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 more mature, less ambitious businesses, there’s a good chance that nobody who invests in this ETF will get what they’re expecting.
The NYT Paywall is Working (or is it?)
Felix Salmon notes that the NYT’s paywall now has just under 400,000 paying users (including 100,000 sponsored by a Ford promotion from earlier in the year). The NYT paywall has mostly been exciting because it’s a way for them to price discriminate their way from wholehearted print subscribers down to halfhearted print subscribers, which prolongs the core business long enough for them to find a new model. In some sense, it’s a bad sign for the Times. They’re doing a great job of fighting to preserve their old model. But a multiple-orders-of-magnitude drop in the cost of distributing news, or targeting it to the right person, should lead to an order-of-magnitude change in how much people pay for their news, at a minimum.
Facebook is Hoarding Metrics
Forbes has a well-considered article on how activity shifting to Facebook makes it harder for marketers to get good metrics. This is a very good point. Facebook is almost certainly storing up this information on their own, and it’s only a matter of time before they release it.
One thing Google discovered early on was that if they raise the average revenue per visitor from search traffic, most of the benefits from that growth flow directly to them—people bidding on traffic compete with one another, but Google has fewer direct competitors. So they subsidized tools like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.
Facebook will likely find ways to subsidize social commerce in the same way. Whether that means selling data or selling insights may depend on what their big advertisers ask for, and how much they can innovate in-house. So far, Facebook has tried to outsource all of the least scalable parts of their business to other people (i.e. advertisers write the ads, Facebook just places them algorithmically; advertisers create Facebook pages, and Facebook surfaces them algorithmically). This implies that Facebook will find some way to put raw data in the hands of marketers.
Is Google Banning AdWords Ads Pointing to Facebook?
Here’s a secondhand account of someone trying to buy AdWords ads pointing to a page on Facebook. Based on a spot check of keywords which used to have AdWords ads pointing to Facebook, it’s fair to say that Google may have implemented a large-scale cull of these ads. It’s not universal: searching for “facebook blog” still shows an ad for Facebook’s ad solutions. But even internal Facebook ads, like their advertisement on the term “Facebook Login,” have been shut down.
There are a few possible reasons for this:
- It could be a response to Facebook blocking ads promoting Google+ and banning AdSense from Facebook ads.
- It could be spam protection run amok.
- It could be an attempt to prevent people from “link laundering”: placing their own content on Facebook and promoting it through AdWords as if Facebook endorsed it, similar to this scammy technique using press releases.
Without a statement from Google, it’s too early to tell.
On a related note: sites are gaming Google’s brand trust in order to promote scammy content. At some point, Google will have to downgrade sites that allow user-generated content and don’t rigorously police it. In the meantime, spammers and scammers will be able to use eBay and Youtube to promote their wares.
(Digital Due Diligence has done some research into related, but even more black-hat, techniques. Look for our report on this in the future.)
What Do People Type Into the Address Bar?
This is an amazing study of type-in traffic and typo data. A few caveats: like all Internet surveys, it either represents the opinions of nerds or the oblivious. In this case, it’s nerds (the information was gathered from a browser plugin). This skews some numbers. Google and Facebook both skew other numbers, and the information isn’t normalized for this or for letter frequency in general. The skewness is actually the most interesting part of the study: to the extent that non-Facebook, non-Google sites get their traffic, it’s disproportionately through either Facebook or Google.
Baidu and Yandex Expanding Internationally?
It must be earnings season. Yandex is sneaking into new markets, and Baidu is making noises about the same. The broadly accepted thesis about Yandex and Baidu is that they’ve won because Russian and Chinese are so different from what Google is used to dealing with. Cultural differences also impact user behavior.
If that’s the case, Yandex is doing this exactly right: they’re targeting Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, which are Slavic countries. Baidu is likely posturing: if they have serious plans, they should be keeping quiet, and like Google they’re probably more worried about winning the social media fight in their home market than picking a search fight in a new market.
The Rise of AngelList
GigaOm has an excellent piece on AngelList, the social network that matches early-stage companies to angel investors. Most salient, the data: “AngelList now has 2,300 investors and more than 10,000 companies with registered profiles on the site. The network has directly facilitated between 400 and 600 startup fundraises, and is currently helping with an average of one to two fund raises per day.” If Paul Graham is correct that “angels are the limiting reagent,” in startup formation, then AngelList is one of the most important new developments of the last few years.
ShareThis’s Overreaching Ambitions
A surprisingly common business template:
- Find a reason to let someone else put your Javascript on their website.
- Make it ubiquitous.
- Build an ad network around it.
Quantcast is already doing this with their measurement tool turned banner ad targeting system. Now ShareThis is going to try with their sharing widget. This has potential: there isn’t exactly a limit to how many data-driven ad networks we need. But at this point, it’s a complicated field, with a lot of capital being dumped into it.
Meanwhile, researchers have created a plugin to block these Javascript snippets from sharing data. As always, the people interested in this are already terrible customers.
Parsing Android’s Sales Numbers
Android devices are activated more often than iOS devices. But is Android a market leader? One fudge factor is the number of returns: fairly high for many Android devices, and astoundingly low for iPhones. This isn’t enough to singlehandedly put iOS ahead of Android, but it does imply that the gap isn’t as wide as previously thought. More information on attrition is key, here. Apple remains the platform to watch. Android is, by nature and by choice, commoditized; Apple is adapting the rest of the tech ecosystem to itself, rather than the other way around.
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