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Why bad news isn't good news for finance sites
The market gyrations of recent weeks has nearly doubled traffic to financial websites. Bad news elsewhere should be good news for them, right? Wrong. Their most profitable advertising is sold in advance; neither publishers nor advertisers can anticipate swings in traffic, so the bumper crop of pageviews doesn't mean a windfall in ad sales. As Hamilton Nolan notes in Gawker, this is a good time for new sites like the Business Sheet and Big Money to attract readers — but a lousy one for them to build their own business.
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Widgets are dead
One goal of the Facebook redesign was to kill pointless widgets that cluttered user-profiles. It's working. When Facebook launched its platform last year, AllFacebook's Nick O'Neil created your typical one-trick app: the Bush Countdown Clock. All it did was sit on a user's profile like a badge, and yet it attracted and maintained over 50,000 users. But with Facebook's redesign, O'Neill's widget and other simple badges like it were moved to a "boxes" tab on user profiles. After the redesign went permanent on September 11, traffic to the countdown clock dropped 60 percent almost overnight. Writes O'Neill: "Widgets have not survived the shift over and my guess is that within a matter of weeks we will see most top-performing widget applications practically disappear." In December 2007, VC Ross Levinsohn said 2008 would be all about "Facebook plus widgets." Maybe that sort of poor prediction explains why he and partner Jon Miller can't find their pot of gold? -
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Big in Japan! How Twitter jumped the Pacific
The digital revolution promised us that the nation state would wither away. But the spread of social networks show that however much the Internet connects us, quirks divide us. Take, for example, the inexplicable popularity of Twitter in Japan. Tokyo out-tweets New York and San Francisco combined. Pingdom, a website analyst, finds that Twitter is more intensely popular in Japan than in the United States. The conventional theories — Japan's high wireless usage, for example — fail to explain it. More » -
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Worldwide visitors to Facebook up 153 percent in a year
Metrics firm ComScore reports that 132 million unique visitors logged onto Facebook in June 2008, up from just 52 million in June 2007. 117 million worldwide users visited MySpace during June 2008. Its Facebook's first definitive traffic victory, from a source advertisers actually pay attention to, over MySpace. Way down on the list at No. 6 — past the fast-growing Hi5, past still-kicking Friendster — there's AOL CEO Randy Falco's $850 million social network, Bebo, which saw 24 million visitors in June. -
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The 250 shows supercharged viral growth, more than tripling to 806 in four months
Back in March, very special correspondent Paul Boutin revealed that the Olds were derisively referring to the insular San Francisco clique of Web hipsters — the sort of people who Twitter about how they wish FriendFeed had a better Plurk API — as "the 250." After learning that 806 people tuned in to watch Kevin Rose shave his head, live on the Internet, we are now revising that figure upwards by a factor of 3.224. With Rose's market-expanding efforts, we now have three times as many people to mock. Thanks, Kevin! -
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Google loses search market share to Yahoo, Microsoft
Reversing a long trend, one research firm says Yahoo and Microsoft have posted gains in search market share — at the expense of industry leader Google. ComScore reports that 61.5 percent of all U.S. searches went through Google in June 2008, 0.3 percent less than in May 2008. Yahoo saw 20.9 percent of the searches in June, up from 20.6 percent in May. Microsoft went from 8.5 percent to 9.2 percent. Does this argue for a Microsoft-Yahoo merger? Not especially, since those small, hard-won gains would likely evaporate while the combined entity fumbles for years in post-deal internal politicking. -
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YouTube blowing away competition as distribution platform
TubeMogul, a startup which allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites, did a survey of over 200,000 clips and how much traffic they garnered after 90 days. The results? The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092) than on the next eight video sites combined (2,092). [NewTeeVee]
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Google and Yahoo's combined market share approaches 90 percent
Google and Yahoo lawyers are in Washington today, trying to argue that a deal to outsource much of Yahoo's search advertising business won't give Google undue control over the market. A new Hitwise report released today should make their task a bit more difficult. It reveals that in June, Google searches accounted for 69.2 percent of all U.S. queries; Yahoo, 19.6 percent. Together, that's 88.8 percent. Third-place irrelevancy Microsoft comes in at 5.5 percent — which isn't enough to make a dent in the search-ads market. Advertisers tell us that giving Google that much control over the market could ratchet up ad prices by 25 percent. -
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Which iPhone apps make the most money?
Tracking the number of reviews written for each iPhone application sold in the iTunes App store won't tell you how many times that application has been purchased and downloaded. It won't reveal that apps' volume writes Medialet's David Hill. But Hill contends tracking the number of reviews users give apps will give you a sense of each app's "relative volume" — the app's approximate share of of the App stores' overall volume. Multiply the number of an app's review against the app's price and Hill says you get an approximation of its revenue, or at least its "relative revenue," which is good enough for making comparisons. Doing this math, Hill worked up the chart above. What's Hill's chart reveal? That there's riches in niches. Check out ForeFlight mobile, an app for airline pilots that costs 70 bucks a pop, earning more more revenue than any other app but one. -
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Vimeo without founder Jakob Lodwick: quite successful
Is IAC's Vimeo, the video-sharing site founded by bizarrely charismatic (and just plain bizarre) New York entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, missing its founder? In a word, no. Lodwick lost his job due to insubordination last November; his dare-you-to-sue-me funding of an IAC employee's music startup, in an apparent violation of his noncompete agreement, is right in line with the nose-thumbing he did while on the job. We heard IAC finally fired Lodwick because he would blow off meetings with upper management when it wanted to talk to him about things like marketing and growth. So who got it right — IAC chairman Barry Diller's suits, or the wannabe iconoclast? More »
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San Francisco, 12:17 AM
Fri Dec 5
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