Posts by: Byrne Hobart
AirBNB’s First Big Crisis
AirBNB takes a commission for letting strangers pay to sleep in one another’s houses. Anyone who hears about this business model immediately brings up the question of what happens when you rent to, or from, a psycho. (Note that Psycho took place in a standard-issue hotel.) This is a case study in what…
Conventional financial theory tries to boil an asset down to a few simple variables, all of which consist of measurable inputs. Plug in an interest rate and a default rate, and pow! you know how much your bond is worth. Plug in an interest rate, a cash flow growth rate, and a starting point, and…
A Social Media ETF
ETF issuer Global X has announced a new social media ETF. This network is based on a third-party index that includes mostly non-US companies (there are very few pure-play SEO companies, other than the rather mangy ones trading over the counter). Since overseas social media companies tend to be…
Public opinion on Google’s PR is torn. On the one hand, they can be tone-deaf—witness public reactions to Google Street View or their former CEO’s statements about privacy. (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”) On the other hand, they’re widely…
Bing the Albatross?
Today brought a flurry of articles digging into the details of Bing’s business model, and asking about the service’s long-term future. Among them:
Rimm-Kaufman Group, a PPC agency worth keeping an eye on, picks apart where Bing and Yahoo underperform, noting that the search alliance sites have a declining share of total…
In our LinkedIn prospectus writeup, we argued that LinkedIn should “replace company “Careers” pages the way it’s so thoroughly replaced personal résumé pages.” Their latest feature does roughly that. LinkedIn now lets employers embed an “apply with LinkedIn” widget on their site. This has two key benefits:
Forget the debt ceiling. As far as Internet investors are concerned, Apple is the macro situation—it’s the central bank, the legislature, and the source of exogenous unpredictability in the web.
Apple owns a growing number of screens, eyeballs, and minutes. However you measure it, Apple products are a conduit for more and more attention. Apple…
Has the Huffington Post Worn Out Its Welcome?
Earlier this week, an Ad Age writer accused the Huffington Post of ripping off one of his stories wholesale. The HuffPost responded by suspending Amy Lee, the author of the piece in question (who appears to be of the same generation as the people responsible for…
You can download the Groupon prospectus as a PDF (3.8MB).
Groupon filed their S-1 to go public, prompting a flurry of commentary:
David Heinemeier Hansson says to pass on this deal. A Minyanville commenter argues that Groupon is effectively insolvent. Business Insider is worried about…
Here’s an easy theoretical way to ruin an SEO competitor’s life.
Buy a bunch of links to their site. Contact Digital Due Diligence. Wait for the story to hit big news sites. Watch your competitor’s rankings—even rankings they’ve legitimately earned—get torched by Google.
The good news: this has never happened. Better news: it never…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly