Category: Outlets – BusinesWeek
Can MySpace Pull in Revenue Rast Enough for Rupert?
The Google/YouTube Come-On
BUSINESS WEEK — Dec 1 — Google and YouTube are dangling nine-figure sums in front of major programming and network players (Time Warner, News Corp, NBC). 'Don't sue us over copyrights. Take this (substantial) payment, and trust us to figure out how we'll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.' No publicly traded media company today is in a position simply to dismiss, say, $100 million. Such a sum far exceeds what any single broadcast network can extract from the online world–and drops straight to the bottom line. But taking the dough fortifies an already threatening rival.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Who will take the bait? One of these companies will surely take Google/YouTube's deal, and then YouTube will meet it's true potential. These are landmark, society morphing deals. TV will unify with the internet as wireless technologies mature. The wireless internet will become pervasive and everyone will watch TV on mobile phones, and SONOS type receivers at home within the next ten years. Rhapsody partnered with SONOS to deliver music on demand. Movies and TV will be available on similar delivery systems shortly, I think. I'm intrigued with the battle between Netflix and Blockbuster. Blockbuster must realize it's brick and mortar stores are doomed. Netflix should also realize that 'movies-by-mail' will have a five year half life. What are the implications for online dating? Video on the net will become part of the paradigm of the masses. Video communications have been a long time coming but are perfect for the online dating experience. Webcams don't lie. Dating site users will demand seamless video and voice offerings.
Indian Bride Sites
BUSINESS WEEK – Oct 30 — In September Yahoo and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Canaan Partners jointly paid $8.5 million for ~10% of BharatMatrimony.com, a nine-year-old marriage Web site that also has 50 offices across India to serve those without Net access. "BharatMatrimony will help us get a larger share of the Internet market" in India, says Yahoo India Managing Director George Zacharias. Microsoft hooked up with Shaadi.com a year ago, though it didn't invest any money in the site. "Shaadi helps attract huge numbers of users," says MSN India country manager Jaspreet Bindra. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers plowed $4.6 million into Info Edge, which runs matrimonial site Jeevansathi.com. Google is said to be prospecting for a partner. Some 7.5 million people use marriage sites, up from 4 million in 2004, the Internet & Mobile Association of India estimates. Registration is free. Users pay when they want to contact a potential partner. The sites are likely to take in ~$21 million this year. But there's plenty of room to grow. Indians lay out nearly $500 million a year for offline marriage services such as print classifieds. "Today the emphasis is on compatibility and being a professional, something the Internet lets you test, as opposed to the traditional contacts," says Anupam Mittal, Shaadi.com's founder.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I have an interview with the CEO of Bharat Matrimony in the pipeline. There's a lot U.S. companies can learn from these innovative Indian sites.
Web Numbers: What’s Real?
BUSINESS WEEK — Oct 17 — Seth Sternberg dropped out of Stanford Business School to work full-time on instant messaging service, Meebo. Today Meebo is going gangbusters with almost a million users every day. There's just one hitch. They have a hard time proving the site is as popular as they say it is. comScore says European competitor eBuddy.com is four times as big but Alexa shows Meebo is bigger. Which is true? Probably neither. Sternberg's best guess is that the two rivals are about the same size. The dirty little secret of Silicon Valley is that no one knows exactly who is going where on the Web. Valuations for startups such as Facebook Inc. and YouTube Inc. appear to be doubling every few months, but those numbers are based on traffic figures that could be misleading. Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore recruit Web surfers to record their mouse clicks and argue that there are many reasons not to just count the clicks off a Web site's server logs. comScore points out that servers would count pop-up ads as a page view if the tracking service didn't filter them out. Alexa and Hitwise are muscling onto the scene with alternatives. Some say Alexa favors early adopters and techies and the opposite complaint is made about comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I learned about comScore and Nielsen//Netratings in September 2003 while working at FriendFinder. I bought a month of numbers from comScore for $5500 and they did a custom 'roll up' of FriendFinder properties to show that the FriendFinder network of 15 sites (at the time, now they have 20+ sites) was bigger than other online personals leaders. Nielsen were kind enough to show me their numbers to compare…and the difference was astonishing. Nielsen reported 8x less uniques. All their numbers for unique visitors were way off comScore numbers. A lot has happened in the last three years and comScore and Nielsen//Netratings have dramatically expanded their panels and extended their services, however, take a look at the left bar for the USA online personals top sites. Hitwise/comScore/Nielsen still disagree. They probably always will. It's best to make a list of what intelligence you most want, call all three services (comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen) and choose the one that delivers what you require, in a timely manner, at the best rate, …but take the intelligence with a pinch of salt. If you're going to base major business decisions on the information they feed you, have a conversation with your gut, then call around and try and find another verifying source. Some of the services offer a layer of analysis that can help you come to better conclusions. Talk to the analysts at the service you use, and ask for confidence levels in mission critical data. At the top of your 'must have' list should be source/loss info for your competitors and the keywords they're bidding on. Be prepared to sift through a lot of data to find the golden nuggets. Also, bear in mind, if you want to quote numbers or rankings in your press releases, you should be a paying subscriber to the appropriate service, or your numbers might not look good the following month 😉 Also, the press generally regard it as 'not cool' if they call up comScore/Hitwise/Nielsen to verify numbers and the analyst they talk to reveals you used the numbers without their sign off.
Skype’s Venice Project Revealed
BUSINESS WEEK — Oct 5 — Skype's co-founders are preparing to unveil a video web site that combines professionally produced TV and video. theveniceproject.com will be available for download by the end of the year. The Venice Project is currently trying to convince media and TV companies to place their full-length, professionally produced content on the network, and advertisers that could place video ads on the network.
The full article was originally published at BusinessWeek, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Great Expectations allows members to view profile videos and charges thousands of dollars for membership. It's time for internet dating services to revisit video (and 'authenticate' users). There will be a significant paradigm shift around the meaning of 'TV' over the next two years as projects like Venice Project come online. Netflix/Blockbuster will offer streaming video. The 'tube' will be extinct within five years.
Online Video Sites Are Hot Targets
BUSINESS WEEK — Oct 2 — Mark Cuban, the tech entrepreneur and owner the Dallas Mavericks, said on Sept. 29 that anyone who buys YouTube, one of the most popular video sites, is a "moron." Analyst Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets argued that MySpace, the social networking site that generates a huge volume of video traffic, could be worth $15 billion in three years. News Corp. is now shifting more assets into the Internet. Members of the so-called Millennial generation, who were born starting around 1980, don't watch TV the way their parents did. Research firm Frank N. Magid Associates said in a report Millennials spend 2.48 hours a day online, the same amount of time they spend watching TV, and about 2.2 hours a day listening to music. Sorting out the intellectual property rights issues of video on the Web is a thorny issue; what Cuban had in mind when he made his comments.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Will Microsoft’s Spin-off Pack a Wallop?
BUSINESS WEEK — Sep 27 — Wallop was unveiled Sept. 26. It was spun off from Microsoft a year ago and has been in the works a full four years. Wallop looks more like a desktop than a Web page, and it's entirely based on Flash. Instead of listing friends, the site has a radar-like graphic that plots your connections based on how frequently you interact with a person. Wallop doesn't make money by selling ads. It collects small payments for clever, animated applications called "mods." For a fee of, say, 10 cents, you can get a cartoon of an angry bunny created by an independent Flash designer to jump around your page. The key isn't simply amassing users, but getting "cool" people to come to Wallop. Everyone will want to be where the cool people are. The site is invitation-only now, and each person only gets a few invites to dole out. Wallop will be doing some grassroots promotions in cities including Los Angeles and New York to woo trendsetters.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Brilliant! They were wise to ditch the Microsoft pedigree. It wouldn't quite work for viral activation amongst the student population. (Microsoft is still kinda evil, compared with the likes of do good Google). South Korea's Cyworld has made a mint of graphical charms and mods. Will this concept convert to a Western audience. I think so. I worked on all-flash Mooble earlier this year. They are looking for more money to execute the plan I laid out. Namely, chase down Facebook. (Email trevorcoyne@ireland.com if interested)
A MySpace That Speaks Your Language
BUSINESS WEEK — Sep 21 — COO Court Cunningham says Community Connect is the third largest social networking company in the U.S. in terms of revenue. Community Connect's sites (BlackPlanet, MiGente, AsianAvenue) function like MySpace; users can create profiles and search for people by gender, age, and interests, as well as ethnicity. There are also chats, message boards, job listings, personals, and of course advertisements. Together, Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans make up about 33% of the total U.S. population (2005 U.S. Census). According to Forrester, 86% of Asian-Americans are online, 56% of African-Americans are online, and Latinos, at 45%, are currently undergoing the fastest online migration. Community Connect will launch gay/lesbian Glee.com, by the end of 2006. Another Christian site is due January, 2007. Community Connect expects to earn $20+ million this year and has gone from 70 employees to 140 in the past year. 15% of revenues come from online personal subscriptions, 50% advertising, 35% from job postings.
Mark Brooks: The Community Connect team has worked for over a year to build a more scalable platform for launching new niche networks sites. It has proven itself with Black Planet and will loom over MySpace when it comes to profit rich targeted niche communities. Users will end up using three multiple sites; a generic site such as MySpace/Friendster, additional niche focused sites such as Fropper or MyChurch or BlackPlanet, and the latest 'in-thing' social network with more progressive functionality.
MySpace: No Free Ride in Europe
BUSINESS WEEK — Sep 11 — Repeating MySpace's success in the big, fragmented European market won't be a cakewalk, analysts say. MySpace's competitors in Europe already have established themselves with local audiences, offering targeted content in native languages. MySpace is adapting, launching a British version in April and its first non-English-language site in France in August. On Sept. 11, it unveiled its latest country-specific site in Germany. MySpace aims eventually to roll out sites in other European countries, and later in China and India. It's signing up local bands, adding native language videos, and staging events such as the popular "secret shows," where Indie and mainstream musicians play exclusive concerts for lucky MySpace members. Bebo has more market share in Britain than MySpace, according to Hitwise. In August, reports emerged that Bebo might team up with Viacom (VIA ), whose deep pockets would allow a more serious challenge to Murdoch. Ringo.com, a photo-sharing site owned by Monster, tops the social-networking rankings in France and Spain. Other rivals are adopting niche strategies to survive MySpace's European push. Startup MyStrands, based in Barcelona, Spain and Corvallis, Ore., is a "music recommendation" site that blends social networking with music reviews to help its users find new tunes and share their preferences with others. In August, Viacom's MTV Networks launched its own social-network site in Europe (Italy and Britain), called MTVFlux, that combines the company's music know-how with the interactive elements of Web 2.0.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Here are some more well established, international social networks…
Arto.dk (Denmark), ASmallWorld (Euro), Cyworld (South Korea), Epuls.pl (Poland), EveryonesConnected (UK), Faceparty (UK), Fropper (India), Grono (Poland), Hyves (Netherlands), IRC Galleria (Finland), Mixi (Japan), Nexopia (Canada), Passado (Euro), Playahead (Sweden), ProfileHeaven (UK), Rate.ee (Estonia), Yeeyoo (China), Yeskee (China), Yonja (Turkey)