Category: Internet Big Five

Twitter Drops Other Shoe, Which You All Saw Coming, Right?

Way back in the spring of 2010, when Twitter was constantly under siege for “not having a business model,” I co-hosted “Chirp,” Twitter’s first (and I think only) developer conference. This was just two and half years ago, but it seems like a decade. But it was at that conference, in an interview with me, that then-COO (now CEO) Dick Costolo first laid out the vision for “the Interest Graph.” I wrote about this concept extensively (here, here, here), because I felt that understanding the interests of its users would be the core driver of Twitter’s long-term monetization strategy.

Fast forward to now. Twitter today announced its “promoted” suite of ad units may now be targeted by user interest, which to me is a long-expected move that should clarify to anyone confused by the company’s recent announcements (cue link to recent tempest). Twitter’s statements around its decision to sever ties with Instagram and Tumblr couldn’t be more clear:

We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available to (insert company here)…

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The Future Is Cloudy

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about data recently. It’s not just reading books like The Information or Mirror Worlds (or Super Sad True Love Story, a science fiction novel that is both compelling and scary), it’s my day to day work, both at FM (where we deal with literally 25 billion ad calls and associated data a month), and in reporting the book (I’ve been to MIT, Yale, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and many other places, and the one big theme everyone is talking about is data…).

We are, as a society and as individuals, in the process of becoming data, of describing and detailing and burnishing our dataselves. And yet, we haven’t really joined the conversation about what this all means, in the main because it’s so damn abstract. We talk about privacy and fear of big brother, or big corporations. We talk about Facebook and whether we’re sharing too much. But we aren’t really talking – in any scaled, framed way – about what this means to being humans connected in a shared society, to be in relationships, to be citizens and consumers and lovers and haters….

There are so many wonderful micro conversations going on about this topic, spread out all over the place. I’m hoping that when my book appears, it might be a small step in joining some of these conversations into a larger framework. That’s the dream anyway.

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A Show Of Hands Please…

…from those of you in the marketing business out there. How many of you would love to promote your product on the home page of Google, in this fashion?

It’s arguably the web’s most valuable ad placement, it’s not for sale, and no one knows how much traffic or conversion it drives save Google itself.

Just one more sign that the Internet Big Five are girding for a massive fight to be the platform for your life. And if you’re shocked, don’t be. Remember when Amazon launched Kindle? The first thing you saw when you went to amazon.com was….what again? But then again, the Kindle was just another product Amazon was selling, right? At least, it seemed that way.

Now, when Facebook does a home page takeover with its own hardware device, then the battle will truly be engaged. Though I’m not convinced the young company has that move in it….Regardless, here we go….

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Musings On “Streams” and the Future of Magazines

I’ve run into a number of folks these past few days who read my piece last week: The State of Digital Media: Passion, Goat Rodeos, and Unicorn Exits…. Some of you have asked me to explain a bit more on the economic issues regarding media startups. I didn’t really go too deep into them, but as I was answering one fellow in email, I realized I didn’t really explain how complicated they really are, particularly if you want to make new forms of publications. I’ll get into that in the second part of this post, but first, I wanted to address a few articles that have touched on a portion of the issue, in particular The Pretty New Web and the Future of “Native” Advertising (by Choire Sicha) and What happens to advertising in a world of streams? (by Matthew Ingram).

Bridging the Stream

Both these posts tackle the emerging world of “stream”-driven content, painting them as opposite to the format we’ve pretty much used for the past 20 years – “page”-based content (like this page, for example). An established, at-scale business model exists for page-driven content, and it’s called display advertising. And anyone who’s been reading this site knows that display advertising is under pressure from two sides: first, the rise of massive platforms that harvest web pages and monetize them in ways that don’t pay the creators (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) and secondly, the dramatic growth of programmatic buying platforms that do pay creators, but the payment amounts are too low to support great content (second generation ad networks called DSPs, backed by agencies and their marketing clients).

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The State of Digital Media: Passion, Goat Rodeos, and Unicorn Exits….

Earlier in the week I was interviewed by a sharp producer from an Internet-based media company. That company, a relatively well-known startup in industry circles, will be launching a new site soon, and is making a documentary about the process. Our conversation put a fine point on scores of similar meetings and calls I’ve head with major media company execs, content startup CEOs, and product and business leaders at well known online content destinations.

When I call a producer “sharp,” I mean that he asked interesting questions that crystalized some thoughts that have been bouncing around my head recently. The main focus of our discussion was the challenges of launching new media products in the current environment, and afterwards, it struck me I might write a few words on the subject, as it has been much on my mind, and given my history as both an entrepreneur and author in this space, I very much doubt it will ever stop being on my mind. So here are a couple highlights:

* We have a false economy of valuation driving many startups in the content business. Once a year or so, an Internet media site is sold for an extraordinary amount of money, relative to traditional metrics of valuation. Examples include The Huffington Post, which sold for a reported 10X annual revenues, and, just this past week, Bleacher Report, which sold for even more than that ($200million or so on revenues, from what I understand, that were less than $20mm a year).

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Here We Go Again: The Gray Market in Twitter and Facebook

So, casually reading through this Fast Company story about sexy female Twitter bots, I come across this astounding, unsubstantiated claim:

My goal was to draw a straight line from a Twitter bot to the real, live person whose face the bot had stolen. In the daily bot wars–the one Twitter fights every day, causing constant fluctuations in follower counts even as brands’ followers remain up to 48% bot–these women are the most visible and yet least acknowledged victims…

There it was, tossed in casually, almost as if it was a simple cost of doing business – nearly half of the followers of major brands could well be “bots.”

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Who’s On First? (A Modest Proposal To Solve The Problem with First- and Third-Party Marketing)

Early last month I wrote a piece entitled Do Not Track Is An Opportunity, Not a Threat. In it I covered Microsoft’s controversial decision to incorporate a presumptive “opt out of tracking” flag in the next release of its browser, which many in the ad industry see as a major blow to the future of our business.

In the piece, I argued that Microsoft’s move may well force independent publishers (you know, like Searchblog, as well as larger sites like CNN or the New York Times) to engage in a years-overdue dialog with their readers about the value exchange between publisher, reader, and marketer. I laid out a scenario and proposed some language to kick that dialog off, but I gave short shrift to a problematic and critical framing concept. In this post, I hope to lay that concept out and offer, by way of example, a way forward. (Caveat: I am not an expert in policy or tech. I’ll probably get some things wrong, and hope readers will correct me if and when I do.)

The “concept” has to do with the idea of a first-party relationship – a difficult to define phrase that, for purposes of this post, means the direct relationship a publisher or a service has with its consumer.  This matters, a lot, because in the FTC’s recently released privacy framework, “first-party marketing” has been excluded from proposed future regulation around digital privacy and the use of data. However, “third-party” marketing, the framework suggests, will be subject to regulation that could require “consumer choice.”

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On Mayer, Yahoo!, and The (Other) Customer

Mayer at the Web 2 Summit, San Francisco

(image James Duncan Davidson)

I try to let big news percolate for a few days before weighing in, and it seems even more appropriate to follow that playbook when it came to the scrum around Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo.

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The Nexus 7 and The Cloud Commit Conundrum: Google Wins (For Now)

Google was kind enough to send me a Nexus 7 tablet to play with last month, and over the past week or so I’ve had the chance to actually put it to use. Even though I own an iPad, I have serious reservations about the constraints of Apple’s iOS ecosystem (more on that below), so I was eager to see how Google’s alternative performed.

Now, before I get into details, I want to state what I think really matters here: The Nexus device – and others like it – represent a play for something extremely valuable: a hard-wired digital portal to our hearts, minds, and wallets. As I’ve written elsewhere, there are five major companies deeply engaged in this play – Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. All of these companies want us to commit to their services as the basis of our digital lives – how we consume media and entertainment, how we manage our work and personal lives, where we store our most important information (including our money), and of course, how we declare who we are and what we believe (our identity). The more these companies can get us to upload our music, videos, photos, identities, purchases, browsing behaviors, etc. etc. etc. into their nebulae, the more they’ve locked us into a lifetime relationship of revenue and profit.

Put in that frame, your choice of tablet or phone is about much more than feeds and speeds or features and prices (for all that, see this Engadget review). It becomes a choice about what kind of a company you want as a partner in your digital life. Will the company let you export your data easily to other services? Will it be transparent about how your data is used? Will it have the guts to stand up to bad actors, whether they be governments or other corporations? Will the company create dashboards where you can see, edit, delete, and contest how your data is displayed?

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Google’s “Mute” Button: Why Didn’t I Think Of That? Oh, Wait…

One of my pet peeves about our industry is how slowly we change – I understand it takes a long time to gather consensus (it took three years to get AdChoices rolled out, for example) – but man, why don’t the big players, like Google, innovate a bit more when it comes to display advertising?

Well, yesterday Google did just that, announcing a “mute this ad” feature that it will roll out across its network over the next few months. The feature does what you might expect it to do – it stops a particular ad from “following” you around the web. It will look like this:

 

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