The Patent Pledge, double-agent comment spammers, and the “myth” of dangerous bad links

The Patent Pledge

Ur-angel Paul Graham wants companies to promise not to offensively use patents against startups. So far, the participants in this patent pledge tend to by YCombinator companies. It could end up being something idiosyncratic to YC, which already seems to seek out the kind of companies that wouldn’t use patents offensively. But it’s a good sign.

Aol Considers Selling, Among Other Things, Recently-Acquired Huffington Post

The NY Post claims that Aol is not so much shopping its assets as reluctantly allowing them to be shopped. The possibility that Huffington Post could be sold to another media company is intriguing. It’s a recent and strategic acquisition, and there aren’t any companies other than Aol that want that kind of property so much, and can afford to pay for it.

The speculation that Aol will sell its dial-up business to provide capital for the media business is standard-issue, though.

Comment Spammer Double-Agents!

What’s a good way to get your comment spam through filters? Make it a spam comment complaining about comment spam. This is a truly Darwinian tactic (first reported by Razib Khan, who blogs about evolution): if these comments look legitimate, they could reduce the incidence of other kinds of spam, meaning that proportionally more spammy links point to the sites promoted this way.

Can Bad Links Damage a Site?

Speaking of spam: Search Engine Watch claims that harm from negative inbound links is a myth. Perhaps. It would be foolish for search engines to always avoid penalizing sites for bad inbound links, since that means buying links is a gamble with lots of upside and minimal downside. All Google has to do is ensure that it’s too expensive to be an effective tool for trashing competitors. And that’s not too hard: it’s basically impossible to have a business driven by SEO that has more than 50% market share, so anyone who torches a competitor is mostly benefiting their other competitors. (If you have 25% of the market, and you eliminate a competitor with 25% of the market, you’re dividing the market among the remaining players, so your surviving competitors benefit twice as much as you do.)

Freemium: A Précis

Mailchimp has just acquired TinyLetter, a very tiny email marketing service. They use that news as a hook for a great analysis of freemium plans as a marketing tool. Well worth reading.

(Mailchimp powers this newsletter, among many others. The free plan is worthy trying out, and the paid version is worth paying for.)

Google Gives up Valuable Homepage Real Estate

Google has marginally increased its homepage clutter by calling out daily deals on the homepage. This used to be forbidden at Google—now that there are so many paths to search, it’s less of an issue. But the Google homepage is still one of the most viewed pages on the web, so this is an important move.

Google doesn’t usually rely on lots of its properties for distribution. Gmail, for example, was originally promoted to long-standing Blogger users, but was otherwise left to fend for itself. But in the last few months, they’ve cross-promoted two big new products (Google+ and now Offers), both of which are clones of startups Google has either tried to buy or tried to bury. This isn’t a sign that Google is getting desperate, but it is a sign that they’re getting old. Five years ago, Google tried to win purely on product; now, a key strategy for their most important products is to win by squashing competitors with shear size.

Related: Chrome is another key product which Google is cross-promoting aggressively. Their big strength, according to a former Mozilla honcho: auto-update.

Mobile App Inventory is Meaninglessly Huge

If mobile ad units were priced like typical display ads, mobile would be bigger than desktop. And if desktop ads monetized as well as mobile, the online economy would collapse. It’s a pretty meaningless statistic to compare ad units based on an arbitrary price, when the big pricing drivers in mobile are excess inventory and very low rates of engagement. As mobile targeting gets better, only one of these will improve.

TechCrunch, which publicized the original research, also published a saner counterpoint.

CSN Rebrands Away from Domains

CSN stores has completed their promised rebranding. Allegedly.

Actually, they aren’t doing a whole lot to promote their main site. The new links to their site are mostly no-followed—so Luggage.com is sending traffic but no link equity to the new site, for example. This could be the first step, but it’s an oddly tentative one. Since this move from CSN is a key part of the thesis that exact-match domains aren’t as valuable as they used to be, this is worth watching.

Apple Update

Barry Ritholtz has a nice list of companies Apple has creatively destroyed. Even the companies that benefited from Apple’s rise are somewhat beholden to them. Especially now that Tim Cook is in charge, Apple may end up growing their margins the same way Walmart and P&G do: by being a big enough part of a vendor’s revenue that the vendor will go under without them, and using that to cut profit margins to basically zero.

Meanwhile, Asymco argues that the iPad is hard to compete against because it’s not so good that it’s too good.