Google+ the ghost town, the limits of retargeting, and Google’s weak hand

Meanwhile, at Google

Congress is trying to figure out whether or not Google is a monopoly. This is some kind of high water mark. They’re pushing Google+ harder than any product since search, and it isn’t working.

The basic argument is that Google has the power to make or break businesses, and they tend to prefer all-or-nothing negotiations: let them scrape your reviews, or lose 75% of your traffic. Of course, the other way to phrase this is that Yelp is 300% bigger than it would be without Google (to the extent that that’s false, Google is not a monopoly).

Other Google news:

• They’re constantly rolling out small features for Google+.
• Rick Santorum has asked them to clean up the comical results for his name. Google is principled on these issues, and Santorum’s opponents probably have more SEO talent (or at least link equity). But this article correctly points out that this is a classic reputation management situation, and it’s fixable given enough effort.
• Google keeps experimenting with different special search results for local searches.
• They rolled out a fairly appealing design for Product Search, and they’re closing Boutiques.com, which never quite fit in.
• Google Offers is doing well from a very low base.
• Blekko notes that they’re not afraid of Google. Fine. Small companies rarely get killed; they usually die quite lonely. Even for an interesting startup like Blekko, the most salient feature of Google’s alleged monopoly status is that it’s a chance for a PR push.
• Danny Sullivan’s frenetic liveblog is a tour de force. It takes a special skill to transcribe a hearingand throw in some commentary.
• RKG has an overview of how paid search is getting more organic. To be fair, organic search feels more and more like paid.

And one last note: Groupon just lost their COO. She’s quitting to join Google; she quit Google to join Groupon back in April. There’s a pattern here: that article on Bing’s culture mentioned a similar story with even faster turnaround. And Google offered a $6mm restricted stock package to an engineer who was thinking about leaving for Facebook.

Google has about $40bn in cash. They’re hiring. And thanks to stories like this, it sounds like they’re willing to be the high bidder in every auction. Investors take note.

Retargeting Isn’t Enough

This piece on the “retargeting swindle” overstates the case. Retargeting is a great signal. But like any signal, it can be data-mined into meaninglessness. But what’s nice about retargeting is that it’s a proprietary edge: it bumps up the performance of ads in general, but most of the gains are captured by the advertiser in particular.

Anatomy of a Spam Link Campaign

SEOMoz has a great writeup of a campaign ranking for the name of a certain pharmaceutical product whose name is of great interest to spam filters.

TechStars Offers “Start Fund Lite”

When the mass-incubators started, the deal terms were pretty simple: a few months of mentoring, and a stipend for living expenses during that time. YCombinator superficially changed the nature of the deal when they announced their Start Fund deal ($150,000 in no-cap, no-discount convertible preferred). Their dirty secret is that this was not as big a deal as it looked like: in the previous YC class, more than 90% of the startups were able to raise money. The real winners were the edge cases: companies with a weird enough idea that they probably couldn’t raise their first round the traditional way.

TechStars hits a different demographic. So their slightly worse version of the same deal probabl won’t have the same impact.

In other DST news, they’re bidding for a stake in Alibaba.

(Disclosure: my employer also owns a stake in Alibaba.)

Business Insider Raises a Round

The rumors (reported on Business Insider, naturally) were true! BI has raised $7mm. This prompted some criticism:

• Ryan McCarthy doesn’t like how the site wraps other people’s content in edgy, sometimes misleading headlines.
• Marco Arment really doesn’t like how they scrape his content (which he offers via a creative commons license—they’ll almost certainly take it down if he asks, despite the license).
• John Carney jumps in to defend them against these claims.

But there’s a better question to ask here: if BI is a profitable, fundable business based on aggregation rather than pure original content, then maybe that’s adding value. No one would argue that, in the abstract, what we need is more news. But people are willing to make that argument in every particular case: they’d rather have one more story break than to incrementally shift audiences to the stories they actually care about.

So what if Business Insider is in the headlines-and-excerpts business more than they’re in the original-news business? The Internet is the first post-scarcity economy, where the big money should be in packaging other people’s content, rather than creating it in the first place.

Groupon’s Amended S-1

Amateur filter: anyone who thinks this amended S-1 is material is not to be taken seriously. The main change is in how Groupon counts revenue; they’re counting just their cut instead of the full value of the deal. This doesn’t affect the bottom line; it’s an arbitrary distinction that makes it slightly easier to parse their financials when their gross margins drop. As with all Groupon news, this has provoked some commentary on their ostensibly aggressive accounting. As we’ve argued before, Groupon’s accounting makes sense whether or not the business does.