Archive for the ‘Analysis’ Category
It was reported by News.com.au that Australia has one of the largest Firefox user numbers in the world. The Oceania region, which includes Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, had the highest percentage of Firefox browsers in the world at the end of last year, according to French web survey firm XiTi. The actual percentage of Firefox browsers has rise by 12% in Oceania in the last year and a half alone. This is a faster growth rate than Europe of even North America.
Im interested to see what percentage of the remain browser users use, IE or something else?
Display Advertising Opportunity
Currently, Yahoo is a long way behind in several market, but they seem to have a great opportunity improve in this area. In the first slide attached to the previous article it states that the top 2 players control more than 90% of the search market, whereas in the display advertising market, the top 10 players only control less than 25% of the market. Hmmm. This being said there is a great opportunity for Yahoo to control this market as there are no real dominant players.
Additionally, I can see Yahoo taking a keen focus on the markets with very high CPM rates, such as classifieds, search and online video. The online video acquisition not too long ago of the Maven networks has now been justified.
Currently, Yahoo also has a strong presence in classified sections, in terms of jobs and autos, but there are more targets they could approach in this area. Craigslist comes to mind. The site is still currently owned by Craig Newmark with a 25% stake owned by eBay. This could be a potential target for Yahoo to quickly expand their growth in this area.
The second area which currently has a strong CPM is search. Yahoo is currently second in the search race, but are really a long way behind in search marketshare itself and more importantly being able to provide unique search sales services. This was supposed to come from the Panama service, but it has never really been upto standard. With the Panama system Yahoo estimate they can reduce the gap between the industry leading RPS and their own by 30% in the US in the first 9 months of 2007. I simply just cant see this happening.
CapEx and Investing:
Yahoo plan on investing aggressively and spending $2.6 billion cumulatively from 2008-2010. The are focused on Display Advertising, Grid expansion, relevance and experimentation. Hence, you will see Yahoo purchase some strong display advertising network in 2008-2010, my bet is a ValueClick purchase. Valueclick is one of the larger ad networks still left independent and they have a strong focus on display advertising.
Innovation inside Yahoo:
Im very interested to see how Yahoo Buzz progresses. It has been reported about a lot in the last few days about how much traffic the site is pushing and im keep to see this expanded, but not expanded too much. Quality rather than quantity.
Revenue Increase: Are They Realistic?
Yahoo is projecting revenues after traffic acquisition costs (TAC)—i.e., what it shares with other Websites that run Yahoo ads—to grow from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $8.8 billion in 2010. Yahoo also argued to its board that it could exceed Wall Street expectations and accelerate revenue-growth to 25 percent in 2009 and 2010 and increase its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion this year to $3.7 billion in 2010.
Are these figures realistic?? We can only wait and see!
Today, Yahoo filed a presentation which was detailed just before the Microsoft unsolicited bid. This three year financial plan was shown given by management to its board of directors back in December 2007. As you can see from the projections, Yahoo has project their revenue after traffic acquisition costs, which is what it shares with other Websites that run Yahoo ads—to grow from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $8.8 billion in 2010.
These slides come curtosy of Techcrunch. We will have our own analysis of these slides coming in the next few days, so stay tuned.
Towards the end of December I received an email from the nice people at Forbes.com asking me to join their blog network. The blog network is focused around the Business and Finance sector and there are some nice benefits that come with this partnership.
First, some of your posts / articles can be published on Forbes page which lead for higher readership. Second, you will be involved in Forbes advertising program.
Requirements for participation are:
- to have business or finance related blog
- to run two banners ads on your blog (728×90 Leaderboard and 160×600 Skyscraper or 300×250 Rectangle)
All ads management is done via online account at Adify. Pricing is based on eCPM (effective CPM). Blogger receives 40% of all net revenues collected by Forbes. It has also been rumoured that the eCPM rate that you can expects is between $10-20. Thus, working out to be $4 CPM for the publishers, which is a lot higher than most other networks.
However, this all being said and done, the blog network was supposed to be launched at the end of January and now we are just about to be at the end of March and still no news! I think this network is a great idea by Forbes to capitalise on a growing section of the internet, but they are quite poor at keeping the members informed about their network.
Here is a list of other discussions about the Forbes.com network:
I have been using twitter a lot more recent and ive been looking for an application that can show twitter message in real time and also allow me to interact. I think I have found the perfect client, Spaz. Spaz is the winner of the Adobe AIR Developer Derby Award for Best HTML Community Application, Ed’s desktop client for Twitter provides users the ability to customize the user interface with multiple themes, user CSS overrides, event sounds, and access to extended features of the Twitter API.
Anyways, make sure you head over to Twitter and follow me. Ill be sure to follow you back.
It has been a busy day in the race for Yahoo. Rupert Murdoch has officially stated that News Corp is going to fight Microsoft for Yahoo, and on the flip side the Time Warner Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes has said that Time Warner is open for a deal on AOL.
Talking to investors at the annual Bear Stearns Media Conference, Murdoch said that “We’re not going to get into a fight with Microsoft, which has a lot more money than us.†Murdoch also gave support to Google as FIM’s ad provider: “We’re very happy to be in the Google camp. They sell our search advertising and pay us well for it.â€
Bewkes however acknowledged weakness in the AOL business and told the Bear Stearns media conference Tuesday that Time Warner was open to combining AOL with another company “whatever configuration makes it the strongest and the most valuable.†This being said, AOL booked $5.2 billion in revenue in 2007 with AOL properties receiving 112 million visitors a month.
So as the race heats up, who is actually putting in formal bids for Yahoo and will there be a merger, takeover, or nothing?? Only time will tell.
A while ago digital distribution company CD Baby started to sell their artists Mp’s direct from their own site. This has proved amazing popular and Derek Sivers reports that the company’s direct mp3 sales have exceed the revenues from most of their partners.
CD Baby sold $600,000 in mp3 downloads in the last few months, with NO marketing or announcements at all. Therefore, CD Baby sold more than emusic, Yahoo Music, Sony Connect, Verizon, MSN and Snocap.
The digital distribution space is just about to open up. CD Baby has been one of the leaders in the market, because they offer artists the ability to keep more money in their pockets. CD Baby will soon have a new competitor, RouteNote. RouteNote is a digital distribution company quite similar to CD Baby, but they will have an additional feature of licensing music. Allow artists to also have their music available to be licensed for TV, radio, games, etc, all while selling their music to the worlds largest online stores. Make sure you head over to their site and get a private beta invite.
Disclosures: Steven is currently CEO of Insomnia Ltd, which own and operate RouteNote. Â
Im sick and tired of seeing the same pointless interviews by the major players in online activities. Here is a nice contrast between Zuckerberg doing a pointless interview at SXSW and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft doing the complete opposite. Please check them both out and let me know what you think about them both, and any comments on PR scripted interviews.
Facebook and Zuckerberg
Microsofts’ Steve Ballmer at Mix
This has to be the biggest news since the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. Digg is still up for sale and Techcrunch reports that they are close to finding a buyer. If you dont already know, investment bank Allen & Co have been shopping around on Digg’s behalf to find a potential buyer. A source very close to the deal mentions that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg – two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies – Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.
Originally, Digg was looking for a price tag of around $300 million, but it is reported that Google are likely to bid approximately $200 million for Digg. Microsoft however will be offering a figure lower that the $200 million, solely because they already have a three year advertising deal with Digg.
Even at $200 million is Digg overpriced? I think it is. Digg has received a lot of rewards for their technology and product, but the community is the key. If Digg is bought by Microsoft will the community continue to use the product with the same intensity as they current do? I think not.
So far Digg has only raised $11.3 million in funding, so this will be a great out for Kevin Rose and friends.
I was just reading a very interesting post over at GigaOM which discussed the possibility of Automattic (Wordpress creators) creating an application to turn Wordpress into a social network. It is rumoured that Automattic have just hired Andy Peatling, who is the guy who created BuddyPress, which is a Wordpress-based social network. The next key is that on Matt Mullenweg’s blog, he writes:
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
Now does this mean that Matt just wants a piece of Zuckerberg and what he has, or does he really want to develop a product that Blogs, Forums, and Social Networking, together?
Im all for open source software and I think what Matt has done with Wordpress and possibly also trying to create with BuddyPress is the way forward. Open source software is nearly a part of every developers life in one form or another. Improvements in this market will always be moving and social network is the newest market to get involved in.
I thought this article was quite interesting, it came from Our Digital Music and it talks about a website called PiraBoogle.com. PiraBoogle is a quite interesting mashup of Google and PirateBay, as you can also tell from the name and logo. PiraBoogle uses Googles own in house tools to provide results on finding easy-to-use Torrent searching. Users can simply type in a song or artist and within seconds it brings back the search results on all available torrents.
The developers were quoted saying, “We thought it fun to showcase how easy it is to provide a really easy-to-use Torrent file search engine with Google’s own tools given all the recent coverage about PirateBay.org being sued and Yahoo removing PirateBay from its search results”.
Now, how does PiraBoogle differ to Seeqpod? Seeqpod is currently being sued by Warner Music, where they allege “SeeqPod directly infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, including by making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of those works. SeeqPod secondarily infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrights under the well-established doctrines of contributory, vicarious and inducement liability”.
Spock is a service that I have never understood. Spock is a people search engine that helps you find anyone on the web.
When I use Spock I find it very incomplete. It has listed millions of people all over the world and there are very few where the profiles have actually been completed. Normally, when you look for your friends on the internet, it is normally within another program. For example, is I am using Facebook then you obviously search for your friends within Facebook, every product has its own tool. So why use Spock?
Additionally, at present they have no business model. I know they will be using an advertising business model, but the product is just so mundane.
