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Tag: Yahoo (Page 2 of 4)

Widget Summit, Day 1: MyBlogLog’s Founder

Eric Marcoullier is the founder of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo). He didn’t start it as a widget company — it kind of morphed into that after a year or so, with the now famous "Recent Readers" widget (see mine to the right).  P1030551
The company launched very simply in March of 2005, just to look at the outbound links of a site.  It was purely a stat service at that time and, after a year, some 14K blogs were using it.  Then Scott Rafer asked them to consider the aggregate value of all the data they were gathering, and, voila, Scott was CEO within a month, Eric said. Skip forward, and it’s now M&A history….

Eric left Yahoo a couple of months ago, and I would expect we’ll be hearing about him starting something new in the not too distant future. (The rest of the MyBlogLog team remains in place at Yahoo, he told me later.)

Eric gave us some of his personal views towards the end of his talk (he was careful to state these are not Yahoo’s views), and one of the most interesting is to be clear that "widgets are not free advertising."  He said that many companies, advertisers, etc, see widgets and think, "Wow, how do I get some of that?"  Eric says that’s the wrong way to think. "People are dying to syndicate your content if (1) you don’t take users away from their site, and (2) you can do it for free."  The key, he said, is to widgetize your content. He raised an interesting question: "If iTunes would have had a widget years ago, would Last.fm even have had any success?"  Another point Eric really emphasized: "As you pursue your widget strategy, think about how you’re going to promote your widget."

Yahoo Eats Blue Lithium

The advertising M&A game just keeps going and going…. MarketWatch reported earlier this evening that Yahoo will buy ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Yahooeatsbluelithium Blue Lithium, as I reported in my blog post How the Top Ad Networks Rank on August 18, is currently the fifth largest ad network. A few minutes ago, this Red Herring article went up, noting that Blue Lithium was founded in January 2004 and was backed by Walden Venture Capital and 3i. The article went on to state:

BlueLithium is also known for its behavioral targeting, which has become the must-have for online marketers. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to target users based on the sites they’ve visited, as well as demographic and geographic characteristics. Yahoo recently launched SmartAds, a nascent effort in this area.

YHOO was up 5.46% today, closing at 23.97. In after hours trading, it was up another 0.63% to 24.12 as of about 8:00 pm Eastern.

The New Age of Advertising Is Upon Us: Opportunity Abounds

We are in a major period of disruption in the advertising industry. I have never been more convinced of it. Getting into the middle of the ad:tech conference last week (see previous posts) just helped me experience and understand it even better, up close. The online portion of the industry is on a trajectory that cannot be stopped. (See graph in previous post.) The movement toward a new world order in the ad business is a major, ongoing story, and I can’t help but get excited about the changes and the opportunity it holds for so many of us.

Let me digress a bit. This story isn’t about me, but a little background: I began my career in an advertising agency — at what was then a top Minneapolis firm, which had many people who went on to ad fame and fortune. Nothing beats starting in the mailroom, that storied beginning in the business, where you learn so much, so quickly. And I danced in and out of the agency business for several years, even joining a top-ten worldwide ad agency as an account exec for a time, on a major, Fortune 500 piece of business. Later, in mid-career, I launched of my own marketing consulting firm, actually serving as an ad agency for several of my small tech and B2B clients, among my other duties, for quite a few years.

The reason I had earlier left the traditional agency business was because I thought it was mired in old ways of doing things. It didn’t get technology. It didn’t understand systems and productivity and stuff — you know, being out in front with new techniques and computer-driven processes. It relied only on the ethereal “creativity,” and, of course, the old boy network of expense accounts and golf and long lunches. It was living in the past, on old glory. It lived and died by winning and losing accounts, of course (it still does). But where was the innovation that would move things forward? It didn’t take me long to know I had to get back into tech, which I’d gotten a taste of soon after moving on from that first job in an agency. (I had graduated to being a copywriter on the client side. Computers and software were so much more exciting.) Once I finally left behind the idea of working for a large agency and went whole hog into tech, I never looked back (though I was certainly able to apply some of what I’d learned in running the business I later founded, especially how to manage client accounts and make a profit).

Today, traditional ad agencies still control a majority of the business, and traditional media still account for the vast majority of spending. But, boy, are things changing. The light is getting brighter at the end of the tunnel. The newer breed of tech-savvy, interactive, digital agencies is on the rise, along with new technology-based services, ad networks, exchanges, behavioral-targeting technology companies, widgets, and much more. Acquisitions are flying about everywhere. The dynamics of the industry are in major flux. The old ways, the old agencies die hard, but they do die. They must evolve, or new players simply step in. I liken much of the plight of the old guard today as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Sadly, some will surely go down. But so many new players will attain leadership positions in the industry.

Nowhere is this trend more evident or interesting, I think, than in the acquisition earlier this year of Digitas by Publicis (say it with me now: poob-li-cees), whose leader, Maurice Levy, claims he started the whole recent big-acquisition binge. Digitaslogo It’s hard to argue that the man doesn’t see the big picture. This recent article in the New York Times tells the story very well: It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad World. And the larger story about Publicis even has a local angle of sorts, in that famed Minneapolis agency Fallon is part of that holding company. Publicislogo On hard times lately, the agency recently announced that its chairman, Pat Fallon, was handing over the reins to Publicis sister agency Satchi & Satchi. The Fallon agency was a strong player early-on in interactive, but later jettisoned that department to refocus on the traditional part of the business. I never understood why.

Today, there’s no denying the ad game is changing — big time. Online is the new sheriff in town. GOOG and MSFT advertising companies? Who would have believed such a statement even six or seven years ago? Are they agencies? Well, they’re being very careful to hedge on that question. Perhaps they never will be. Meanwhile, the old guard is desparately trying to protect its flanks, preserve its share, posturing and manuevering at every turn, trying to out-smart competition coming at it from everywhere. The dollars are major, so it’s a fight worth watching.

But in this whole mix, of this there is no doubt: technology is finally coming to rule the advertising business. The Internet changed everything, and keeps on changing everything. And opportunity is adundant for new careers, new companies, and new wealth beyond our wildest dreams.

It’s about time!

Update: To add the pronunciation of Publicis….only because I love to talk Francais once in a while.

Web 2.0 Expo: Yahoo, Topix, Enterprise 2.0, Joost

Just wanted to do a quick post on the talks in the general session on Wednesday morning. This was the final day of this first ever, full-on trade show for “Web 2.0.” For a term that started out as a quaint, digerati-hip buzzword about two and half years ago, one might suspect it could be reaching maturity when it finally arrives at Moscone. Or…maybe not, quite yet. No doubt both tech cycles and buzzwords have shorter lives these days, but this one still seems to have some legs after 30+ months. So, I sat down in the main room first thing Wednesday to try to get some more wisdom with the rest of the assembled Web 2.0 crowd….

Yahoo: The morning opened with John Battelle interviewing Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner, who’s just been given responsibility for a new Network Division at the firm. His new buzzword is “network individualism.” [Google it…whoops, I mean Yahoo it…is that a verb?] Yahoologo He says Yahoo wants to connect its consumers with what they value the most. Connecting social media assets seemed to be a theme of his vague answers to Battelle’s attempts to get something quotable. Though John did come up with one quotable question: “Wall Street yawned at your earnings yesterday, versus Google recently hitting it out of the park. Are they running circles around you?” To which Weiner largely responded by saying Panama is going really well — just ask the ad networks, etc. “You have the largest network on the web,” said Battelle. “Why am I asking you about Google?” Weiner’s response was that everyone likes what’s hot, but “it’s about building things that last.” And he cited other new developments, such as Yahoo Pipes and the newspaper consortium deal they announced, with 265 papers and 50 million unique users. He downplayed Google’s dominance in search by saying “it’s only one part of the dialog.” He reminded us that Yahoo is #1 in other areas of the web, including finance, and that “there’s a reason for that.” He said intellectual property holders like to be able to “leverage their brands on top of our platform.” Weiner wouldn’t comment on any Facebook talks (of course), but he said that site “has done a great job,” and that they get the notion of “network individualism” quite well. He said there’s no pressure at Yahoo to do big acquisitions, but there is to get the company’s strategy right. “We have tremendous assets to be leveraged.” It’s his job to pull these assets together, and there is pressure with that. But he said he has a great team.

Topix: Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, talked about how his firm has built its aggregator news site. He said they’ve come to focus on local content, which is getting about $6 CPMs (“not bad”), but that certain categories of local content get much higher CPMs, such as $30 for real estate — and in the Bay Area, it’s $60! Topixlogo He said the local online ad business is a big one, with 6 million local businesses in the U.S., and a good percentage of the 500,000 advertisers Google now has on its site are local firms. The bad news they discovered, however, was that there wasn’t enough local content. There are 1400 local papers in the U.S., but they can’t produce sufficient content. Besides, “Mainstream media is going away — the Internet is destroying the print advertising that pays for it.” So, in 2005, Topix decided to implement blogs for its content. “We thought that might fix our content problem.” And that it did, said Skrenta. What’s more, when Topix allowed comments to be added to these local stories, it increased their page views by six or eight times. The site now has local content and reader comments for 20,000 towns nationally, and comments are posted daily in 1000 of those. This is America speaking out, he implied — everyday people. “These are not TechCrunch readers,” Skrenta declared. “The conversation is local.”

Enterprise 2.0 panel: Dan Farber of ZDnet moderated this one and led a lively discussion. The panel kicked off with Matt Glotzbach, Google Enterprise product manager, talking about his unit being the best kept secret inside of Google. Googleenterpriselogo “We’re second only to the ad business in revenues,” he said. [Okay, a distant second, but still…] “Enterprise 2.0 is all about user choice and collaboration, as we move from individual to group productivity.” I loved Farber’s sarcastic comment here, that, if participation is really applied Web 2.0 style to the enterprise, “we can just have everyone vote — a great way to run a company!” He asked Satish Dharmaraj, the CEO of Zimbra, which he described as “the poster child for web apps in the enterprise, for his take on what such apps really do for a CIO. Satish answered they can reduce costs bigtime, such as those for updating thousands of desktops. Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, said these new Web 2.0 tools also reduce search costs and time inside the company, and “they change the corporate culture by helping to stop the hoarding of information.” Glotzbach of Google reiterated that business is really moving from the individual knowledge worker, and that “it’s now about groups and collaboration.” We now need apps and tools that let individual users work the way they want within their many groups, which will vary from one to the other. Mayfield had a great comment here: “Kids grow up doing their homework on Facebook, which is called cheating. Then, when they get jobs in the real world, it’s called collaboration!” Zimbralogo Farber asked the Zimbra CEO what he thought about employees wasting time online: “Certain people are going to goof off no matter what. They were doing it in the ’90s with GeoCities.” On the topic of online apps, Glotzbach said that Google’s emerged to let workers choose the way they want to work. “Is your entire company on these apps?” asked Farber. “Pretty much,” said Glotzbach, “but probably not the hardcore finance people — they’re not a replacement for their desktop apps.” Mayfield said SocialText created “SocialPoint,” which is a combination of wiki and Sharepoint functionality. “So, what do you guys offer to make a CIO replace Microsoft Office desktop apps?” asked Farber. “We probably can’t replace those,” Glotzbach said. “But we can meet special needs of some firms, such in the area of mobile apps.” Dharmaraj of Zimbra noted that Web 2.0 apps can be hosted in your own data center, and that this approach could be an option for firms wanting to shift from a Microsoft-centric environment. “And soon all web apps will have to have an offline component,” he said. “Mashups of all of us here are very possible and feasible,” said Google’s Glotzbach. Socialtextlogo_2 SocialText’s Ross Mayfield got the last word. “Standards are still needed. And it’s not just about developers anymore, but users doing apps,” he said. “You have to share control to add value.”

Joost: The last presentation of the morning’s general session was a demo of this new P2P television platform, by Dirk-Willem van Gulik of the Apache Software Foundation, who’s a board member of Joost. This platform, which formerly went by the code name of The Venice Project, is about “TV the way you want it…all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.” Joost_2 Co-founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Joost claims to “fill a gap in the online video entertainment arena,” providing a premium interactive video experience, while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators. Van Gulik said the technology is “pure HTML and Javascript,” and he put on an awesome display of features and capabilities — I’m sure to the largest crowd yet to see this eye candy. Yes, the Web 2.0 faithful were well “Joost up” about the coming introduction of the live service, which van Gulik said would be “early this summer.” Meanwhile, if you’d like to try out the current beta client, go here and read about how you might try to get an invite. Also check out the Joost Blog, where you’ll learn they recently did their first deal with a major TV network, CBS.

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