Posts by: Byrne Hobart
Developers make more than they used to. Accounting for salaries, options, perks, and morale-boosting strategic decisions, developers are the most expensive part of most Internet companies. The cost of developers hasn’t just increased—the cost has become more of a variable cost than a fixed cost, and the increase is predominately in pay for the best,…
Quinstreet’s Earnings Beat
A few days after Demand Media beat their earnings estimates and saw their stock price promptly collapse, Quinstreet barely beat estimates and saw their stock rise as much as 22%. The lesson, of course, is to report earnings on a day when the market’s doing great.
Carbonite’s Daring IPO
Carbonite actually priced their IPO,…
Demand Media’s Bizarre Price Fluctuations
After-hours on Tuesday, Demand Media’s stock spiked up 17% before settling slightly down for the day. On Wednesday morning the shares hit $10.75, but closed at $8.45, again down slightly for the day. This, after a very positive quarter. One reason is the combination of their lock-up expiring and the…
The Worst Business Story in the World
Yesterday, we argued that the worst business stories were of the “X nearly reaches Y” genre. We could have cited the example of the “Index reaches round number” stories, but we chose the ever popular “Apple’s earnings/market cap/etc. approach Microsoft’s.”
What Monday was to the S&P, yesterday…
In the next year or two, we’ll likely see the following companies go public with an initial market value over $10bn:
Facebook Groupon LivingSocial DropBox Zynga
Many of these are companies that, in a world without Sarbanes-Oxley, could already be public. That would probably be good for investors; if average people could have gotten Facebook…
What the Crash Means
Investors should prepare for an economic and financial climate as bleak and unforgiving as last September, when the S&P was about where it is now.
Outsourced Pessimism
The irrepressible Jason Calacanis has a fairly new blog covering tech stories. Calacanis has long been notorious in the SEO field for
Social Media Plays
LinkedIn’s IPO is strong evidence that investors are looking for ways to invest in social media as a trend. But LinkedIn itself is a bad bet on social media:
LinkedIn already has a revenue stream. And it’s not based on anything especially “social”—LinkedIn sells leads and pageviews, both of which are businesses that…
Why Google Copies
At Digital DD, we’ve long argued that Google uses a two-stage process to expand into new businesses: first, they scoop up and aggregate lots of data, while distributing lots of traffic to the people they aggregate. Then, they use their aggregated data to bootstrap their own content creation. Once their content is…
A Reductio Ad Absurdum of Facebook / Google+ Comparisons
Alan Wolk at The Toad Stool has an amazing post about a Chrome Extension called BetterFacebook, which “most notably add[s] the Circle functionality of GooglePlus to Facebook.” As regular Digital DD readers know, the “Circle” functionality on Facebook is called “Lists.” Not only does it predate Google+, but Facebook…
LinkedIn released their earnings on Thursday, beating estimates. They showed faster-than-expected growth in all segments, particularly premium subscriptions (60% growth, vs a 37% projection) and marketing (111% growth, versus 58% expected). As we have previously argued, LinkedIn is making a useful and aggressive push towards being the “Twitter of business.” Their Twitter partnership refers more traffic…
Recent Research
Digital Due Diligence Weekly