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June 01, 2008

Reason 847 Why Not to Pick Fights With Bloggers

Barry Ritholtz shares an email response from Missouri realtor and builder Ron Stenger to a post on mortgage delinquencies rising, from his blog The Big Picture.
Apparently, Stenger is none too pleased with the state of the real estate market. Certainly, he's not pleased with Barry Ritholtz' suggestion that the market has not yet neared a bottom. So displeased that he replied to the Big Picture post with a two-word email (and the two words weren't happy birthday).

Ritholtz then did the simplest thing for a blogger to do - he wrote a post and shared Stenger's note. And, of course, since the Big Picture has a great Google page rank, that post now shows up 4th in the Google SERP when you search for the name Ron Stenger. So, Mr. Stenger now has a permanent link to his response, which anyone Googling him or his companies in the future will no doubt see. Good way to promote your business, Mr. Stenger.

I'm fascinated by the people who pick fights with bloggers. Haven't they ever heard the Mark Twain quote "never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel"? Today's bloggers are yesterday's newspapers, but with less editorial oversight. Mr. Stenger, I hope your market comes back faster than your reputation will.

May 27, 2008

24/7 Wall Street Acquires Investor Blogs

Doug McIntyre and Jon Ogg at 24/7 Wall Street have announced their acquisition of two niche investor-related blogs. The site has acquired the Biohealth Investor blog and the Volume Spike Investor.

Both blogs had previously been authored by Dr. Hisham Ayoub, who had maintained the blogs while building his dental practice. The Biohealth Investor blog had been reasonably active, while VS Investor had been largely dormant since last fall.

24/7 Wall Street has quietly become a must-read for anyone in the finance space and clearly they are looking for niche markets to fuel their growth. It will be interesting to see how they integrate these two new blogs.

May 19, 2008

The Alacra Affiliate Widget

The early days of Internet publishing can be considered the “field of dreams” period - Build it and they will come. Those were the days of mega-portals where Internet users would come to find content. Content distribution was easier then. Most publishers simply built their own portal and/or inked licensing deals with companies like Yahoo, Lycos and AOL.

As if we didn’t have enough evidence, the current conditions of Yahoo and AOL make it pretty clear that the field of dreams days have ended. Internet users are more sophisticated now and they don’t need some mega portal company deciding which content they should look at. The deportalization of the Internet (as Fred Wilson and others have described it) is here and users today want to be in control of what content they get, where they access it and how it should be arranged.

For publishers and aggregators, this means that you can no longer simply make your content available on your proprietary site; instead, you need to package your content up and make it available where the users are.

Alacra today launched its first widget, the Alacra Affiliate Widget, designed to get content in front of potential users wherever they may be.  The Alacra Affiliate Widget is a widgetized version of the Premium Content Ad Network which we launched earlier this year. You can see the widget scrolling in the right-hand column of this blog.

The Alacra Affiliate Widget displays contextually relevant content (available for purchase at www.alacrastore.com) based upon the content of the page it runs on. The goal of the Widget is to help readers of blogs, financial news or commentary websites to identify related content that may be of interest to them.

For bloggers and website owners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget provides new ways to monetize their traffic. The widget is built on the Alacra Affiliate Program, so bloggers and website owners share in the revenue generated by reader purchases on the Alacra Store.

For Alacra content partners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget enables them to get their content in front of potential buyers while those buyers are in the midst of researching or reading about a company. The ads are contextually relevant, so they serve up headlines on companies that are mentioned in the blog post or article they are already reading. In addition, they are behaviorally relevant as they serve up research content at the time a user is researching a company. Compare that to a typical display advertising network – if a user is reading a page on a financial commentary about HP’s intended acquisition of EDS, a typical contextual ad server will return ads for Hewlett Packard printers or laptops. But, clearly, no one’s reading that article because they want to buy a printer. With the Alacra Widget, the user will see an ad displaying links to recent credit and investment research on HP and EDS, as well as M&A analyses and, perhaps, transcripts from HP’s analyst call discussing the deal.

If you’re interested in exploring ways to better monetize your blog or website traffic or wish to learn more about the Alacra Affiliate Widget, drop me a note at barry-dot-graubart-at-Alacra-dot-com. Or, click here to configure and download the widget.

More details about the Alacra Affiliate Widget can be found on the Alacra Blog.

May 14, 2008

A Blog Is Not a Web 2.0 Strategy

Traditional publishers have largely struggled to embrace web 2.0. That’s not surprising and in some ways sitting on the sidelines might be the right strategy for many of them. At the same time, every publishing conference has an obligatory “web 2.0” session, though many are light on ways for publishers to really engage their audience using social strategies.

This week, I attended Marketing Sherpa’s Selling Online Subscriptions.  The conference was very good, overall, and was filled with specific ideas for improving customer acquisition and retention rates. Of course, there was a Web 2.0 panel, with Oz Sultan (who left the Economist a few weeks ago to join professional services firm Tacit Knowledge) and Jamie Steven of Real Networks and moderated by SEO-PR CEO Greg Jarboe.

Oz  was a strong panelist and shared examples of what they’d done at the Economist, deploying their Debate series, which allowed them to get sponsorship for this interactive forum, developing a Facebook widget for their fan page and more. Jamie shared examples of Real Networks efforts (some successful, others less so) to engage their audience by allowing them to create and share playlists with friends and family. He also shared how their initial efforts to develop a Facebook app have been less successful than they’d hoped and how they’re now partnering with an as-yet-unnamed partner with great Facebook penetration (Slide, perhaps?) for a co-branded widget.

The session was pretty good, but then they got to the question of “what can publishers do to embrace Web 2.0”?  The first response, from Jamie, was “launch a blog”. This is the same advice I’ve heard from web 2.0 panelists for the past few years.

But my question is “Are blogs really a web 2.0 strategy”?

To me, Web 2.0 is all about connectivity, collaboration, engagement and community. While blogs can be a part of that, for the most part publisher blogs become a one-way communication platform; they’re a bullhorn. Most publishers use blogs as a means of posting editorials online but they tend to generate little or no comments.

Oz had other suggestions that I think were more relevant – open up your content and create a mashup with Google maps or do something to generate more value out of your content.

So, by all means publishers, launch a blog. In fact, launch several. But don’t consider that a Web 2.0 strategy.

April 15, 2008

AOL Buys Sphere; Will it Go Into a Black Hole?

AOL (NYSE:TWX) has acquired blog aggregator and indexing service Sphere.
Sphere provides a "more like this" functionality, surfacing blogs and other content related to the piece of content a user is reading.  If you read the Wall Street Journal and see links to related blogs at the end of a story, that's Sphere in action. I first wrote about Sphere nearly two years ago.

Sphere has been effective in penetrating the publishing and media market. In addition to the Journal, they count Time, Reuters, CNN, Newsweek and others among their clients. Sphere also offers the "Sphere It" widget, which returns relevant content back to partner sites.

This is not the first AOL acquisition of a Web 2.0 startup. As Kara Swisher points out, they've bought video search engine Truveo and Userplane, among others. It's just that they haven't done much with them after the acquisition. It's the same problem that Yahoo has had with its many bolt-on acquisitions. There doesn't seem to be a strategy to cultivate them and expose them to their wide user base. 

Congratulations to Tony Conrad, Jeff Yolen and the Sphere team.

April 03, 2008

Research Zeitgeist - Q1

Research Recap has released its first quarter Research Zeitgeist.

Research Recap, launched by Alacra last summer, highlights interesting credit, investment, economic and market research.  Each week, the most widely-read posts are noted in the Research Zeitgeist.  Then, each quarter, a comprehensive Zeitgeist identifies those posts that received the most attention during the three-month period.

The Research Zeitgeist for the first quarter of 2008 was released this morning. Not surprisingly, the most widely read posts of the quarter largely reflected the credit crunch and market turbulence of recent months.

The top posts for the quarter were:

  1. Warning Signs Seen in Rising Credit Card Delinquencies (CreditSights)
  2. Research Primer: Credit Default Swaps (Fitch)
  3. Research Primer: Structured Investment Vehicles (Moody's)
  4. Bond Insurer Downgrades Could Lead to Bank Downgrades  (S&P) 
  5. Role of Hedge Funds in Subprime Crisis Examined (International Monetary Fund)
  6. Subprime Mortgage Lending Primer (NERA Economic Consulting)
  7. Market-led Measures Not Enough to Solve Subprime Fallout (Oxford Analytica)
  8. Write-down Spotlight Shifts to European Banks (CreditSights)
  9. Alternative Proposals to Stem Subprime Foreclosures (various)
  10. Audit Integrity Questions Citigroup's Risk Assessment (Audit Analytics)

Hmmm... I think I'm sensing a theme here.  Perhaps if Ben Bernanke were reading Research Recap he might be less afraid to mention the R-word.  I hope that Q2 and Q3 can bring some posts about growth and recovery, but I'm not optimistic.





March 27, 2008

The Death of Newspapers

Eric Alterman has an extensive piece in this week's New Yorker entitled Out of Print: the death and life of the American newspaper.

Much of the material has been covered on this blog and elsewhere, but Alterman focuses on newspapers as the fount of trustworthiness. Most traditional media differentiate their offerings by focusing on the editorial process and vetting that takes place, as compared to a blog where the author and editor are typically one and the same. The other key attribute for most newspapers is a claim of unbiased approach, while bloggers frequently take a position.

To Alterman, this truism was called into question  in 2005 as Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post began to aggressively question the reporting of New York Times' writer Judy Miller. The subsequent testimony in the Scooter Libby trial unveiled details of leaks provided to Miller and an overall cloud over her shaky reporting of the facts leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As Alterman points out, despite the fact that Huffington Post had little investigative or editorial resources, they were able to leverage the power of the community to identify issues in Miller's reporting that had gone unnoticed by the editorial desk.

The article talks about a future where online and offline converge, and raises questions of what we, as a society may lose, as newspapers pare back on their journalistic efforts.  The blogosphere is effective at analyzing and providing feedback but are reliant upon the traditional sources for general reporting. No matter how smart and creative, a blogger working from their home will be no substitute for reporters in war zones, inside political campaigns and otherwise in the trenches.

UPDATE: Now that the Wire has run its course, those wishing to get a sense of what it's like inside a newspaper might want to read this post written by Chicago Sun-Times veteran reporter Howard Wolinsky upon his leaving the paper.

March 26, 2008

More Blogonomics

There have been a bunch of posts on Blogonomics recently.  Felix Salmon, at Portfolio.com's Market Movers blog has been the leader in these discussions. He dissected the likely P&L for Gawker and ripped the ridiculous Breakingviews article on blog valuation (I posted a related piece on blog valuations at the time).

Now, Doug McIntyre at 24/7 Wall Street gets into the mix with his post, the Twenty Five Most Valuable Blogs.  As Doug points out, "the task of valuing the largest blogs is impossible", but he makes a great effort here.

The top five, according to Doug:

  1. Gawker Media, including Gawker, Wonkette, ValleyWag, Gizmodo and others ($150 M)
  2. MacRumors ($85 M)
  3. Huffington Post ($70 M)
  4. PerezHilton ($48 M)
  5. TechCrunch ($35 M)

Of course, a blog is only as valuable as an acquirer is willing to pay, but his methodology is pretty sound.



March 18, 2008

Is Anyone Aware of Any Feedburner Issues the past week?

I noticed that my Feedburner subscriber count has dropped by about 25-30% since March 10.
Same pattern appears on AlacraBlog, Research Recap and Content Matters. If it were just my blog, I'd blame it on poor writing but since it's across multiple blogs it looks like a technical issue with Feedburner.  Most of the drop seems to be from two news readers - Netvibes (which has dropped off completely) and Google Reader (Feedfetcher) (where it's reporting numbers about 2/3 of what they were a week earlier).

I checked the Feedburner blog but there's no update from them. They also have shut off posting to their forums while they transfer to using Google Forums, so hard to get any updates.

Anyone seeing the same problem?

March 06, 2008

More on Blog Valuations and Acquisitions

Felix Salmon at Portfolio.com has further thoughts on the BreakingViews piece that I posted on yesterday.

Felix takes a less ..umm.. nuanced approach than I did, though we come to the same conclusion.  He opens his post with:

Breakingviews, one of the least web-savvy websites in the world, ran a column by Jeff Segal on Monday about blog valuations.

Ouch.

But, the post deserved such treatment.  Felix references some of the same obvious examples that I had referenced, such as Jason Calacanis' sale of Weblogs, Inc. to AOL to refute the basic premise that blogs aren't viable M&A candidates for media companies. It's hard to imagine that the BreakingViews writer was unaware of those deals.

A key point in Felix' post is the fact that unlike the zero sum game of traditional media properties, in blogs, intelligent competition can lift all boats:

I want other finance blogs to launch, the more the better. And I want them to be written by keener minds than mine. The more that happens, the more traffic I'll get - that's the way the conversation works. Other media don't work like that: if I'm watching ABC, I'm not watching NBC. But blogs are different, and don't operate according to that kind of zero-sum mathematics.

Looking at properties like TechCrunch, PaidContent and even Alacra's own Research Recap, it's pretty evident that the blogging platform is a great platform to launch media properties.  And once those properties develop an audience they are just as attractive (probably more attractive when you figure in cost structure) than the traditional forms of media.



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