FBOOK
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the world’s most popular online social network and its value to marketers.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
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…
How Startups are Outsourcing Distributed Spam Attacks
There are two practical reasons not to spam:
If you’re using your own server, your ISP will quickly identify you as a pest and shut you down. If you’re paying to use a mailing service, they will identify you as a pest before your ISP gets around to it.
The…
If there’s one way to sum up the resurgence of display advertising compared to search advertising in the last few years, it would be this: Display is finally a market. Like a financial security that can be split, swapped, sliced, diced, packaged, unpackaged, and hedged, ad space is being matched to the exact right bidder,…
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