Getting Mugged by the Huffington Post

Has the Huffington Post Worn Out Its Welcome?

Earlier this week, an Ad Age writer accused the Huffington Post of ripping off one of his stories wholesale. The HuffPost responded by suspending Amy Lee, the author of the piece in question (who appears to be of the same generation as the people responsible for this kind of thing).

Gabe Rivera of TechMeme wants to clarify that aggregators are not rewriters, and that he doesn’t belong in the same category as the HuffPost. And Gawker finds former HuffPosters who claim that this kind of behavior is explicitly endorsed there.

A few interesting ideas:

• Is “article spinning” detection advanced enough to spot this kind of thing?
• Are search engines even opposed? The Huffington Post is a bigger brand name than Ad Age, after all.
• Could sites create a “robots.txt” analogue setting forth basic terms and conditions for attribution and sourcing?

Why Does Google Do Worse in the Finance Vertical?

A study from Rosetta reveals that Bing and Yahoo take a disproportionate share of search queries related to finance. And Yahoo finance also ranks incredibly well (#1 for numerous stock symbol queries). Bing makes a big deal about their financial data sets, but these data sets are all pretty commoditized. It’s a mystery.

One possible explanation: Google’s successes come from things that they use internally (search, email, calendars), and their flops come from things Googlers don’t use (e.g. video, earlier social efforts). Between Google’s superior stock performance and their internal advocacy of index based investing, perhaps Google’s employees are too rich and too sensible to use a finance portal.

At Last, a Publicly Traded Twitter Pure-Play

This is worth avoiding: IZEA, a company focused on Twitter-based ad solutions, is now publicly traded. It’s traded over the counter, and appears to be at a huge premium to its recent private placement (last quoted price: $2.58; private placement price: $10,000 for 30,000 shares and a warrant to buy 18,000 shares at $.50/share—the private placement buyers are up 1,000% on paper). Last time there was a pure-play Facebook app company, Bloomberg caught on and the stock went crazy. Hopefully if this happens again, investors won’t be similarly burned.

Google+ Demographics Getting Saner

Google+ is overwhelmingly male (at about 66.4%), but the proportions are dropping. This, according to Ancestry.com’s Paul Allen, who has made a name for himself by publishing Google+ analyses on Google+. Given how much Zynga depends on female users—and how hard advertisers try to target them—it’s a good bet that Google+ will work hard to fix this.

The Mismeasure of Twitter

Awe.sm tries to shed some light on how much traffic Twitter really sends, by factoring out the ways it’s reported in analytics. This is a well-known problem; when people wrote about LinkedIn surpassing Twitter.com as a referrer, most explicitly noted that Twitter’s apps add up to more than their site. Still, the latest numbers (that Twitter.com is responsible for about 24.4% of total Twitter traffic) are useful.

Hints from Google’s Latest Panda Prescription

Google told HubPages to segregate content by subdomain in order to reduce the sitewide effects of their Panda update. This is an interesting move. Google doesn’t like to take existing standards and apply them to completely unrelated situations, so a statement like this indicates that Google uses subdomains as an authorship signal. Group blogs take note: if you want full credit for links to your site, plus you don’t want low-content bloggers dragging the whole site down, then subdomains may be a good solution.

Dropbox’s Massive Round

Dropbox may be raising $200mm to $300mm at a $5bn+ valuation. Given the way they’ve capitalized their business before (a small early round, and nothing else), this may presage a change in strategy. One obvious guess: they may begin ramping up customer acquisition to the point that they run at a loss, or at least have negative cash flow. Another possibility: they may end up expanding into the enterprise market, whether it’s through a new product or acquisition.

Dropbox has done a stellar job at SEO and social media marketing (just search Twitter for “Dropbox” to see how ubiquitous they’ve made themselves).

Making the Case for Newspaper-Subsidized Tablets

Poynter explains the argument for Philadelphia Media’s decision to distribute tablets to subscribers. Long ago, Business Insider noted that it would be cheaper for the New York Times to stop printing and send every subscriber a Kindle. The economics of manufacturing tablets and of selling newspapers have both moved in a direction that makes these points more valid.

Email Remains the Dominant Social Network

The resurgence of email was less about people discovering that it was a good sales channel, and more about getting over the usual snootiness about email in general. Email continues to stay surprisingly relevant: it’s the preferred sharing method of aggressive sharers, at least at the New York Times.

Another SEO / SMM IPO Coming Up

Eventbrite, the ticket selling site, could file to go public in 2012. That’s a strong statement about the market’s future appetite for startup IPOs.

Google Tries Gamification

In a very heavy-handed attempt to “gamify” news, Google has created Google News Badges. This seems like a way to reward their most pathological users, but it won’t really motivate anyone. This is clearly not the product of the same kind of thinking that gave us Google+.

Netflix Prepares to Kill DVDs

Netflix may be a first: they were named after a wildly optimistic concept, couldn’t pull it off, but then lived up to their name after building a different business first. They’ve raised their prices in order to make DVDs less economical, provoking outrage from the online commentariat. Netflix has done an incredible job of testing every element of their business—they’ve surely run the numbers on what this price increase will do to their churn, and decided that it’s a good bet. (Netflix’s stock has barely moved since the announcement.)

Twitter and Bing Negotiate, Nervously

Twitter pulled the plug on their search agreement with Google, temporarily ending their real-time search earlier this month. Now, Twitter is negotiating the renewal of their agreement with Bing. It’s a dicey situation: if Twitter loses both, it will lose some of its status as the short-messaging protocol of choice. Microsoft or Google may shoot for some kind of exclusive now that they’ve seen how useful the data feed is.

What MySpace Will Do Next

Here’s an interview with the CEO of Specific Media, which bought MySpace. Among his plans: more original content, which MySpace may end up paying for. This could all still be a fig leaf for Specific’s plans to use MySpace profiles for ad targeting, but it’s still a possibility.

Google’s Second Quarter

Google reported great second quarter earnings, with the caveat that their “Network” revenue (i.e. AdSense) is growing more slowly than their search revenue (AdWords). One good reason for this: they’ve culled lots of spammy results recently. Meanwhile, in the vacuum Google left after pulling out of China, the CEO of web portal giant Sohu.com (SOHU) claims Sogou, their search engine unit, is on track to overtake Google China within a year.

Local.com’s Me-Too Spree Continues

Local.com continues to catch up to hotter companies in the sector, this time by buying another daily deal site.