Posts by: Byrne Hobart
Zynga Delays IPO
Zynga is not likely to IPO on time, mostly due to the dicey market situation (though why they didn’t announce this during the diciness is a mystery). Dan Primack argues that it’s not a big deal.
Is Google+ an Identity Service?
According to BoingBoing, Eric Schmidt thinks so. If so, this is a more…
VCs don’t like SEO-dependent companies, because SEO isn’t the competitive advantage it used to be. Wall Street doesn’t like SEO because it’s too much of a black box. They’re both wrong: public perception of SEO is, by nature, a few years behind the industry most of the time. Why?
People are usually aware of SEO…
Google Brand Affinity Update
Score one more point for Google’s love of brands: they’re now citing recent searches in new search results. In other words, if you search for “airline tickets” and see a big-brand result, and then do a narrow search for “things to do in portland,” the sites that showed up in your…
Google+ Now in Gmail
Yesterday, Google added Google+ hangouts to Youtube. Now Gmail is showing recent Google+ activity. This is a clever way to convince people to update their own Google+ profiles regularly. (Or to convince them to do a one-time “I don’t use this account” update.)
Inside Google’s Search Updates
Google has posted a
If a search tool is any good, people are going to use it to make decisions, many of them involving money. And as soon as that happens, there’s a monetary incentive to game the search engine. The best search engines, then, aren’t necessarily the ones with the best initial results: they’re the ones most resistant to…
Yesterday we covered “Cannibals“—companies whose business model is pure status quo, and whose growth model destroys the status quo. They’re fun to track, but they’re intrinsically speculative: their entire business model is based on the existence of something that they’re arbitraging away.
The opposite is a special case of network effects: companies that have…
Facebook Pages and SEO
According to PageLever, Facebook pages get about a third of their referring traffic from search. This could be a good reason to focus on SEO for those pages, but there are some caveats:
Many of these searches are likely to be navigational. Big brand advertisers often direct people to their brands’…
Statistical Errors and Lifetime Value
Custora, a churn analysis and lifetime value calculation company, notes the results of not segmenting customers by churn rate. This is usually a bigger hypothetical than real problem, since different user categories aren’t usually quite so differentiated. But the hypothetical does illustrate the risks of simplistic user retention analysis.
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Two of the most conventional business models online are doomed to collapse:
“Let’s let users upload media in digital form, and then sell it back to them in print form!” “Let’s get famous online so we get a book deal / TV show!”
These models are easy to understand, and the second model is especially…
Skype Buys GroupMe
Skype has purchased group-texting service GroupMe for about $85mm, a nice exit for the year-and-a-half-old firm. It’s also an interesting combination: one of Skype’s big strengths is its peer-to-peer structure, which basically coopts users’ computers to keep things running smoothly. GroupMe uses Twilio, which is basically an API for anything a standard…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly