cool, just for a start? Sounds hard to do, right? But actually, it shouldn't be. The information is all there. It's just not organized properly.
But giving potential new readers a tour of Searchblog is not the only reason to think about merchandising the site. In fact, it's not even the primary one. The real reason to think about solving this problem is to solve what I as a regular reader of many sites find most frustrating: it's nearly impossible to navigate these sites past the home page.
Sure, some sites, including this one, make lists of "most active topics" or "my favorite posts" that we stick on our templates. These static navigation boxes help a bit, but they fail utterly to solve for a reader's implied or specifically declared intent. And finding anything specific on a blog site is, well, a pretty poor experience. I'm not saying blog search technology sucks, I'm saying it simply doesn't work very well. Often you find far too many posts for the keywords you enter, and there's really no context for the ones you do find.
Now, I know what many of you are thinking - this is the problem that tagging will solve. OK, sure, let me know when that happens. For now, tagging strikes me as one more signal lost in a ton of noise - it's up to publishers to take that signal and make something useful from it.
And as long as we are talking about signals, there are so many other ones I'd love to have at my fingertips, signals I as a publisher can weave into useful context and navigation for my readers. Links to a particular post, for example. Why can't I have, easily, a list of all my posts sorted by how many links each has, or by a matrix of links crossed with authority of those links? How about the number of comments? Or the number of pageviews each post has received? With all of these signals, plus tags, I can start to really build useful navigation elements for all my readers, past, present, and future.
But it's way too hard to get all this information and harder still to know how to use it. I know it's out there, in bits and pieces, but it strikes me that no one company is really motivated to address this problem in a way that benefits bloggers. I have high hopes for Feedburner, now that it bought BlogBeat, and perhaps I'm missing some dead obvious widgets that do all this and more for any particular site. For that reason, I'd love to work on this issue with what resources FM has to throw at it. But first, I need to get smarter on the possible solutions. What say you, Force of Many?
I've known Peter for a long time, he was at IDG when I was running the Standard. Only a couple of months ago we met to talk shop (and Google, of course) as he was running AllBusiness.com, an interesting restart of sorts (it's been around the funding block more than once). Now Peter has taken a big job at IAC. Jim Lanzone at Ask.com, for example, will report to him, as will many others. I've sent him an email and hope to run a short interview here.
comScore releases the December rankings for search engines; and here are the results.
In December 2006, Google gained .4 share from November, to lead with 47.3% market, and Yahoo! went up .3, continuing with the second largest share of 28.5% . Microsoft share dropped .5 points to 10.5% share, Ask fell .1 points to 5.5% share, and Time Warner share shrunk by .2 points, to close at 4.9% share.
In addition, comScore notes that:
• Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.
• Google Sites led the pack with 3.2 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (713 million), Ask Network (363 million), and Time Warner Network (335 million).
WikiSeek launches today. I am traveling, so will not be able to take a look till later...
Greg has a lovely post about moving on from his creation, Findory.
Game search engine Wazap nets $7.9 million, Venturebeat reports. That's a lot of money for a niche search engine, but gaming is a hot market...
Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, emailed me to let me know about news from his company and Comscore. From the release:
TACODA®, the world’s largest behaviorally-targeted online advertising network, today announced that it has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with comScore Networks® to integrate comScore data with its existing massive Audience Networks™ database of behavioral insights. The result will be actionable data that will reveal unique insights about online audiences that will allow advertisers to design stronger media plans and produce and place more relevant online marketing messages.
Google integrated Comscore data a while ago, but does not have the behavioral approach championed by Tacoda. (note: Tacoda is one of many partners of FM, my day job).
In this SJMN piece. Is it just me, or is the line "don't underestimate Microsoft" starting to ring a bit hollow these days?
From the piece:
According to comScore Media Metrix, the total unique audience that visited Microsoft's U.S. Web sites in December 2006 was roughly 117 million, unchanged from the previous year. Google is fast catching up, with its number of unique visitors up 21 percent to 113 million.
Microsoft's page views, an approximation of how long visitors spend at its sites, was down 12 percent in December to 18 billion, according to the research firm. Google's page views were up 90 percent to 13 billion.
Microsoft has steadily lost ground in search, despite developing its own search engine in 2004. As of November, Microsoft's share of Internet searches has fallen to 8 percent. Two years ago, when MSN search was released in beta, Microsoft share's of U.S. searches stood at 14 percent, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
Microsoft's Internet slide is reflected in its online sales. During the quarter ended Sept. 30, sales for the online business unit were $539 million, down 5 percent in a year. Google, in cruel comparison, reported revenue of $2.69 billion, an increase of 70 percent.
"Terror Rats Go Google" screams the NY Post. My God, they're using Google Earth to figure out where the British bases are!
The Telegraph has the measured story. The images are clearly old, but then again, who knows if "coalition forces" have moved anything around in the past few years. They might be totally accurate outlines of how things are in the British bases. It's amazing to think that no one figured on Google Earth being used by terrorists, and at least asked Google to help out. I mean, that's kind of what intelligence agencies are supposed to do, no?
A Google spokesman in the piece:
A Google spokesman said the information could be used for "good and bad" and was available to the public in many forms. "Of course we are always ready to listen to governments' requests," he said.
"We have opened channels with the military in Iraq but we are not prepared to discuss what we have discussed with them. But we do listen and we are sensitive to requests."
Just now, they've opened channels? Just now, thanks to a raid, the folks running army intelligence realized that Google Earth exists?
Lord, help us.
I've become interested in the whole carbon credit thing, and wonder if any of you are as well. My research shows a few sites which allow you to pay off your guilt for your globe-warming ways, but I wonder, are these sites for real? Do they matter to anyone but the guilty conscience of the person who is paying them off? Is any one better than the others? Any readers out there use these services, and do you recommend them?
Totally off topic, but....
So today I posted a couple of jobs over at FM, and I used LinkedIn's job listing service. I plan to use others, including some of the job boards at FM sites like GigaOm, TechCrunch, and the like, but I was on LinkedIn for other reasons and decided to get it done there first.
One of the features I like best about LinkedIn's job postings is the ability to send an email to your entire network about the job. Now, this can get a bit perilous - not everyone likes to get unsolicited emails. But on balance most folks seem OK with it, and I don't mind getting them, so I sent all my colleagues the job announcement. Now, I am not in the business of actively building out a LinkedIn network, but over the years more than 400 folks have asked me to join their network, and I generally do.
Long story short, I sent out about 400 emails in one fell swoop, and a funny thing happened. About 20 mails bounced back with SpamArrest requests that I go to a URL and verify I was a human being. I don't mind doing this usually, but 20 in a row was a pain. Because I wanted to get word out about the job, however, I did it.
Then I sat back and pondered. 20 emails, all from one single provider. It seems SpamArrest has truly cornered the market. That's 5% of my network using SpamArrest. I have never given a single thought to using such a service, but after this experience, I'm thinking again. My battellemedia.com address is overrun with spam. I'm pretty good at deleting it, but still....
So, do you all use these services? You like them?
From Mark's column:
One problem in the sex blog snafu is the nature of the blogs’ subject matter and the exploitation of sex searches online. Blogs like Tiny Nibbles and Dirty Pretty Things and ErosBlog try to give insight into human sexuality in a more artful way than the average glossy porn magazine. But so many unsavory characters are trawling the web trying to divert the huge amount of sex searches to their own businesses — even if the business has nothing to do with sex.
From time to time, I am jolted into re reading stuff that I practically memorized while writing the book. Here's one passage, an appendix to "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" - the original paper by Larry and Sergey introducing Google - that felt like it was worth another look, in particular given the tempest over "tips" and ongoing pressures to monetize partnerships like AOL and YouTube, as well as the increasing creep in the number of ads we all see in Google results. I've bolded that which I find particularly worthy.
Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Most of you know that I am a partner and Program Chair of the Web 2 Summit. That event has been oversold for three years now, and my partners O'Reilly and CMP have launched a second event targeted at a broader (and much larger) audience. As part of that program they are replicating the Web 2 Launchpad that's been part of the Summit these past two years. If you have a new company with a major product or company launch in the April timeframe, this is a great place to do it. More information is here. The deadline to apply is Feb 1....
The Times reports on new legislation, emboldened by AT&T's recent concessions:
Senior lawmakers, emboldened by the recent restrictions on AT&T and the change in control of Congress, have begun drafting legislation that would prevent high-speed Internet companies from charging content providers for priority access.
The first significant so-called net neutrality legislation of the new Congressional session was introduced Tuesday by Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of South Dakota, and Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, one of the few Republicans in Congress to support such a measure.
“The success of the Internet has been its openness and the ability of anyone anywhere in this country to go on the Internet and reach the world,” Mr. Dorgan said. “If the big interests who control the pipes become gatekeepers who erect tolls, it will have a significant impact on the Internet as we know it.”...
...Despite the flurry of activity, the proposals face significant political impediments and no one expects that they will be adopted quickly. But the fight promises to be a bonanza for lobbyists and a fund-raising tool for lawmakers. It pits Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon, which support the legislation, against telecommunication titans like Verizon, AT&T and large cable companies like Comcast.
The debate may also affect the plans of the companies to develop new services and to consider certain mergers or acquisitions.
It was killed by "conservative managers" says an ex-Googler in this Chronicle article from earlier in the week.
The piece tracks familiar territory of rich early employees getting the itch to go do something else.
Extremely wealthy from stock options that soared in value, 100 of Google's first 300 workers have quietly resigned to go to law school, help poor shopkeepers get loans or simply to live the good life. Although hardly a mass exodus, the numbers are adding up, scattering what some employees considered their second families.
For Google, the departures present a new hurdle. Enticing as many old-timers to stay as possible is a priority because, with each farewell party, a piece of the company's institutional knowledge and culture is lost.
Or, perhaps, the Google culture was changing and the newly rich old timers were unhappy about it, the piece intones. Will Whitted, an engineer who worked on the much-rumored server cargo boxes, said this of Google:
"I loved it and hated it," Whitted said of his time there.
Whitted, who helped design several generations of Google's servers, said the company was increasingly bogged down by its size. Conservatism was creeping in.
One of the ideas he championed was to build portable data centers in cargo containers, a project Google tested in its headquarters parking lot. But managers were too timid to pack in enough servers, so the experiment was not cost-effective and was ultimately canceled, he said.
"Instead of inspiration-based design, it became fear-based design," Whitted said.
A lot happens when you're gone for over a week. Here's what seemed important that I missed, with commentary:
Apple does what everyone thought it'd do. But thanks to FCC etc., the damn thing isn't available till June. Please, spare me, is my initial take. I'll buy one when it's been around at least a year. The AppleTV, though, I may buy if it can do Tivo for me...
Yahoo bought MyBlogLog. You woulda known this if you read Toby's post here. After all, he is the guy who makes the calls over there. Yahoo also announced Go 2.0 / oneSearch, and a deal with the iPhone. Mobile is certainly heating up. Are we at my prediction 13 yet? No, but we're gettting there.
The Journal pointed out how lame online measurement is, and how different the year end roundups were from each of the major search engines. Tell me about it.
We lost Garry Betty, CEO of Earthlink. He was a great guy and the industry is poorer for this loss.
Google pulled its tips feature. Seems it has replaced it with top AdWords sponsored links instead.
Many blogs started claiming that Web 2's bubble was bursting, one week after I predicted the mainstream media would do the same. We all know that the mainstream media gets its ideas from blogs, so....watch out! My take: With thousands of startups in this space, many are bound to peter out, die, or fail spectacularly. Wouldn't be an ecology without that.
Lots of people started talking about Stickam.
Richard does a search 2.0 poll.
More on Google's health thinking. Oh, and Google shipped a new version of Blogger right before Xmas. Oh, and Google wants you to help them model the whole earth. OK?
More when I can post more...
Funny thing, vacations. You take a week off to sit on the beach, and by day six, you realize you need another week.
Anyway, I'm back, but it might be a slow re-entry. Bear with me, folks. Much is afoot in this new year.
VentureBeat has a nice editorial surmising the impact of Google's controversial decision from April to begin charging a licensing fee for use of its AdWords API this month:
Just trying to understand the API pricing in a specific business situation is a challenge, as is clear from seeing the Google price sheet. The billing appears as a large, non itemized bill.
The structure of the API fees will also significantly impact several areas of the software industry. Since API cost scales with frequency of access, there are very negative implications to companies who would like to use Google data in a real time web analytics platform. Given that Google offers a free low end analytics tool, could this be a hint that Google will be targeting higher end web analytics in the future?
Venture investors would need to be aware of how open Google will be with APIs going forward. Any startup that is working on a mashup that would take information from Google via an API would have an increased level of risk. (What if Google begins to charge for the spreadsheet API, or the maps API?) Just this week, it appears that Google is removing new access to its SOAP search API as well.
From O'Reilly:
Jen Pahlka of CMP, our co-producer on the Web 2.0 Conference, just sent a pointer to an Advertising Age article noting that Web 2.0 was the most cited Wikipedia article of the year, beating out such pop-culture topics as Steve Irwin, Mark Foley, and Snakes on a Plane, as well as other tech topics like blog, Ajax, and RSS.
And I have to say, the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0 is indeed pretty darn good, so I just incremented that link count by one... (But do still read my own What is Web 2.0? :-)
Despite all the debate about whether the name is or is not useful, which seems to crop up with some regularity in comments on this blog, it has indeed captured something important about the zeitgeist of the time.
How will Google scale its massive hiring ramp-up while maintaining its famously intricate screening process for 'Googley' employees? With an algorithm of course.
After months of interviewing their employees to decipher trends in personality and interests that mark Googlers, Google has 'derived' a complex hiring questionnaire. Google will begin using the surveys with all applicants this month. NYT (selections):
The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization. The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.
Until now, head hunters said, Google largely turned up its nose at engineers who had less than a 3.7 grade-point average... And it often would take two months to consider candidates, submitting them to more than half a dozen interviews. Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people...
Last summer, Google asked every employee who had been working at the company for at least five months to fill out a 300-question survey.
Some questions were factual: What programming languages are you familiar with? What Internet mailing lists do you subscribe to? Some looked for behavior: Is your work space messy or neat? And some looked at personality: Are you an extrovert or an introvert? And some fell into no traditional category in the human resources world: What magazines do you subscribe to? What pets do you have?
“We wanted to cast a very wide net,” Mr. Bock said. “It is not unusual to walk the halls here and bump into dogs. Maybe people who own dogs have some personality trait that is useful.” [Plot spoiler: dog owning isn't the magic glue holding Google together.]...
The data from this initial survey was then compared with 25 separate measures of each employee’s performance. Again there were traditional yardsticks — the employee’s reviews, both by supervisors and peers, and their compensation — and some oddball ones.
Indeed, there was no single factor that seemed to find the top workers for every single job title. (And pet ownership did not seem to be a useful predictor of anything.) But Dr. Carlisle was able to create several surveys that he believed would help find candidates in several areas — engineering, sales, finance, and human resources.
PodZinger announces users can now search keywords within the YouTube database. Via SplashCast:
Speech-to-text video and audio search engine Podzinger just announced this afternoon that users can now search inside YouTube videos with a tab on the front page of Podzinger. The functionality appears to have been added in late December but I haven’t seen any blog coverage of it yet...
How’s the quality? I did a search for Starbucks and Podzinger found 120 results so far - compared to 3,000+ on YouTube searching text. Those results are interesting though, including one video uploaded today of a man driving a motorcycle through Taiwan at night, past a place that reminds him of Starbucks. He says the name of the coffee chain at the 3:46 mark in the video, Podzinger shows us. That is very impressive!
The official PodZinger blog post.
Google Reader just added a Reader Trends feature that highlights blog posts users have read, starred, and shared in the past 30 days.
A post by Paris Lemon Blog, via Digg: What's completely clear now is that the user statistical data is there and ready to go...the question is how long until Google utilizes it to showcase the 'most starred' or 'most shared' of Google Reader?
The Google Reader Blog announcement describes Reader Trends as an efficiency tool to allow users to identify subscriptions wanting removal or a catch-up read.
YouTube's failure to create a copyright detection software to help avoid legal entanglements may put spell trouble for the GoogTube. Since the announcement of Google's purchase of YouTube on October 9, the answer to every question of copyright violations and lawsuits has been this software. It was the also arguably the pretext that allowed Google to imagine partnerships with major media companies and music labels. Probably more to come on this...
Financial Times:
YouTube said on Friday the technology would not be formally launched this year and YouTube's offices were closed until the new year. While providing no further details about when the system would be made formally available, it said tests of the system had been under way with some media companies since October and the system remained "on track".
If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, "this is certainly going to be a serious issue", Mr McGuire (a digital media analyst at Gartner) added.
The delay to the software could also spell wider problems for Google, which has been trying to negotiate partnerships that will give it access to content from a number of big media and entertainment companies. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.
Speaking of dominating a list of the best search engines, in case you missed it, the New York Times recently did a piece on a trio on entrepreneurs setting their sights on just that: besting the giant. ("In Silicon Valley, the Race Is on to Trump Google") ReadWriteWeb has a summary and follow-up that breaks the competition into categories of competition to Google: Better Technology, Better UI, and Vertical Search. Well worth a read, but the conclusion Alex Iskold draws is that no one's quite ready to battle Goliath yet.
A list of the Top 100+ Search Engines of 2007, graciously compiled by SEO Charles Knight, with some editorial tinkering. Thanks Charles.
A9 amazon.com answerbag AOL Ask.com Ask.mobile askville AURA! Baidu bessed blinkx boing ChaCha ClipBlast! Clusty collarity CometQ d e c i p h o del.icio.us digg digg labs swarm eurekster exalead Feedster FINDITALL GIGABLAST Google Google /*Code Search*/ Google Mobile ICEROCKET inQuira ixquick Jambo Jyve KartOO keyCompete Kosmix krugle KwMap last.fm like Live QnA LiveDeal lurpo MavenSearch mnemomap MS. DEWEY mystrands nayio oodle Opera Mini Pagebull pluggd PreFound Quintura kids Quintura retrevo riya ROLLYO searchmash SearchTheWeb2 SEO Discussion Search Singing FISH Skweezer snap Sphere Sphider SPURL.net SpyFu SQUIDOO Srchr SurfWax Technorati thefind.com trulia url.com Vivisimo W a l h e l l o Webaroo WEBBRAIN What to RENT? whonu? WIKIO Windows Live wink WiseNut wondir Yahoo! ANSWERS Yahoo! MINDSET Yahoo! Mobile Yahoo! SEARCH Yahoo! Search Builder Yedda yoono yoople ZABASEARCH ZEBO Zillow.com Zippy ZOO.COM ZUULA
A post on Skrenta heralds Google as the winner in the third age of computing. Worth a read, some major points include:
* Yahoo is effectively letting $1.5 billion in revenue sit on the table so long as they chose not to allow AdWords to handle their search monetization.
* "Google is the start page for the Internet. The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages."
* Alluding to Battelle's database of intentions: "Google's CPMs are $90-120, vs. $4-5 for an average browse page view elsewhere. This value premium on search vs. content is because of the massive concentration of choice potential which exists on the decision point, Google."
* Next step, dominating the verticals: "It's actually not inconceivable that they could eventually own all of the destination page views too. Crazy as it sounds, it's conceivable that they could actually end up owning the entire net, or most of what counts. Complaints are already being heard about Google using their starting point power to muscle into verticals." Here Skrenta is referencing the new Google Tips on their homepage, on which Firefox brain Blake Ross, generally a friend of Google, just posted a scathing note of criticism.
* Zero switching costs for users means that a search engine with even a modest advantage will attract a snowball effect of preference, to paraphrase Skrenta. That's an advantage underlined when brand recognition is taken into account.
Yes, I'm at it again, but this year I promise to be a bit more pared down, a bit more to the point. I had nearly 20 predictions last year, I'm hoping that by the time I lift my fingers from the keyboard I'll have a few less. So Happy New Year, and to business:
1. Thanks to Google's dominance in search and media and a complacent DOJ, Microsoft will buy a better position in online media. Acknowledging that it can't build it, Microsoft will shop its way into a dominant position. AOL, Yahoo, or IAC will be leading candidates for acquisition. Microsoft will name a strong second in command to Steve Ballmer who will run their entire media division after this acquisition. If that person is not Steve Berkowitz, he will leave.
1. (a) If Microsoft does not buy AOL, Yahoo will, and failing that, AOL will go public, but the IPO will receive a lukewarm review.
2. A major media outlet will predict that the "Web 2.0" bubble has burst or deflated seriously. The prediction will be wrong. I've been seeing more and more respected voices out there claiming we're in a bubble of some sort or another when it comes to "Web 2.0." I predicted that the meme will have played out in 2006, and I think I was right, but the underlying foundational strength of what created that meme is far too strong to be a bubble or played out.
3. Google will integrate YouTube into its main services. YouTube will be promoted via the "video" tab on Google's home page. YouTube will keeps its name and domain, but the business/sales end will be interchangeable.
4. Related to this, Google Video Ads will dissappoint until Q4 2007. Why? Because advertisers in video have all sorts of structural reasons to not want to work the way Google wants them to work. Until the Fall of 07, when these differences will be worked out, and Google will have a slam dunk quarter in a form of advertising outside of text ads for the first time in its history.
5. Yahoo will not regain its luster, but will take the steps necessary to do so by the end of the year. I am not seeing anything out of Yahoo that says "radical change." There is a lot riding on Panama, but even an excellent new platform needs at least a year to get its footing. Hence, I would not predict a banner year for Yahoo, but a rebuilding year, sort of like the 49ers had this year.
6. eBay will have a major change in executive leadership. This feels overdue.
7. Amazon will continue to push beyond ecommerce into web services, the market will punish it for doing so, and by the end of the year Bezos will be forced to defend his investments as his stock takes a hit for those services' failing to find traction. It's not that I don't believe in Jeff's vision, it's the track record with things like Alexa and the very real sense I have that the market for what Jeff's selling is not yet fully baked.
8. There will be a brief, somewhat irrational spurt of acquisitions related to "content", in particular independent media sites with good demographics and a decent audience profile. I say irrational because by the end of the year, it will be clear why those sites were independent in the first place.
9. Speaking of the content business, it will face a major test as two forces converge to undermine the pageview model: Ajax, on the one hand, and ad blockers on the other. Both will be addressed with alarm and alacrity by industry efforts. By the end of the year, new metrics will emerge to help publishers and marketers understand audience engagement.
10. "Blog 2.0" will become a reality. By this I mean that Version 1.0 blogsites, of which I think Searchblog is a good example, will begin to look dated and fade in comparison to sites that employ better approaches to content management, navigation, intelligent widgets and web services, etc.
11. One major Internet player will really screw up the privacy/trust issue, in a way bigger than even AOL did last year.
12. The Google founders will find themselves the subject of at least one major "takedown" piece in the mainstream media. The piece will claim they have lost touch with the company they founded, that it has outgrown them, and that they have become enamored of the life of the super wealthy - hobnobbing with stars, flying to exotic locations to kite surf, testing fighter jets and the like. This piece is inevitable, in my view.
13. Allow me, for the third year now, to repeat my mobile prediction in the hope it will come true: Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search. The outlines of such an innovation: it'll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business - leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly - that makes the leap.
14. Lastly, I will begin work on my second book. Yes, I have an idea...but it's not entirely fleshed out yet... and, I will stop making predictions about FM. It was fine to do last year, but this year, I feel like the business is in a new place, one that feels wrong to predict. It could go in so many great directions this year, I don't want to jinx any of them.
Happy New Year to you all, and here's to a great 2007!
Reader Ed Brenegar writes: This is a year to change the customer relations game. With less commerce happening, presumably, there is more time for interaction. That interaction has to build the relationships...»
Yup, it makes the perfect gift for that officemate or colleague who you thought had everything... including you! If you order here, I promise to sign it, assuming we can figure out the shipping...
You can also buy the audio version here.
Check my book page for more info.
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