Category: Media/Tech Business Models

Change your name from Gator, get the books in order, put happy smiling people on your website, and file. OK, Marchex, Advertising.com, BrightMail, Shopping.com, Salesforce, Claria. Do we have a trend yet? Do we have a problem yet?

Bankers: Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, and Thomas Weisel Partners.

The S-1 is here.

Not sure entirely what they’re on about in this eMarketer report, as it’s an excerpt, but the suggestion is made, after lengthy throat clearing, that Google create its own online currency so as to compete in the SFO (Search Find Obtain) space. The article correctly points out that Google lacks muscle in the Obtain part of the equation, compared to Amazon and EBay. But then it says Google should get its own currency. I don’t think so. But, what do you think?

Yahoo announced earnings (PDF) just now, and the numbers were stronger than expected. The company earned $132 million on revenues of $758 million ($550 excluding TAC), up from $55 million on $283 million a year ago. EPS came in at .14, the street was expecting .11. The stock is up more than 10% in after hours trading. If you want to download their presentation on their earnings, click this link. The company posted strong gains across nearly all the core metrics – uniques, active users, cash flow, international revenue …etc.

To add to the euphoria, Yahoo announced a 2 for 1 stock split, and boosted guidance. The conference call is slated for a half hour from now.

(Thanks for SEC nod, Gary)

…with this post from Kottke. The concept is further pushed by Danny Sullivan in a post here and in an AP piece in which yours truly is quoted.

Excerpts from Kottke:

They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world’s largest computers that’s all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they’re about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.

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Journalists have a problem with IntelliTXT. Not only is its name rather difficult to spell, its technology takes words within editorial stories and turns them into sponsorship opportunities. This is not going over well with the ink stained classes. I’m talking to the company later this week, stay tuned.

Safa Rashtchy predicts strong earnings this past quarter, starting with with a good quarter from Yahoo this Weds.

Driven by continued strong fundamentals, the first quarter of 2004 will bring mostly upsides to the estimates and only a few in-line performances. In fact, we believe the Q1 earning season will be characterized as a strong quarter with two trends: On the one hand, companies like Ask Jeeves, Netflix, and LookSmart have already pre-announced a much better-than-expected quarter. On another category, companies like eBay and Yahoo will have strong upsides to guidance – much of it already known and reflected in at least some of the Street estimates, including ours. We do believe, however, there will still be upside even to our raised estimates for Yahoo or eBay. The upside to guidance is likely to be the trend even for the smaller companies such as DoubleClick and Cnet – in general, all ad-based models should report a solid upside since the growth trend in advertising noticeably accelerated in Q1. Similarly, search not only stayed strong but showed very solid pricing for a seasonally weak Q1.

My friends at boing boing are asking their readers to help them figure a way to pay the bills yet stay true to their roots. They’ve asked me to help them, and I’d love your input too. Many of Searchblog’s readers are well down the path of figuring out how to support blogs with advertising or sponsorship revenue. You can chime in via the comments below, or at bb’s comments page, here.

…has filed. That makes yet another net advertising-based filing – Marchex clearly helped. Story here, S-1 here(re req’d). Goldman will lead with Deutsche and Piper holding the wedding train.

Some very smart thinking in here about how Google is a massively distributed platform with its own OS, and how that has given Google the competitive edge to roll out cool stuff like Gmail. Very Web 2.0 stuff here – the Platform Web.

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

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Methinks.

The Guardian:

As it is, Google’s plans to embrace the public market and all that entails seem to have slipped. Too late for the pre-summer flotation window, there are also no jungle drums beating for an autumn offering. It is as if the search engine’s owners have tested market receptivity, found it to be OK in principle but now have to make the hard decisions about the merits of a listing before they even get to the issue of its timing.