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ConversionRater A discussion of online advertising, web entrepreneurship, and personal ramblings from Pat McCarthy.

Category Archives: Conferences

Dan Rather Keynote Liveblog from SXSW 2007

March 12, 2007 12:20 pm / 3 Comments / Pat McCarthy
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images.jpgNews icon Dan Rather did the keynote this afternoon at SXSW 2007 here in Austin, Texas. It’s not often you get to here a longtime American news icon speak in public, especially about the topic of “new media’, so I decided to liveblog it.

2:09 pm
The keynote was supposed to start at 2:00, so Dan is obviously playing the diva role for his keynote. The Hilton ballroom is large but people are packed in like sardines and most likely hammering away sending messages to Twitter so they’ll show up on the plasma screens everywhere.

2:11 pm
Jane Hamsher comes out, she blogs at firedoglake.com and produced Natural Born Killers, and she gets to chat with Dan. Lucky gal, and she’s reading from a bio card to introduce him.

2:12 pm
Dan has really lived and worked through some of the most amazing events in world and American history. He’s also interviewed most major political and news figures over the past 30 years, including a famous and hard-hitting interview with Richard Nixon.

2:13 pm
Dan is announced as one of Jane’s personal heroes, and then he comes out to a standing ovation to the music of What’s the Frequency Kenneth, when he was part of the incident that is the basis for that REM song.

2:14 pm
Dan leads off with a joke about appreciating introductions involving Abe Lincoln once saying to appreciate praise from the audience because they’ll soon enough figure out you aren’t worth it.

2:15 pm
Dan jokes that the acoustics are so bad he can’t understand the first question, twice, about being dismissed by Richard Nixon when he wouldn’t be dismissed.

2:16 pm
Dan said to this crowd Richard Nixon must feel as far away as Caasar’s campaigns.

2:17 pm
He was proud to work as a correspondent to the White House. He didn’t see himself as challenging Nixon, he was just trying to be an honest broker of information and find out what was really going on, opposed to what they wanted the people to believe was going on.

What he was saying wasn’t the facts, it was continually being disproved as not fact. Leon Jaworski and the special prosecutors would often find out the opposite of what Nixon was saying. So he tried to phrase the questions like “Mr. President, your’e saying one thing, but the evidence is saying the other.”

Nixon would respond trying to knock Dan off balance by making a comment or asking a return question.

2:19 pm
He said the facts were that President Nixon was the leader of a widespread criminal conspiracy. And Dan has more respect for the office of the President than anyone, but he had to focus on the facts.

2:20 pm
Jane asks if the opportunity exists for someone to do today what he did back then. Dan replies that “Over time American journalism has lost its guts.”

Journalists have learned to go along and get along. They keep people on their good side to get access to people, or they’re more worried about keeping their job and have people feel good about them.

There is also the danger of being accused of being anti-patriotic or being against the troops when you question our leaders today. It is the tough questions that are patriotic!

2:22 pm
Dan says we have to question power. Ask the tough questions, follow up on tough questions, and it does sometimes still happen in American journalism, but it’s getting more rare.

Jane says that Beltway journalists like to keep their status and don’t want to rock the boat.

Dan replies and says he includes himself in this, but that “American journalism needs a spine transplant.”

2:24 pm
Dan says journalists get too cozy with their sources. They make either stated or silent agreements that “if you’ll take care of me I’ll take care of you”. This is very dangerous according to Dan. You can get so close that you become part of the problem.

Journalists use the sources, and sources use the reporter. But the second the source begins to believe that the reporter can be pulled in and be “on the team”, then it’s gone too far. When the reporter begins to feel the same way, it’s gone too far.

2:26 pm
During the Nixon Whitehouse, their became a time early on when the Whitehouse decided to strangle the journalists and cut off information. So the journalists went outside to talk to Congress and others and then called again and said they’d be on the evening news with unflattering information. Pretty soon, the Whitehouse started calling back.

It isn’t true that you have to go along with the power to get the information you seek. You don’t necessarily have to play their game.

2:28 pm
Jane asks that most people today feel that there is a lack of asking the follow up question.

Dan says “do we still believe that it’s important that journalists are Independent with a capital “I”? Do we still believe that it’s important to ask the right question and have the guts to do so? Do we still believe that the documents produced by the government are owned by the people? Do we still believe that the people in power are here to serve the people?”

Dan then points out that isn’t the phrase “investigative reporter” redundant? He’s never liked that phrase.

2:33 pm
When is the last time you’ve seen a true hour long investigative show by one of the big six networks? The corporations of news have gotten larger and larger and are global conglomerates. As they’ve gotten larger, the news has become less important.

There is a gap in leadership there, and a huge gap between the leaders and the reporters. And they have so many goals now that have nothing to do with journalism, there is no relationship to the news room. They would possibly do away with the news if they still didn’t need things from Washington.

2:35 pm
Dan adds that we shouldn’t get him wrong, that he doesn’t think the leaders of the networks are evil and he has many friends there. He just said their focus is on shareholder value and other things besides investigative news. And that when they need things from the government, it puts them in conflict with those same people when their journalists are asking tough questions.

2:37 pm
Four of five companies now own the principal means of mass communication outside the internet, and they are trying to get less more competition, while Dan is in favor of more competition in journalism.

2:39 pm
America’s ideal for journalists is for them to be the barking watchdog. And that role has been shrinking over the years.

Jane adds that’s one reason the blogosphere has grown in importance. There are more investigative journalists and a democratization of news.

2:40 pm
Dan replies that he anticipated this question and could talk about it all afternoon. He thinks the internet is a tremendous tool and so much potential. He thinks it’s in the “Beatles” phase of development. If Elvis was the early stage, we’re now in the Beatles phase of it really blowing up with unlimited potential.

Dan adds he has no idea where it’s going, but if you’re trying to think what the internet may become you can’t think years out. When the Wright Brothers invented flight, one reporter said “In 75 years we may be flying coast to coast non-stop.” 5 years later we were doing trans-oceanic flights. The internet is the same way.

2:44 pm
The blogosphere and the internet is so large that it’s easy to overgeneralize about it. He hopes people will continue to investigate and report the facts, but he does have a problem with the ease of anonymous blogging and reporting, and he doesn’t have the answer. But given time, the marketplace will balance it, but in the interim people and businesses will be hurt by anonymous people saying untrue things.

2:45 pm
Jane says what she’s trying to get at is how does new media fill that vacuum where nobody is asking our leaders the tough questions?

Dan says we need to stay on top of it. If we think that the right questions aren’t being asked, people need to point out that the right questions aren’t being asked. “So many raindrops will eventually make a dent in the rock”.

Accountability is a problem in the political system. When bad things happen, either nobody is accountable, or people at the lower levels are held accountable when they really shouldn’t be. It’s a problem that has happened in every government of every type.

2:48 pm
Dan says the President or a general will say something, and we may think it’s a pile of steaming stuff. When was the last time someone reported that someone in power said something and a reporter contradicted it with the facts and called it a lie? Everyone just does a sidweays dance now.

2:49 pm
Round of applause from the audience.

2:50 pm
Jane asks if Dan thinks journalism as a craft took a hit in the Scooter Libbey trial.

Dan says it goes back to journalists thinking they are close and part of the system. If that toxic gas gets loose, we need to take care of it for the country as a whole. For example, Dan said it wasn’t that long ago that in Washington it was clearly defined what “Off the record was”, and “On background was”, and what “On deep background was”. These weren’t legislated, they were just the rules of the game.

It was up to the source to say “on what level are we talking here”? It wasn’t the journalist having to determine it, and it was often negotiated between the source and the journalist.

Dan said those rules aren’t as clearly defined today, and Dan prefers it being how it was where everything is clearly defined.

2:56 pm
Dan continues that the ideal is that a journalist should not be “clubbable”, that they can’t be able to be associated are put in groups and get too close with people. Even if that makes their boss angry or hurts their cwn career in the short term.

2:58 pm
Round of applause.

2:59 pm
Jane says this is more obscure, but how many problems have been created because the Fairness Doctrine went by the wayside.

Dan says that’s a good question and he’s not sure he’s qualified to answer it. There are a lot of factors at play, and we have to keep asking questions and figure out what are journalists role in society. Some people already feel that journalists already are too aggressive and independent. Dan disagrees with that and believes the opposite, but there are people who believe that and they are good people.

Dan wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and then he and his neighbors will make up their mind.

3:01 pm
Time check by Jane, and now for a couple of questions from the audience. Of course, there is no microphone in this gigantic room so nobody can hear.

The first question is an independent filmmaker in Austin, who likes Brian Ross’ work on the news, and Dan agrees that Brian Ross does good work. There are exceptions out there who do good investigative work out there, and Dan thinks it’s important that the people they work for hear from the people who appreciate it.

3:05 pm
Oh, there is a microphone, and a bunch of people waiting in line to ask questions! Next question is if the press isn’t willing to ask the questions, how can people get access to ask the questions themselves.

Jane answers that there isn’t really much access, as George W. Bush has about one press conference in every 6 months. Dan adds that it’s very hard to tell Presidents that they need to have more press conferences, although they should. But basically as the heat turns on, Presidents and their administrations become afraid, so they have fewer of them. It’s the same fear that journalists have of not being in the “inside”.

3:08 pm
Dan is going to leave us with a few thoughts. A plug for high definition television as he now works with HDNet. And a question for Jane, “on the whole, and taking into account that bloggers on all sides of the politically divide, do you think think political blogging helps pull us together or push us apart as a society.”

Jane says that’s a good question and says it allows people to share their viewpoints. There is a debate that goes on that allows people to have a discourse with the various sides that doesn’t exist in other mediums, so it allows for clarification of opinion. She thinks that the powers that push and pull exist on a much greater level, so blogs probably aren’t influencing it that much.

3:10 pm
Dan then says that stuff that happens 3,000 miles away seems to not really exist because it’s so far away. Television can seem like it makes things smaller than they really are. Larger TV screens and better definition can help that, but that we can’t think of the United States as the center of the world and universe. We can be leaders, but we have to get rid of the illusions that things happening far away are illusions. The war happening is real. If you only see small pictures of it or read about it, it descends into a video game in your mind. Fight that illusion.

3:13 pm
Standing ovation!

Posted in: Conferences

SXSW Is Impressive

March 10, 2007 2:58 pm / 1 Comment / Pat McCarthy

SXSW 2007

It’s day #2 at SXSW in beautiful Austin, and I’ve come away very impressed with the conference. It’s definitely not your small your and cozy conference which sometimes can be really nice, but it has so many options for quality sessions, so many talented people, and a multitude of evening events.

This morning I was a panelist on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel, and I think it was pretty good. It’s sometimes hard to tell, but I found the other panelists insightful. Those panelists were Cody Simms from YPN, Larry Allen from Tacoda, Justin Ward from Feedburner, and it was moderated by Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net. I wish we had more time, and perhaps there was too much talking from the panelists as there were still audience members waiting to ask questions when the session ended. It doesn’t look like anyone has blogged about it that I’ve noticed yet.

There’s still a few more days of good looking sessions and party, I’ll report back more with anything particular interesting. If you’re really curious what’s going on in more detail, check out the Technorati SXSW tag, the YouTube SXSW tag, or the Flickr SXSW tag.

Posted in: Conferences

Speaking at SXSW in Austin on March 10th

February 25, 2007 12:10 am / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

SXSWOn March 10th in Austin I’ll be on the Online Publishers and Ad Networks panel at SXSW.

The panel will be moderated by publisher Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net, and will have me representing Right Media and the ad exchange market, Cody Simms of the Yahoo Publisher Network representing the contextual network market, Larry Allen of Tacoda covering behavioral targeting and ad networks, and Justin Ward from Feedburner covering RSS advertising.

Hopefully it will be educational and worthwhile, I know I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been to SXSW, so I’m anxious to check out many of the other sessions and speakers as well.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Conferences, Publishing, Random, Right Media, Yahoo

Super Affiliates Session with Shoemoney, AOJon, and Andrew Johnson

January 22, 2007 8:33 pm / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy

Super AffiliatesThis afternoon’s session at Affiliate summit West 2007 was the Super Affiliates session which was a QA format featuring super affiliates Jeremy Shoemoney Schoemaker, AOJon of Wickedfire, and Andrew Johnson of WebPublisingBlog.com.

I was looking forward to this session as I’m obviously a huge fan of web publishing, and these three all have had a lot of success as web publishers and being able to monetize their efforts.

The session got off a bit slow as there was no moderator and no microphone for the audience, and you need a microphone for the audience to ask questions for the most part. Anyway, they just kicked it off anyway with audience members yelling until a microphone arrived. The following is my paraphrasing of the questions and answers from the Super Affiliates.

How do you pick who you work with?

Shoemoney: I basically test everything, the money doesn’t lie so you just continue what works.

AOJon: I do research at Google to see what areas are hot, but I kind of just got out of doing affiliate marketing.

Andrew: I usually focus on specific niches, so it’s companies that have offers in those niches. I like companies that treat their affiliates right. I also do a lot of stuff outside of affiliate marketing, so I don’t always have the time, but at least the reps keep contacting me with offers.

When you get started how do you know where to go and what to do, how do you make an offer succeed?

Shoemoney: Find a company and start to work with an affiliate manager who will give you insight. A good affiliate manager should know and provide you information on what is and isn’t working for sites like you.;

AOJon: I ask my friends to see what’s working, and I also use Google as a big research tool. Also a company should be able to provide you that information. Hey, why is everyone leaving? (people were leaving in the back)

Andrew: On a technical level, I like to do a PPC test and track the results, and try and determine exactly where the point of failure might be. Run tests with each network on each offer and determine exactly what does and doesn’t work.

Shoemoney: With ringtones as an example you want to test different carriers and landing pages, because what works for Sprint may not work for Cingular?

Once you have your PPC campaigns dialed in, what do you go back and consistently test again for? Are you ever satisfied?

Shoemoney: I’m never satisfied, so I do tons of A/B testing and heatmaps like CrazyEgg and Clicktracks to see what’s going on with my pages and seeing where people are clicking and what they’re doing. You have to keep playing with that content, rearranging things. I pay a guy to make 50 landing pages at a time and then rotate them over a month.

AOJon: We don’t spend any time on anything that is going to convert under 3:1. I guess we’re lazy but we set stuff up and don’t touch it until it dies out.

Andrew: I could spend the time, but I get bored with things so I’m often going to look at new markets because that excites me more. I just want to learn as much new stuff as possible.

Why do you prefer CrazyEgg or heatmaps instead of web analytics?

Shoemoney: Use CrazyEgg testing to set up a layout, and you have three different links to get to wherever you want your traffic to click. Heatmaps will show you which one of those three links is generating the most clicks. They may be clicking on the top link, or a button on the left. You can rearrange your navigation to work better. CrazyEgg will allow you to set up A/B testing and archive the layout. I’ll often even put contextual advertising on the landing pages because if they don’t click on my offer I can still make some money off of them since I paid to get them there.

AOJon: I don’t use heat maps.

When do you decide to bail on something?

AOJon: When conversions start pummeling and it starts to suck. After 6-8 months often times a new and profitable niche can become saturated and you lose your ROI. You probably shouldn’t be telling your friends when something works.

Shoemoney: The numbers don’t lie, it’s all about being profitable. I give a new program a day if I know what the results should be.

Andrew: Just look at your spreadsheet and see if it’s losing money. If it’s something minor you can fix, then do it, if not move on. Just because something is dead, it doesn’t mean you can’t come back down the road and use some elements again.

Have any of you ever tried affiliate relationships with web hosts? What tips can you give on really competitive marketplaces?

Shoemoney: Why do I always have to go first? I personally never got into the web hosting affiliate space because it was saturated when I got into the business and I’m interested in so many different things. It’s still very simple in a lot of niches and people overcomplicate it. At a previous event someone asked if you can still make money in something saturated like ringtones, so we picked some artists, bought some traffic on MSN Adcenter and sent it to AzoogleAds ringtone offers and they quadrupled their money the next day.

AOJon: Yeah, web hosting was saturated in 1998. So you guys need balls of steel to compete in that space, so maybe you do incentivized offers where you give your affiliates interesting or unique gifts and prizes. Back in my adult affiliate days, they’d do tiered programs that would pay you more the better you did. They pioneered so many things. They did point prizes where you earned points for signing people up, then give prizes for points.

Andrew: I’d recommend looking hard at the long tail and targeting specific markets that need hosting. How about packaging hosting templates for things like tanning salon businesses and making it a specific sell to tanning salons.

AOJon: You could also go to offer hosting large forums. Not just mine, because mine rocks, but we had a large hosting company who offered to host our forums for free if we’d just put their logo near the top.

You talk about testing as much as you can, so taking the ringtones example, how much media spend or click volume do you allocate to a test before shut it down?

Shoemoney: I’m probably unlike most people driving click traffic. I only pay the minimum PPC amount and focus on huge amounts of keywords to drive volume. You’d be surprised at the weird keywords that end up converting. Like AOL.com converted for me for ringtones.

AOJon: Uh, that’s trademarked.

Shoemoney: Oh, it is? Anyway, when Adcenter first came out they had no cap on the number of keywords you can upload, I took CNET’s database of search terms they made public that had like 27 million unique keywords. I broke out all the unique phrases and uploaded to Adcenter and made a bunch of money bidding the minimum. Of course then I got banned for doing that! There are caps on all the engines now, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple accounts. Not that I do or anything.

What do you do if a CPA company doesn’t pay you? Or has that happened?

Shoemoney: If I get burned I’ll blog about it and put the word out. One guy had a Commission Junction problem and had all this evidence so I blogged about it.

AOJon: I had a problem with Commission Junction, I was doing mortgage leads and a merchant claimed a bunch of leads 30 days later were fraud so they didn’t want to pay $170,000. They need to treat affiliates better. It took me two and a half weeks to four different people to find out I wasn’t getting paid. Go to forums and talk about it. We’re launching a directory, and letting people rate affiliate programs and giving them all equal listings for people to rate. But also letting the programs talk to people as well to figure it out.

Shoemoney: If you post on forums about a problem, you’ll get a lot of attention. Just make sure you’re very factual about what’s going on.

Andrew: If you are a program or network, you need to make it a top priority to monitor forums and address issues that are brought up about your company.

AOJon: I know a lot of people who get banned by Google Adsense or YPN without explanation. We don’t get to see stats from Google or Yahoo on what they claim is fraudulent, but if we want to complain about fraud we have to provide stats. Why don’t they?

Do you use any second tier search engines?

AOJon: I’ve been using them for arbitrage, but arbitrage 2.0 which is a content site that is Adsense and YPN and gives the user what they want to find. So I’d buy cheap clicks on these 2nd and 3rd tier networks. Typically nothing every converts, but it’s a good way to buy cheap traffic and then get a higher paid click from Google. Don’t make the page plastered with ads, but if they click on an ad you’ll make some money.

Shoemoney: When I’ve dabbled with them, and something like Adbrite, and a lot of them deliver a lot of international traffic. If you’re going to pay for it, make sure you have offers that international traffic can convert for. Set up a good geotargeting system to make sure you give people the offers that work for your geography and get the best ROI.

Andrew: I think we should probably clarify to make a difference for something like Adbrite which is on page advertising instead of something like Searchfeed or 7search which have poor conversion rates on affiliate offers.

When I am doing affiliate marketing or arbitrage I feel like my hands are tied because I don’t have control of what the landing page is like that I’m sending people to, what can we as affiliates do to help companies make better landing pages?

Andrew: I think we’re going to see more white-labeling and custom landing pages. I think if you also contact the company and are willing to help them and do some testing for them, they may be willing to work with you. Probably not the largest companies, but some of the smaller ones.

Shoemoney: Some companies like Azoogle will work with you and work with their merchants to make landing pages better. I think the ringtones do a good job with it.

AOJon: Threaten them. If they aren’t willing to work with you, then leave. Many companies will customize offers for you. There’s no reason we have to abide by their rules and there’s so much competition out there between affiliate networks those ones that make the extra effort to work with you will win out.

With forums, how do you go out and start a new forum in a competitive space?

AOJOn: Wickedfire has no ads on it right now, we’re only 6 months old. A lot of time people make forums to monetize them, but you should get the quality up before you put the ads on it. I’ll take this opportunity to bash Earnersforum, they started out and put ads all over the place, we didn’t, and we started doing really well. We’re going to add ads soon, but do it in a simple way. We also did contests to give incentive for people to post. It pissed some people off, but it worked to get some people posting. As it grew we kept giving users what they wanted to get. We don’t censor anything. In an industry like video games that has a million forums, why not start giving away games? That’d get people interested. Don’t focus on ads until you’re already rolling.

Shoemoney: You first mentioned DigitalPoint. He’s owned that domain for about 10 years, and used his forums to support his software, then launched the webmaster forums. He got people to his domain through his free tools as well, and then put his latest posts in a little box on those tools pages so tool users would go join the forums. It’s just a lot of ways to keep acquiring users. I’ve tried a couple of those “pay per forum posts” services and they’ve been horrible. People don’t just sign up for forums anymore to have a place a chat. You have to find good ways to get people to your forums.

How do you compile reports to give to the search engines to report bad clicks?

Shoemoney: We only target USA users, so anything that we get that’s not USA we know it’s invalid. If we see the same IPs over and over, or IPs repetitively clicking then we submit those. The engines are pretty receptive because they do want to keep things legitimate.

AOJon: I’m technically challenged, but my partner over there does. Go talk to him. He’s like a genius or something. You can also call him really late at night.

Andrew: I think we’re done. Here’s a final plug, stop by WickedFire.com, Shoemoney.com, or Webpublishingblog.com, and send us any questions.

Shoemoney: In closing, I think it’s a really interesting time in the affiliate space. It used to be a lot of bulk emailing, but now everyone is realizing the power of search engine marketing. As more affiliates figure this out and get more statistics and SEM tools, it’ll just get better.

Posted in: Advertising, Conferences, Publishing

Affiliate Summit West Lights Up Las Vegas

January 22, 2007 3:51 am / 1 Comment / Pat McCarthy

Vegas at Night
Not a bad view from my hotel room, and I’m looking forward to meeting lots of people at the conference over the next couple of days and learning some things as well. And yes, I already have lost a little money, but plenty of time to win it back!

Posted in: Conferences, Random

Heading to Affiliate Summit West 2007

January 19, 2007 6:06 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

Affiliate Summit LogoOn Sunday I’ll be off to Affiliate Summt West 2007 in Las Vegas. The conference is much larger this year and there looks to be some good speakers and sessions. If you’d like to meet in person, shoot me an email to pmccarthy@gmail.com.

I’ll also try and do a couple of blog updates from the event.

Posted in: Conferences, Random

Carson Systems To Launch Future of Online Advertising Conference in New York

January 9, 2007 12:58 pm / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy
Future of Online Advertising Logo

Carson Systems, the company behind applications like DropSend and Amigo, and the Future of Web Apps conference series, have announced that they are putting on a conference called the Future of Online Advertising to take place in New York this June.

The topics that will be covered at the event:

  • Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  • Video advertising
  • E-mail advertising
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Click fraud
  • Ad filtering
  • Advertising networks
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Pay-per-click advertising
  • Advertising standards
  • Contextual advertising
  • Advertising on social networks
  • Advertising in the virtual world
  • Behavioural targeting

I attended the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco last fall and really enjoyed the event, so I’m looking forward to this conference from Carson Systems this summer. Additionally, I’ve helped them out a tiny bit in a few ways to point them in some directions I felt were important to the future of online advertising and led them on some paths to hopefully find some key people in the industry to be involved.

Posted in: Advertising, Conferences

Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit

November 14, 2006 1:02 am / 3 Comments / Pat McCarthy

After a weekend to reflect, I’ve come up with the Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit that was put on by O’Reilly and hosted by John Battelle.

1. Google likes it fast.
While the results and point of her talk wasn’t surprising, Marissa Mayer did an efficient 10 minute talk with great examples proving that the speed of a web application is one of the most important things to users, and it often has a very direct correlation to traffic and revenue.

2. Everybody is chasing Google.
Essentially every interview and session I attended featured a question along the lines of “How can you/we beat/compete with Google?”. Again, not really groundbreaking, but when you see numerous CEOs and powerful people at all the major web companies trying to answer that question without really having a great answer, it makes it all too clear that nobody knows yet how to deal with the 800-lb gorilla.

3. Jeff Bezos is on to something.
Amazon’s recent move into web services has befuddled analysts on Wall St., but after listening to the energetic Bezos talk about their new initiatives on this area you can see that it is a good opportunity for Amazon, and one they intend on dominating at. I like the move.

4. Advertising is being thrown on it’s head.
The Advertising 2.0 session, as well as other sessions and talks helped show that advertising online is far from being set in stone. Ideas are still coming from everywhere, and many large players are still not yet embracing some of the new and better ideas. Video advertising is a big opportunity that’s being attacked from many different angles, and nobody knows what the right one is yet.

5. There aren’t as many innovative startups as I thought, at least not there.
After hearing that there were over 250 companies that applied to be part of the Launchpad 13 where startups got to launch themselves with a 5-minute presentation, and after seeing who the panel of judges were, I thought we were in for an exciting set of companies. I was underwhelmed, and a bit bored by the presentations. One-quarter of them seemed useless, one-quarter of them didn’t seem very innovative, one-quarter were actually interesting and promising, and I’d read/used about one-quarter of them long ago (how is that a launch?).

6. It feels like a bubble.
It was a really nice venue, very crowded, the parties were pretty lavish, and it seemed like a lot of people were walking around hoping to get bought by the big few in the industry. Just had a bubble vibe.

7. You can hack a conference.
Recently-launched Mashery hacked the conference by booking a conference room for a party right in the middle of the action. It was cheaper than sponsoring the event, and may have gotten them more attention.

8. Basic problems still need fixing.
About 40% of talks and sessions seemed to have problems with the wireless connection, computers screwing up or crashing, or power not working. And the conference wireless connections were hit and miss all week. It’s ironic we’re all trying to build these new revolutionary web applications, when we still suffer from such basic infrastructure problems.

9. Talking to random people you don’t know is still socially awkward.
I’ve been to many business conferences, I feel confident about myself and my employer, and I feel I’m a social person. Yet, there’s still something very socially awkward having conversations with people at these events. They’re either trying to sell me something, I’m trying to sell them something, or you’re both generally not interested but still are in a situation where a conversation needs to exist. Sure, every once in a while a common ground is formed and a real conversation ensues, but it’s still pretty strange.

10. Eric Schmidt talks through an API.
Read the link for more details, but it was fascinating listening to Schmidt talk intelligently, dance around tough questions, and jab his competitors without explicitly doing so. Very well done.

Posted in: Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Google, Web 2.0

Update From Entrepreneurs at Web 2.0 Summit

November 9, 2006 11:54 am / Leave a Comment / Pat McCarthy

This session at the Web 2.0 Summit was a visit with four entrepreneurs who launched in the last year and had involvement in the last Web 2.0 Summit.

Zimbra – Satish Dharmaraj
Launched the Zimbra Collobration Suite last year, and they started selling the suite in March. They just passed 4 million accounts.

Today they are launching the Zimbra offline AJAX client. It works just like Zimbra online, and basically sent messages just stay in the Outbox. When you get back online, you just hit the synchronization button and it syncs up and sells your email.

They are also starting to sell a white label solution. Satish gave a funny demo where they skinned and made Zimbra into an exact replica of the Gmail interface.

Zimbra raised $15 million and hasn’t really touched it. They are trying to disruptive stuff and thought it’d be necessary, but they’re doing pretty well.

Zimbra knew a bunch of developers, so it hasn’t been a big challenge.

Their biggest mistake was asking for an all or nothing on their product suite.

Veoh Networks – Dmitry Shapiro
It’s a peer to peer network, but uses the Netflix queue idea combined with an Internet Tivo. They’ve started dealing with long form high resolution video, and think it changes the way TV work.

They got a Series B round of $12 million, and are doing over 3 million unique visitors. Initially they raised $2 million in a Series A, and they haven’t used much of the Series B yet. They feel they need a warchest because this is a big opportunity and aren’t planning on a quick exit. Their business is very capital expensive.

Finding good developers has been a challenge for them.

One problem they’ve seen is knowing where to stop with features and opportunities. They get presented with many opportunities to extend their video platform and white label things, and they need to keep in control.

Wink – Michael Tanne
A social search engine that launched late last year. They feel that the web is getting more social (no kidding!), and they take user input and help turn those into relevant search results. They put an early beta out earlier in the year, and a month ago they did a major upgrade to the product to take into account all the feedback they got. They also added “collections”, which allows people to put links together that belong in the same community. He gave a nice demo of a Ramones collection.

You can also do an Advanced People Search across social networks, which is pretty cool, and also probably makes for a great stalker tool. You can search social networks for specific interests, filter by gender, filter by age, and filter by dating status.

He thinks people should start with an angel investment for a consumer web application, and see where it goes from there. They took $6 million and have only used $1 million of that.

He thought their biggest mistake was probably releasing their product too early before it was ready.

Weblogs Inc./Netscape – Jason Calacanis
It’s been a big year, they sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and have now integrated that into AOL. He’s still running Weblogs Inc, but when he got to AOL they were wanting to do something different with Netscape.com since it had been stangnant for a few years. Jason liked what was going on with Digg, del.icio.us, and other sites like that and rolled with the Digg model with an added editorial layer and did meta-journalism.

He thinks they had a rocky start, but things are going well now. He thinks they are less susceptible to gaming, and have vastly different demographics. Digg is 94% male, and Netscape is split pretty evenly between male and female, and they have a more balanced audience. So while tech stories dominate Digg, Netscape sees a mix of general news, politics, and family stories.

To start Weblogs Inc. Jason and Brian Alvey put in their own money, and Mark Cuban then invested low six figures which they didn’t touch.

Finding developers has not been a challenge for them because Jason feels that you just need to have something they believe in, and to find them working at jobs. He said good developers have jobs, so you just need to recruit them away.

He’s felt his biggest mistake is probably six or seven blog posts he’d like to take back. He was used to a transparency and fast acting style, and many in AOL were uncomfortable with that. But they’ve found a good balance and he and other new companies in AOL like Userplane our working with the old guard to push AOL forward.

He also mentioned one problem was parallel entrepreneurs who take on too many projects or get too wide on their main project. Mark Cuban always told him “remember what got us here”, which was a reminder to focus on their profitable blogs and don’t move out into all the other opportunties that were popping up.

Posted in: Blogging, Conferences, Web 2.0

A Paraphrased Conversation with Ross Levinsohn of News Corp

November 9, 2006 12:54 am / 2 Comments / Pat McCarthy
levinsohn.jpg

levinsohn.jpgPerhaps one of the most well-known acquistion guys in the Web 2.0 world is Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn. The following is a paraphrased conversation he had with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier today:

JB: So you bought Myspace, it exploded. Google bought YouTube. You said that if YouTube had shopped themselves maybe they could get 2 billion, is that what you’d pay?

RL: No, I went on to say we probably wouldn’t participate at the price they sold for. YouTube is a fantastic property. It would have been fun to be involved. It went very fast, and perhaps it was the right deal for both companies.

JB: Give us some insider information, what happened when you heard about the deal? You and the folks at Fox weren’t pleased?

RL: No, that’s not fair. Pre-Google I had always expressed my support and had spent some time wtih Chad and Steve and the VCs there, and expressed an interest that we’d like to be involved if they ever wanted to sell.

JB: So after they sold they made a visit, did they have to make nice since Myspace provides so much traffic to YouTube?

RL: No, they didn’t need to make nice. Google is a large strategic partner for us, they are our largest partner really, and we are a big partner of theirs. When you look across the web, those who are your biggest partners are often your biggest competitors. You just have to manage these relationships and make them work.

JB: So the deal you did with Google and Myspace. $900 million deal across Fox Interactive. What is that $900 million for?

RL: It’s for Google to power search across Fox properties except FoxSports due to our MSN deal. It’s a pretty simple deal although the negotiations were fast and complex. People were saying years ago I was the dumbest guy on the planet and that News Corp was crazy for paying what we did for Myspace. You’re neither as dumb or smart as people make it seem. This is a hard business, nothing is as it seems. It wasn’t as bad a deal as it seemed at the time, and if we don’t pay 100% attention to it and grow it, it won’t be as good as some think it is now.

JB: Myspace streams more videos than YouTube, so really that price tag for it’s worth is now over 1.65 billion. Do you plan on ever selling it?

RL: You’d have to ask Rupert, but we have no plans to do so. But never say never.

JB: According to Nielsen, traffic declined at Myspace from August to September. Are you worried about that?

RL: I’m not worried, most sites are down at that time of year, it’s seasonal, and we had a similar dip a year ago. We’re launching internationally, Myspace Japan, etc. We added 320k profiles yesterday, that’s like the size of Buffalo. Time spent on the site has grown 30% in the last 6 months, and we’re up to 38 billion page views a month.

JB: What do you look for in a company when you’re thinking about an acquisition, and are you still looking?

RL: IF we’re not looking we’re not doing our job. we haven’t bought a single company in the last four to five months however.

JB: Does that mean there aren’t any good companies now? Have they all been bought up?

RL: No, I’ve been here all morning at this conference meeting with people and my head is spinning. It’s a great time in this business and media. I get excited about new things. It’s much easier for us to integrate companies into Fox now than it was a year ago. When I look at acquisition targets, I look at the people, and you can see their passion. I’ve met with people who I could tell they were just buliding to sell.

JB: Barry Diller said yesterday that an entrepreneur with a great idea shouldn’t sell. Do you agree?

RL: I disagree. Not to hedge, but in some cases if you’re building a really good feature, it may make more sense to sell. If you’re building the next Google, then obviously you don’t want to sell too early.

JB: One of the previous founders of Myspace keeps suing you guys. He’s now suing you over censorship because you are blocking his sites apps from being shown on Myspace. What can you say about this?

RL: It’s Brad Greenspan, and every motion he’s filed against us has been thrown out. It’s like a boxer who fought Mike Tyson who kept getting knocked down and then getting back up. He got thrown out of the company years before we bought it, and he made $40-50 million in the sale but won’t let it go. Life is too short.

Question from an audience member: Will Myspace open up it’s data like Facebook?

RL: Email Tom Anderson. It’s a good idea and one we’re thinking about and talking about.

Posted in: Acquisitions, Advertising, Conferences, Random, Web 2.0

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