- Digital Due Diligence DailyBlog · Research
Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy…
Quarterly Earnings Update
A few search- and social-driven companies have reported their earnings this quarter. An update:
Overstock.com had weak sales growth and lower gross margins, with a drop in sales and marketing expenses and an increase in technology spending. The press release has details. Early in the quarter, they were penalized by Google, which may be…
People who talk about search engines act as if Google owns the market. “Don’t do that. Google won’t like it.” “Do that—you’ll rank better on Google.” Google does own a big piece of the market—66% in the US, more in most other places, and it’s a contender even in the few countries where it’s not…
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…
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…
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…
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:
It extends LinkedIn’s reach into HR departments….
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…
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