Content Matters

Austin Ventures has announced its acquisition of All Star Directories, a lead generation service for higher education.

Last year, Elisabeth DeMarse of DeMarseCo partnered with Austin Ventures on a $50M buyout fund to make acquisitions in the content space.  This is the first deal completed under that partnership.  DeMarse, of course, led the growth of Bankrate.com from $15M to more than $36M, so she knows something about the lead generation space.

 

DeMarse has been carefully analyzing consumer spends in recent months, to identify the market niches where aggressive growth is attainable.  Indicates Elisabeth "I've reviewed categories as disparate as travel, education, housing, health and wellness, and all the categories of personal finance. When you look at these categories as a percent of HHI, there is a strong common denominator—that a unique visitor to a destination site in one of these categories is quite valuable to an advertiser. The acquisition of All Star Directories represents our first investment in the online education lead generation space.

Mike Mathieu, founder of All Star Directories, has built a very impressive company in five years, with an excellent management team. Doug Brown, President of All Star Directories, will retain his role leading that organization. I will serve on the Board, and continue to uncover investments for AV and DeMarseCo that fit with our strategy."

All Star has thirteen directories and revenues estimated at $15M.  Its products, including All Criminal Justice Schools, All Business Schools and All Nursing Schools, among others, are lead generation  applications aimed at the rapidly growing for-profit education segment.

Google today announced that it has acquired hosted wiki provider JotSpot.
Under the acquisition, the service will become completely free.

Previous rumors this summer had Jot being acquired by Yahoo, as part of their efforts to bulk up their social software platform.  I wouldn't be surprised to see Yahoo respond with an offer for WetPaint or SocialText.

In the near term, the deal provides Google with many more page views for serving ads.  Longer-term, it will be interesting to see whether they integrate Jot with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other collaborative applications.

Last week, Google integrated its Blog Search results into Google News, providing users with a comprehensive view of both “traditional” news and blog posts for their searches. 

Yesterday, in a related move, they added Blog results to Google Alerts.  As shown, you can now set an alert to be "comprehensive" (news, blogs, web and groups) or select an individual type.  The default is comprehensive.  For those of us who track news from various sources, including blogs, this is a huge convenience.  More importantly, these two changes will begin to expose blog posts to many more users who don’t regularly follow blogs.

Today, about half the Content Matters traffic comes via Google web search (the rest is a mix of RSS readers and specialized blog search via Technorati, Google and others).  This web search traffic consists of users who are not specifically seeking out blogs.  Integration of blogs with Google News and Alerts should provide similar exposure to users of online news.

As TechCrunch points out, Yahoo last month reversed course, pulling blog content out of its news results temporarily, as they rework the results.  I expect that we’ll see an integrated view from Yahoo again in the near future.

As content from various sources begins to be included in the “news” bucket and as traditional news is disseminated through more diverse platforms, we will continue to see erosion of the traditional destination news sites.  That’s why the next ten years will bring even more rapid change than the past ten to the news industry.

Via Editor & Publisher, this article summarizes some of the findings of a new analyst report by Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine.
The theme of the Editor & Publisher article is that it will take 30 years for online revenues to equal print advertising revenue for newspapers.  Fine comes to this conclusion, doing a "back of the envelope" calculation using double-digit increases in online ad revenue through 2012, then 5% annual growth thereafter. 
The basic premise of the calculation makes no sense to me.  Does anyone really expect the newspaper business to gradually evolve from its current model over the next 30 years?  I see three trends that tell me that a gradual shift from print to online ad model for newspapers won't happen:

1. Newspaper and Media companies are diversifying their properties, leveraging new forms of traffic to gain eyeballs for their content. 
2. The separation of news from the newspaper opens up this market to many new competitors.  Today that includes companies like Yahoo and Topix with many new entrants to come.  Meanwhile, local search is evolving and seems poised to make further inroads into what has traditionally been the purview of the newspaper industry.
3. Young people entering the workforce today don't read printed newspapers.  While the demographic shift may not happen overnight, a large portion of the traditional newspaper market will go away sooner, rather than later.

While the newspaper industry has already gone through a great deal of change, I think the next 5-10 years will bring a faster rate of change than we've seen the past decade.  Advertisers will use different methods to reach consumers.  Some traditional newspaper companies like the NY Times and WSJ may position themselves to take advantage of this change and might see their online/offline revenue mix change rapidly.  Others will cling to their old models and see their market share and revenues erode quickly.  At the same time, new entrants will disseminate news information in compelling new ways.

A slow, 30-year transition from print to online?  I doubt it.

Google has thrown its (very large) hat into the personal search engine space with the launch of Google Co-Op Custom Search Engines.
The Custom Search Engines (CSE) are similar to those provided by Rollyo, Yahoo Search Builder and Eurekster.  You create a CSE by entering a series of URLs that you wish Google to index.  Google generates code for you to place on your website or blog and, voila, instant vertical search.

Unlike Rollyo, which limits you to 25 sites, Google indicates that there will be no limit to the number of sites you can include in a CSE.  And while the search engine results will include Google Adsense ads, you can personalize the presentation of the results page.  And, of course, you can't launch a product today without a social software spin, so Google allows you to enable users to contribute sites to your CSE.  You also have the choice of restricting the CSE to only those sites you entered, or to include all web results while giving preferred weightings to those sites you have selected.

Google also includes the Google Marker function, a toolbar plugin which allows you to add content to your CSE as easily as you might tag a page in delicious.

As a quick test, I created a content industry CSE in about 5 minutes, including content from various blogs and websites covering the content and technology space.  I'll integrate it into the blog later, but for now Update: I've added the CSE to the blog, just above the Rollyo box, so you can test both out and see which results you prefer or you can test it out here.

For more on Google Co-op Custom Search Engines, take a look at posts by John Battelle, Matt Cutts, Steve Rubel and Michael Arrington.

It's become a truism that the ROI on web advertising is easier to measure than that of traditional media.  And, for the most part, that's true.  But debate over the impact of click fraud has raised a cloud over search marketing.  And, when you pull back the covers, you can see that PPM display advertising is not as scientific as some might believe.

Sarah Lacy at Business Week Online has an interesting story on the challenges of web metrics.  While page views were never a great measure, new development approaches such as AJAX, along with the use of widgets and persistent toolbars make the page view concept even less relevant.  As RSS proliferates, so will the challenge of determining what counts as a page.

Traditional media advertisers are having debates over whether to pay for eyeballs time-shifting their programming via Tivo.  As more and more ad dollars move to the web, the old page-view model will need to be replaced by something that can factor in various usage models.

Dow Jones has announced that it has purchased the remaining 50% ownership of Factiva from Reuters for $160M.  The purchase price reflects a value of slight more than 1x 2006 estimated revenue of $290M, an increase of just 3% over 2005.  According to Dow Jones CEO Rich Zannino, the acquisition will shift Dow Jones revenue mix by dropping the print segment from 70% to 60%.

Clare Hart, who led much of Factiva's growth through the years and now heads the Dow Jones Enterprise Group, will now have oversight of the entire Factiva business.

Joint ventures, by definition, are difficult to build and manage.  Getting two companies with frequently conflicting goals and cultures to agree on anything is a challenge.  Putting Factiva solely under the Dow Jones umbrella should make it easier for them to reinvigorate Factiva's growth.

David Meerman Scott this week published the“Gobbledygook Manifesto”, a ranking of the most overused meaningless hype terms included in press releases.  David first surveyed PR execs and journalists to compile the master list, then turned to Factiva to mine their news content to see which terms were most overused.

In the analysis, he found that roughly 20% of the nearly 400,000 press releases analyzed used at least one of the phrases.  Leading the list was “next generation” with almost 10,000 mentions, followed closely by “flexible”, “robust”, “world-class” and “scalable”.  The term “groundbreaking” was used more than 2,700 times; it’s a wonder that there’s any ground left to break.

We’ve all been guilty of using these types of buzz words in our marketing communications over the years.  In many cases it’s out of laziness.  When trying to describe a product or solution, the gut reaction is probably to add a few adjectives.  Instead of simply using an adjective like “scalable”, we should provide quantifiable examples, such as “supports 10,000 concurrent users on a single server.”

In the meantime, if you’re concerned that your press releases have too much substance, and are looking to add more unsubstantiated hype and buzz, try the Web 2.0 bullshit generator.  It helped me create the headline for this post.

Sitting at a conference last week, I had a discussion with a few colleagues about the value of business social networking sites, particularly LinkedIn.
The general consensus was that LinkedIn was moderately useful, though none of us were raving fans of the service.  Then today, I stumbled across a post by Jeff Atwood, called Opting Out.

Jeff has some pretty strong feelings about the lack of value he has gotten from LinkedIn, and the fact that LinkedIn gets inherent value from its 7 million members.  Seeing no value from the service, Jeff is right to opt out (and is rightly frustrated that there's no easy "remove me" button).

That being said, I think that services like LinkedIn do add value, though the value is perhaps a bit more nuanced than LinkedIn might want you to think.

First, we should all understand that social networking in the business world is very different from social networking for teenagers.  When you're a teenager, gaining a new "friend of a friend" might be compelling in itself.  When you are measured by the size and status of your social networking, almost any addition has value.

In the business world, the value of a distant online friend is minimal and could even be a negative.  I use LinkedIn as an online tool to help me understand the network of my offline contacts.  In other words, if I am trying to find a contact at CompanyX, I'll use LinkedIn to see who in my network knows someone at CompanyX.  Then, I'll typically call that contact to discuss a possible introduction.  My goal is not simply to increase the size of my network, but rather to identify the potential reach of my existing network.  And, LinkedIn helps me do that.  Without it, I'd end up sending emails to all of my peers asking "Do you know anyone at CompanyX?"   

It's true that I get about a request a month from someone who doesn't know me to link to them.  Many of them are simply link collectors (you can see them listed with 500+ connections in their LinkedIn Profile).  In most of these cases, I politely decline, letting them know that I only share access to my network with people whom I've met.  I also have my profile configured so others cannot simply browse my connections - they only see the link when it's part of a relevant search.

But for me, LinkedIn does create value, certainly enough value to make it worth keeping my profile up to date.  If it doesn't create that level of value for you then, like Jeff (and Robert), you should opt out.

Yesterday was the 2nd annual Great Read in the Park, sponsored by the New York Times and Target.

Held at Bryant Park, just behind the 42nd Street library, the day featured dozens of authors doing readings, participating in panel discussions and conducting book signings.  We spent most of our day at the Children's Stage, where children's authors and illustrators like Mark Teague, Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart read from their books.  There was also entertainment including a reading by the Grinch from the upcoming Broadway show Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  (with  Bullseye, the Target dog, in costume as Max the Dog).

Of course, numerous celebrities have become authors, and we were thrilled to get the chance to see Julie Andrews reading with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton.  After all, it's not often that a child gets a chance to meet Mary Poppins.

 

The day wasn't limited to children's authors.  Frank Rich, Jonathan Alter, Adriana Trigiani, James Ellroy, Roy Rosenbaum and Eve Ensler were among the many authors participating.

With sunshine and temperatures in the sixties, it was a perfect New York day.