Social Media Now: Will the Widget Survive?
May 16, 2007
On the heels of the still-unconfirmed deal to buy Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is apparently making another widget move–acquiring slide show widget maker Flecktor for as much as $20 million, according to Techcrunch, although FIM has declined to confirm or deny the deal.
Michael Arrington neatly lays out the logic of the deal:
It’s an odd acquisition…since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.
But Flektor has a killer team of founders…. Also, Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is built with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code.
The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content.
But what might the deal mean for the rest of the world of widget start-ups? At VentureBeat Dan Kaplan looks at the impact on the leading slide show specialists, Slide and RockYou:
While both Slide and RockYou have huge user-bases, they also depend heavily on social networking giant MySpace and other sites. MySpace has made it abundantly clear that it is happy to pull the plug on widgets that lose its favor. If a Slide or RockYou try to push more advertising, and compete head-on with one of MySpace’s new properties (Photobucket, and potentially Flektor), MySpace may try to snuff them. How valuable are these immensely popular widgets when a small competitor can innovate quickly, get scooped up at a much lower price by MySpace and have a giant platform (like MySpace) to gain distribution?
Good question, one David Hornik’s VentureBlog post earlier this week offered a possible answer to. I recommend reading the whole piece, which is a nice wrap up of the state of the widget economy. But most interesting are his observations on the relationship between start-up widget makers and the big boys of social networking:
If a widget is doing nothing to monetize its host’s traffic…, it might be viewed as neutral or perhaps symbiotic for freely increasing the functionality of the host’s site. If a widget is seeking to monetize the host’s viewers (e.g., ads or branding on a voicemail widget), the host may view that widget as parasitic. This relationship, of course, assumes there is a zero sum game of monetizable attention on any given host service, therefore the fact that a widget is monetizing some of that attention means the host has lost that revenue opportunity in return. ….my view is that if a service’s functionality is significantly enhanced as a result of the various widgets that attach to it (e.g., the MySpace experience was massively enhanced early on by the work of both Photobucket and YouTube), one might argue that the widget experience is always symbiotic — enhanced functionality in exchange for traffic, monetized or not.
But it’s interesting to see how quickly the the attitude among the digerati has changed towards widget start ups–from cheerleading for a new world order, to fatalistic resignation about the power of MySpace and Facebook. Om Malik, has a non-interview interview with FIM’s Peter Levinsohn, which is not nearly as bullish on widgets as Hornik’s piece:
The acquisition, if true, is yet another proof that widget (and other start-ups) need to diversify their user bases, because sooner or later MySpace is going to end-up compete with them. This is the way of the large companies, and it is not unusual. What is strange is that start-ups ignore this fact of life - putting their destiny in other people’s hands.
Think this way - if a company trying to do an IPO gets 50% of its revenues from one customers, even the bravest investor runs away from that deal. Why should it be any different for start-ups who are basically hawking traffic and eyeball stats? Funnily enough people have been ignoring what Fox executives have been saying for a while now.
But the Internet media business has always been like squeezing toothpaste, and its hard to imagine that MySpace and Facebook represent the last large audiences to be amassed in the social networking business.
Sphere: Related Content
Social Media Now: How Big is Your Widget?
May 11, 2007
Several pieces this morning got me thinking about the size and scale of the widget business. First, Matt Marshall at Venture Beat wrote about Slide–maker of a web slide show widget:
Slide, the maker of a Web slide show feature, has emerged as a major player, boasting 150 million daily slide show views and more than 200,000 new slide show “widgets” created daily.
These numbers are astonishing, and are enough to make it the largest “independent” widget company on the web, according to the company. It is a striking example of how quickly you can grow if you have a good, simple idea.
Techcrunch too touted Slide as well as a competitor called Flektor, hyping their value based on traffic numbers and the recently reported $300 million price that MySpace has agreed to pay to acquire Photobucket:
The new kid on the slide show block is Flektor. It just recently came out of beta and has few users so far, but we’re hearing they are getting a lot of attention from potential acquirors.
Does Michael Arrington get a finders fee? I find myself frustrated by Techcrunch when its tone become so unremittingly promotional, for example: “Flektor is brand new and doesn’t have the capitalization complications of the older startups. My bet (and rumors around the valley back this up) is they may be acquired in the next six months by one of the social networks, perhaps one of the up and comers looking for as many tools as possible to compete with MySpace.” Buy now! Tickets going fast!
By contrast Fred Wilson threw a bit of a wet blanket onto widget traffic numbers, writing about Clearspring, which claims to be serving 60 million content widgets a day. Fred, who is one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful investors I know, doesn’t doubt Clearspring’s numbers, but he does wonder out loud about the way we measure widgets:
But before we start putting Clearspring in McDonald’s territory (billions served), let’s get something straight. Serving widgets generates huge numbers quickly.All you need to do is look at Photobucket, Slide, and RockYou’s numbers for their photo/slideshow widgets to see how powerful the widget model is. I don’t have access to the actual numbers for these three photo widget services and I’d prefer not to print the rumors I’ve heard, but I’d venture a guess that their numbers for widgets served each day will make Clearspring’s 3bn number look tiny.
I do know the numbers for FeedBurner’s widgets and they are well north of what Clearspring is serving. But this post is not about whose you know what is bigger than whose.
It’s about the challenge of understanding what is what in the widget market.
The Internet has long promised to be the most measurable media platform ever, but despite the plethora of metrics that exist–heck, perhaps because of the plethora of metrics that exist– no universally-accepted, bullet-proof, third-party standards exists to allow apples to apples comparisons between one Internet property and another, never mind between one widget company and another.
This babel of measurement is only exacerbated by the distributed nature of widget traffic. From Fred again:
Are those 18mm uniques that are attributed to Photobucket being seen on Photobucket.com? Or are those 18mm uniques the number of people that are being exposed to the Photobucket widget wherever it is being embedded (MySpace, Beebo, etc). I don’t know the answer to that simple question, but it’s an important one.
And what’s the right number to look at? Should Photobucket get credit for having an audience that sees its widget on other services pages? When that page includes five to ten other widgets? Or should it just get credit for those who interact with the widget in some way?
There’s no doubt that the widget business could benefit from a third party measurement that every party could trust. Perhaps the measurement system should be multi-tiered–measuring total traffic, number of widgets distributed, traffic at the point of distribution, and click-through rates (to the extent that a widget is actionable).
Would widget makers welcome such a system? It seems to me that for the moment the dearth of real measurement benefits widget-makers by inflating the value of their products. But a widget to measure widgets–that would have some real value.
Link Love:
Chinese Social Net 51.com Secures $10 Million In Second Round
Last.fm Adds Personalized Music Anywhere Widget
Facebook Marketplace: The Alternatives
Lots of blather on the Net this morning about Facebook’s new free classified ad offering. Here’s a different take that looks at competitors from an end-user’s perspective
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Social Media Now: Widgets, Discovery, and Catching a Buzz
May 9, 2007
When is a widget not a widget? That’s the question I find myself asking this morning as I read about Mpire’s official roll out today of 80 new widgets that variously package affiliate shopping and selling data from Amazon and eBay.
Mpire’s collection of 75 widgets gives free access to packaged, historical Amazon and eBay shopping trend results across 15 popular categories, such as entertainment, sports, fashion, technology, games and youth/teens. Typically, consumers and eBay sellers have had to pay a monthly fee to find out what’s hot or gaining in popularity.
The widgets are for publishers who are Amazon and eBay affiliates, and they are free to publishers. They republish semi-custom content about eBay and Amazon sales (ie, what’s hot in certain categories) with the value proposition to publishers being a tool to drive more retail traffic through the affiliated site. The widgets won’t be revenue generators for Mpire, Hulett told Techcrunch. The program is more about mindshare than about money.
John Cook at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a longer interview with Huellet and Mpire co-founder Dave Cotter who explains the retail widgets as an evolution in web advertising.
Maybe. Sales tracking data, particularly those that track information about market prices on eBay, are certainly valuable. And anything that increases sales is gravy to members of online retail affiliate networks. But is that kind of information broadly valuable to surfers? I’m not sure. Still the notion that actionable widgets represent an evolution in online ad networks is a compelling one.
Now if Mpire would only work some kind of social shopping component into the mix.
Speaking of social shopping, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning that eBay’s acquisition talks with StumbleUpon have heated up, with a potential deal being priced at around $75 million.
Since its very successful purchase and integration of Paypal in in 2002, eBay’s acquisition strategy has been a bit mysterious. I never understood what Skype had to do with running an auction house. But I get the potential core use of StumbleUpon–a social discovery engine: driving buyers to other things they might like but would never think to search for.
Discovery has the potential to solve enormous problems for online retail which today works most successfully when buyers know exactly what they are looking for but least successfully when trying to replicate the bricks and mortar experience of browsing and window shopping leading to impulse purchases.
Link Love:
Mobile Social Networks, Don’t Go it Alone
Katie Fehrenbacher looks at mobile social network start-up InterCasting (whose consumer service is called Rabble). The company has begun selling business to business application through which: “carriers and web-based social network providers….can plug into Intercasting’s gateway via APIs, and the service combines a server software and a handset client”
Buzzlogic Shows Which Bloggers Have Power, and Where
At VentureBeat, Matt Marshall offers an excellent, in-depth look at Buzzlogic’s product–an enterprise-class (and enterprise priced) software for tracking the influence of certain blogs and the impact of blog buzz on products and services. Figuring out how to measure this stuff is crucial to the development of social media as an industry and Buzzlogic seems to be way out in front of the curve
Last.fm + YouTube = Last.fm Video!
Kristen Nicole at Mashable tells us about plans by the UK social music discovery company Last.FM to launch a video service this week.
Social Media Now: Monetizing Widgets, MySpace: Link Nazi, Social News
April 25, 2007
Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.
First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that means widget makers are faced not only with the challenges of making great widgets but also with the challenges of building sales staffs and paying publishers:
This means that companies like Slide, Photobucket, and others will start having to pay a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC). For ad networks, this TAC looks like 60-80% to the publisher, but they are given a standard unit with little to no value to the end user. Let’s say that the widgets will get a better position, like 40-50%.
But even once this is solved, they will have to figure out how to monetize the space. They will also have to build out ad sales teams in order to monetize the real estate, and it’ll probably be brand advertising and not direct response. The former is much harder than the latter.
Andrew offers four things widget makers need to do to improve their earning potential including building sales teams and destinations sites of their own. And Chen is down on widget aggregators:
I think one major loser for this perspective on the market is widget aggregators. In those cases, every $100 needs to be split amongst the blog infrastructure, the widget market, the widget aggregator, and potentially the user. Yuck. That’s a bad business to be in.
Second, regular readers know I’m a believer in the creeping decentralization of social networking–moving away from hubs like MySpace and Facebook and towards white label social networks and Net applications (like the browser) with embedded social functionality (with some kind of cross-platform portable ID). It’s a future against which MySpace continues to erect barriers. Several blogs, and several forums for MySpace layout providers, have noticed that MySpace has begun to filter outgoing links posted in comments through a service called Msplinks.com–a property owned by fraud protection service Mark Monitor.
On one hand the move–which replaces direct links to outside sites with links through Msplink–will benefit users by targeted comment spam. On the other hand it gives MySpace the ability to defeat not only businesses it considers parasitic, but even defeat collateral brand building that come by placing links. Writes Hooman Radfar at Widgify:
For example, I posted a link to Widgify to my friend’s MySpace page. I set the link target to:
When the link was published to his MySpace comment section, the link target was replaced with:
http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpZGdpZnkuY29t
This means that MySpace can now not only track link-out activity, but can also block outbound links. This only seems to be the case with new comments. Old comments still point to their original link targets. MySpace has already turned off links for Flash widgets, so there is definitely a pattern emerging. This activity is extremely interesting in light of the upcoming changes coming soon from MySpace competitor, Facebook. Facebook seems to be moving in the opposite direction - opening up to developers. I wonder if MySpace take a hint from web history, or continue to move along their current trajectory. I guess time will tell if Tom still wants to be everyone’s friend.
Finally, in the world of social news, Seattle-based Newsvine launched a redesigned version of its service yesterday. CEO Mike Davidson gives a full wrap up of the new design on his blog. The central premise of the redesign is the ability of users to recreate not only “MY” style news pages but a customized front page for the service as a whole:
We have our own ideas for what the front page of a news site should look like and you have yours. Most major news sites attempt to solve this problem by maintaining their editorially imposed front page and then offering a “My” page which users can play around with and customize. The result of this strategy is almost always two-fold: 1) Barely anyone customizes. 2) Even among those who customize, there is hesitancy among users to give up their daily reading of the front page in favor of the “My” page. This is evident from sites like ESPN and Yahoo News, both of which have feature-rich “My” pages but do a ton more traffic on their front pages.
The move will be an interesting test of an important question in the world of customized news–do end users fail to customize because it’s not easy for them to do so, or do end users fail to customize because they’re more interested in having some third party provide a top level news filter in a world over information overload?
I think social news should function a lot more like Last.FM–I’m must more interested in knowing which news stories are being read by friends who share my interests than I am interested in knowing what news stories are being rated highly by an enormous general audience. A top level news filter based on social profiles and friends, plus distribution via widgets, would do a lot more for the social news business than individual customization or over all ratings at web hubs.
Sphere: Related ContentSocial Media Now: Confusion over DIY Media at NAB, Facebook Widget Friendly?
April 18, 2007
Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything substantive has changed but because broadcasters are using the wrong words to describe why they old ways are better than the new ones:
Internet radio sounds like the future. Wireless sounds like the future. Digital television sounds like the future. High def sounds like the future. YouTube, Google, iBiquity sound like the future.
What does “free over-the-air broadcasting” sound like? I think you know.
We were wireless before it was hot, but we are captives of the language of decades gone by. The language of our past is confusing and perhaps obsolete. We need to update and clarify. We need to reframe and rebrand.
….
The NAB right now has a team working on finding the best words to define us and take us into the future. This will be a long and continuing effort. But, we need your help. We need your ideas. We need your self-discipline, so that we all speak the same language.
Pitiful. Sounds like when athletes and politicians blame the media for their failings.
Meanwhile, NAB members seem to be adapting by co-opting, aggregating and framing user generated content. At Lost Remote Cory Bergman tells the tale of television station WKRN in Nashville which created a blog, NashvilleisTalking, to aggregate information from local blogs already being produced in and around Nashville. In addition the station has launched other blogs under its own domains:
Our traffic has grown phenomenally. 60 percent of our traffic is WKRN and 40 percent is the blogs,” he said. NashvilleisTalking — which aggregates content from 435 local blogs — averages 5,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday the number hit 9,000 due to the Virginia shooting). And what about revenue? “We’re making more money this year than we’ve ever made,” Sechrist said. “And it’s from the pre-rolls on the videos.” He said WKRN is averaging 600,000 videos played a month, and much of that success is due to video’s exposure on the blogs (although he admits a reluctance to push too many ads to the blogs themselves.) But beyond money, Sechrist says “a lot of (our users) are never going to watch us on TV, but they’ll come to us on the web when something big happens. We have a relationship now.”
Meanwhile, programmers continue to try to graft social functionality on to traditional media. The Los Angeles Times has a story today about MTV’s plan to attach online components to all it’s programming:
The key for MTV will be developing shows that will drive viewers to spend time on series-related online games, in Web communities or on cellphones coughing up jokes of the day.
“We can either stay in the mass business,” Graden said, “or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers.”
He said that the current series “Scarred” and “Human Giant” are examples of the new strategy. “User-generated content has to become reflected in our programming,” Graden said. “Something like ‘Scarred,’ which tells the stories behind the Web’s most gruesome clips of crashes, wipeouts and accidents, “is based on footage that may already be infamous, but it’s our own narrative accompanying it.”
It just may be that the tradition media players who thrive will be those who most effectively absorb socially created media, not those sitting around with PR agencies trying to figure out different words to use to describe TV and radio
Facebook to go Widget-Friendly, Direct Challenge to MySpace: Eliot Van Buskurk reported yesterday in Wired News that Facebook plans to open it’s network to third party widgets, taking a precisely opposite approach from its chief competitor MySpace, which has declared war on third-party widgets. If it happens the effort will allow us to gauge the value of openness and widgets to social networking hubs. At Mashable, Pete Cashmore thinks open widgets are the best strategy for wresting the social networking crown from MySpace. I don’t know if widgets will be the difference maker, but I and anyone invested in the widget business will certainly be watching to find out.
Sphere: Related ContentSocial Media Now: The Global War on Widgets Continues
April 12, 2007
Yesterday’s MySpace/Photobucket flap was the latest skirmish in the ongoing war on widgets led by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division responsible for running MySpace.
It’s funny watching the digerati contort itself in an effort to explain why MySpace is wrong both morally and financially. Jon Fortt at Business 2.0’s The Utility Belt, probably went the furthest, actually quoting scripture to suggest that MySpaces is on a hubris-paved path to destruction. And Photobucket’s own desperate attempts to foment unrest among MySpace users reminds me of nothing so much as the scene from Woodstock–mud caked hippies sitting in a field chanting “No rain”!
My old friend Ed Sim offered what I thought was the most simple, sober observation:
Well guess what-distribution via widgets on MySpace was relatively frictionless, but now that Photobucket is a serious player, the Gorilla is fighting back and that is just the way the world works. I am not saying that you should not leverage free distribution, but that you should prepare yourself for the day that it may disappear.
There’s plenty of other postmortem examination today, the best comes from Om Malik, who gives us 5 lessons of Photobucket Fiasco, and Nicholas Carr, whose comparison between the economics of social networks and the economics of sharecropping is truely inspired:
It’s worth remembering that the business model of Web 2.0 social networks is the sharecropping model. After the Civil War, when the original sharecropping system took hold in the American south, the plantation owners made money in two ways. They leased land to the sharecroppers, and they also leased them their tools. It’s no different this time. The payments for land (Web pages) and tools (video widgets et al.) don’t come directly, through exchanges of cash, but rather indirectly, through the sale of advertisements. But the idea is the same. If there’s a widget that can accommodate advertising, that tool will be supplied by the plantation owner, not by some interloping varmint. Whine all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to be.
Now, if the interloper would like to pay for the privilege of being a tool supplier on the plantation owner’s land, well, that’s a different story entirely.
There’s one crucial difference, however, between social networks and cotton plantations. God wasn’t making any more plantation acreage, but Internet real estate is infinitely expanding, and users don’t need to rely on government largess for their 40 acres and a mule.
Having spent a fortune for MySpace, executives at FIM are obviously feeling their oats and certainly MySpace (as well as Facebook) remains a powerhouse by virtue of the traffic it generates and the barrier to user exit created by the network effect. But industry leading social sites have come and gone before, going back to the Web 1.0 days of personal web page building through the social media era. Does anybody remember TheGlobe? Geocities? Friendster?
(Wired News has an interview today with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams about his new, vowel-challenged business, Socalizr, which combines event planning with social networking.)
Embedding social functionality in the browser in inevitable. Social networks that aren’t web based—like AIM–can snap on Web-based functionality (although the AIM Pages beta is lame so far). Businesses like Socializr reflect the trend of adding social functions to all Web content and services. The era of private label social networking is just beginning. Transportable identification will allow users to easily cross social networks. Clearly the future of social media is open, not closed.
As long as social networks like MySpace are free, easy to use, quick to add functionality and perceived to be cool, there’s no reason for consumers to switch. But there’s also no reason for consumers to join only one social network. The mindshare and pageviews crucial to MySpace as an ad supported business in the end may rely more on new and added functionality than FIM executives believe.
FIM may be on to something with its SpringWidgets platform–a plantation on which it invites sharecroppers to grow new widgets that Fox can own and control. But its an open source world. New and better functionality is sure to be developed more quickly via open access to widgets. That said, I understand how vexing it must be to see other companies selling advertising on your real estate.
Meanwhile, at Techcrunch Michael Arrington–who leaked information from Photobucket’s roadshow book–asks the question of the day: Can Photobucket Survive without MySpace? To the extent that Photobucket survived before the blockade by selling advertising on its site, seen by users uploading photos, then, yes, Photobucket can survive. (According to Techcrunch two thirds of Photobucket’s revenue came from advertising on its own site over the past two years. Last year’s total revenue was less than $10 million.) To the extent that Photobucket was counting on video posted to MySpace to meet its 2007 revenue target of $32 million, then no, it can’t survive. But it was hard for me to believe the 3X revenue growth in the Photobucket projections to begin with.
Link Love:
Two New Ways to Mine for Twitter Gold
The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter
To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it
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Social Media Now: MySpace Kicks the Photobucket
April 11, 2007
This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.
Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur the loading of video. The still photos it hosts remain unblocked.
Scoble offers a little tough love for users of Photobucket’s video service:
If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and Wordpress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic…. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with [it] when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.
Calling Photobucket a “parasitic service” is a little harsh. It’s a backend business that provides photo hosting and video editing tools for free to users. That its value relies on user created linkbacks from sites it doesn’t own doesn’t make it any more parasitic than your average search engine. Still, its fair to say that Photobucket, like dozens of backend service providers and widget makers, rely for their success on the kindness of strangers.
Michael Arrington at Techcrunch offers a short term history lesson:
This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.
Clearly News Corp’s war on widgets and add-ons continues.
Duncan Riley looks at the business implications for Photobucket, calling the MySpace move an “act of corporate sabotage” and wondering outloud if the move is designed to drive down Photobucket’s asking price:
….when your product targets social networks and you’ve had access partially blocked to the biggest marketplace of them all…with the possibility of course that the ban could end up involving all content, your value drops, and drops dramatically…and because of this there’s little doubt that News Corp has simply just screwed Photobucket over. I wonder if News Corp ends up buying Photobucket? What better way to squeeze a better price!
At Deep Jive Interests Tony Hung nails the lesson of the MySpace move for the development of the widget business:
If MySpace has an alternate video storage and management product cooking — which only has to be *just* has good — it will have no problem locking in its users. ….
And if MySpace *does* have an alternate to Photobucket, the next logical question is “what else do they have cooking?” There’s been a spate of news around widgets which cross blogs and social networks. But if MySpace (and other networks) starts developing their own in-house widgets, it might signal a larger trend towards creating truly closed-in system…not only preventing people from leaving MySpace…but also increasing the height of those metaphorical walls which separate its users from marketers who are salivating at the chance to get at this demographic. Higher walls (to flog the metaphor) can only mean steeper tolls to get access to MySpace’s users.
Scoble adds the observation that this will chill the climate for investment in businesses like widget businesses that rely on social networks to drive traffic.
That’s certainly true. It’s hard to invest in a business whose fate is in the hands of others (unless that business has a patent protectable technological advantage or some such defensible advantage). But I still believe that a secular trend is just beginning which will drive social networking away from walled-garden hubs towards more user directed networks. But a long term secular change is not going to help Photobucket build a consumer facing video business today. It looks as if, to do that, the company will have to launch a site of its own. Does anyone own the Videobucket.com domain?
Building its own social network seems to be the approach of one of Photobucket’s start up competitors. Kristen Nicole at Mashable writes today that DivShare, a photo and video hosting service, has soft launched DivShare Groups–which allows users to establish their own hubs for sharing media. On its blog DivShare lays out the features–comments, RSS feeds, access rules and the rest of the social networking kit and caboodle.
In the traditional media business, power once accrued to copyright holders who often had no direct relationship with consumers–film and TV studios not movie theater and TV station owners. But the irony of the Internet media business is that even though it’s offers a wide open distribution platform, hell, BECAUSE it offers a wide open distribution platform, power accrues to the company that can draw a crowd and develop a direct relationship with consumers. And the more that company relies on the network effect to draw and hold users, the stickier it is (think eBay). For now, News Corp and Facebook, remain the girls with the most cake.
Link Love:
Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine
Techcrunch offers an exclusive inside look at Spock, a people-centered search engine
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Social Media Now: Widgets, TV and Money
March 27, 2007
Bits and pieces this morning from the world of social media….At Mashable Pete Cashmore tells us about the launch of Spinlets, a service that offers an API to allow users to widgetize social websites. The service is the first product from a company called urSpin. Cashmore cites a number of already launched or soon to launch competitors like Webwag, which offers service it calls widgets on demand.
I am increasingly convinced that the future of social media is a decentralized one. The, dare I say it, Web 3.0 cosmology won’t revolve around fixed hubs like MySpace and Facebook but around user created hubs built on white label private networking platforms like Ning or mutated version of current Ajax homepage platforms like Netvibes. In that universe widgets will be the new platform for web services and its worth watching all the companies who make widgets, support widget making, track widgets, and collect metadata from widgets that have been distributed
Will Google sue? Yesterday Broadcasting & Cable reported that the CW network is working on a show with the working title of Viewser that will be built around user content posted to the Web at large. The user-generated or semi-pro content model for TV hardly radical or new. Shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos have long been built around user generated content. From American Idol to the Arthur Godfrey show, amateur hour talent contests have been a mainstay of traditional media programming. And of course MTV’s The Real World predates the Netscape IPO by nearly three years. According to B&C producers are considering ways to make Viewser interactive. But successes for interactive television remain few and far between (I vote for the NFL’s instant replay rule as interactive TVs only real success, at least other than home shopping TV). TV networks and producers can build entertaining programming around user-generated content. But also long as they are locked into the traditional television platform they can’t turn user TV into true social media in which contribution, participation and tagging are the entertainment, not the content.
From the Duh Department….Steve Rubel commented yesterday on a Market Watch story that said that Rocketboom, the pioneering vlog, is looking at new revenue models—including possible paid programming–because, as it turns out, TV advertisers prefer mega audiences to niche ones. So much for all the buzz last year about Rocketboom’s stratospheric CPMs. We all know niche TV can survive with small audiences, but even low rated cable talk shows like Larry King’s or Nancy Grace’s reach four times as many people as Rocketboom, which reaches 200,000 according to Market Watch. The problem for properties like Rocketboom, as well as for almost all podcasts, is that the compete in areas where traditional media already does a good job. Rocketboom is a general interest, traditional-TV style property that is merely distributed differently. Its producers have to convince advertisers not to spend elsewhere but to spend on Rocketboom instead. In that scenario size matters. If you want to make it with ad-supported media that reaches small audiences you better serve a high value audience (billionaires or people with specialty interests) with critical information that audience members can’t get elsewhere.
What’s disturbing about the Rocketboom story is the lack of innovation in business models it reveals. Its the same old, same old: If you can’t make it selling ads then try to charge for content or you sell services (the Rocketboom team is making corporate videos and doing client work for John Edwards). If you want to sell advertising in niche properties you need to assemble a network of niche properties. User generated and semi pro media continues to dismantle the programming paradigms and distribution networks of traditional media without creating new business models to support the alternative.
Sphere: Related ContentSocial Media Now: Widget World
March 21, 2007
Let’s assume that the future of social media is all about widgets and places where people can put them. Let’s assume a universe where all media is distributed by users to other users through widgets that stream audio,
video, text, conversations, personal messages, everything.
We already live in a universe in which every Internet user is also a producer and often a piecemeal distributor, but now let’s assume a universe where everyone is an MSO, everyone is a Clear Channel, everyone is a Cineplex Odeon; a universe where new channels for distribution spring up quickly, spread fast, and, possibly, disappear just as suddenly.
You can see where this might be scary for big media companies which are heavily invested in distribution channels, companies like News Corp which has big money invested in satellite TV, or Time Warner which operates the nation’s biggest cable TV operator.
In this light it’s easy to understand MySpace’s attempt to cut off widgets it can’t control (which broke into the mainstream press yesterday). Sure, News Corp wants to have its hands around all revenues coming into MySpace. But maybe the company is also concerned about how widgets stand to unwind traditional media distribution channels. After all, the widget they pulled the plug on yesterday was a music player.
News Corp of course is hedging its bets, promoting it’s platform for user created widgets, Spring Widgets. But Fred Wilson followed up all the discussion about widgets yesterday with post about how many Spring
Widgets are incompatible with MySpace. Intentional? Who knows.
One new, potentially disruptive widget launched yesterday in a public beta (public beta is the new official launch). Jaxtr is an IP telephony widget that allows users to connect with other phone callers without revealing
their phone numbers. The company also offers web to phone and phone to web voice mail and text messaging as well as a service which allows widget subscribers to phone in to their widgets loading voice messages.
Sounds pretty complex to me although CEO Konstantin Guericke (co-founder of LinkedIn) showed up yesterday on Techcrunch to try to illuminate.
Jaxtr has raised an undisclosed amount of money from a passel of Silicon Valley heavy hitters led by Mayfield Fund’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP/GM of AOL’s Instant Messenger division and David Ladd, former Octel CTO and early pioneer of voicemail.
Sphere: Related ContentSocial Media Now: The Global War on Widgets
March 20, 2007
The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.
Ok, so Hooka, a recently launched project of online music consultancy indie911 wasn’t really “blocked.” A MySpace spokeswoman told the NYT:
A MySpace representative contacted [Nguyen] and told her that she had violated our terms of service in regards to commercial activity. She removed the material herself, after realizing it was not appropriate for MySpace.
The TOS element that Nguyen apparently violated was loading a potentially commercial widget whose maker doesn’t have a revenue sharing deal with MySpace (the MySpace music player is powered by Snocap).
At Mashable Pete Cashmore has been tracking the GWOW for a year noting today that News Corp has also killed Revver, VideoCodeZone, Stickam, Imeem and ProjectPlaylist.
Suggests Cashmore:
…maybe MySpace has realized that the value being created by exponential growth (YouTube, for instance), is far higher than a license fee would cover. Perhaps the more intelligent move would be an “acquire or die” strategy: snap up the best widgets on the way up.
That’s fine, but what happens if the widget war escalates? Say MySpace buys Hooka, and Facebook retaliates blocking Hooka and driving its users into a proprietary music player widget? Will users abandon widgets that aren’t supported by their social nets of choice? Or will they abandon the social nets who limit widgets in favor of open platforms?
After widget makers the people most interested in the answers to those questions are the VCs who invest in widget businesses.
These guys have been having a great conversation about the monetization of the business. David Cohen started it all proclaiming that no matter what widgets will be big business because users love them.
Brad Feld responded with the opinion that widgets which function as application containers for publishers will work, but widget management systems don’t make sense to Brad.
Mike Hirschland issued an open call for thoughts about how to monetize widgets and got a lot of interesting responses.
Chris Fralic offered the opinion that widget management will work as a business offering a variety of functions:
I think we’ll see features like multiple levels of control and customization, automatic updating across the installed base, and tracking of how widgets spread and their “parent/child” relationships
It seems to me that user-chosen widgets freely attachable to all sorts of platforms–from blogs to white label social nets–are the inevitable future and will constitute a new set of networks that will carry ads, messages, and other sorts of media and information. In the long run the social nets most open to innovative add-ons will survive the transition away from social networking hubs towards private -abeled social nets. Why? Because the Internet industry always develops from a more restrictive environment to a less restrictive one.
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