The Praized Blog

As read on TechCrunch this morning,

MySpace is finally getting ready to pull the trigger on its long-awaited platform for developers. Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th. The APIs will allow developers to create social applications for MySpace much like they can already for Facebook. The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platform, meaning that applications written for OpenSocial will work on MySpace with a few minimal tweaks.

More details will come out later about what exactly the APIs will allow developers to do, but at a high level they will allow for deeper integration into MySpace than can currently be done with Flash widgets. The APIs we believe will support Flash, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets, and give developers deeper access to MySpace member profile information and their connections. Developers also will be able to make money from advertising associated with their applications.

What it means: with all the talks about Facebook in the last 6 months, we tend to forget MySpace is still a major force in the social networking world. According to this recent eMarketer article, “The site received 72% of US visits to social networks in December 2007 alone” with Facebook a distant second at 16.03%. In terms of reach, MySpace had close to 72M unique visitors in October 2007 (source: eMarketer quoting ComScore) giving the site 40% reach of the US online market (Facebook is at 18%). In November, Compete data showed that only 20% of MySpace members were also on Facebook. So, if you’re interested in reaching these 72M users, get in line to get a developer access.

(via Hitwise)

YouTube’s growth has not begun to slow yet this year. Hitwise traffic data shows that the market share of US visits to YouTube has increased by 70% when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos). In comparison, the market share of visits to a custom category of 64 other video sites increased by only 8% in that period. As of May 2007, YouTube’s market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined. Here is a ranking of the top 10 sites in that custom category for May 2007:

What it means: YouTube still completely dominates the video market online. As video sites are quite bandwidth intensive and the video ad business model is not quite “ready for prime time” yet, we’ll start seeing some attrition in the marketplace in the next few months within the 64 video sites counted by Hitwise. Expect verticalization and B2B-ization of some of these players. Some of them might close as they run out of VC money.

My friend Mat just sent me this news regarding the acquisition of LiveDeal.com by YP Corp., the owner of YP.com.

Under the terms of the acquisition, LiveDeal shareholders received 15,968,514 shares of YP common stock. LiveDeal will remain an independent entity and a wholly owned subsidiary of YP and the two companies will leverage one another’s content, sales teams and technology to strengthen their individual product offerings. YP plans to use LiveDeal’s innovative technology platform to converge its four principal marketing channels – directories, mobile services, classifieds and advertising/distribution networks into a first-of-its–kind, hyper-local marketing solution for businesses and consumers.

After listening to the analyst call, here are additional nuggets of information:

• They want to become “eBay without the auction”
• They claim they will be the “first player to fuse classifieds and YP online” (which is not true as most international directory players, like Yellow Pages Group, who have acquired classifieds companies in the past have integrated both together already)
• Livedeal Inc.’s revenues have grown 300% in the last two years and will reach $5M this year. Breakeven will also be attained this year and current burn rate is $100K per month. Its gross margin is 85%.
• Livedeal currently has 1M unique visitors
• Livedeal.com’s will become YP.com’s technology platform.
• Investors in LiveDeal Inc. will now own 11.5% of YP Corp.
• LiveDeal’s business model: running newspaper publishers’ classifieds and directory section and sharing revenues with them. The Philadelphia Enquirer, The Toronto Star and Montreal’s La Presse are all customers.

What it means: like my friend Greg, that’s certainly a deal I was not expecting. I’ve said for a few years that directory and classifieds are a natural fit together and I think that acquisition signals more consolidation in the marketplace. For example, Oodle is likely to be acquired by a newspaper publisher this year. As for YP Corp, it looks like they are morphing into a platform play. Hopefully, their past legal troubles won’t impair their ability to sell to large media companies.

(via the Google Maps blog)

For some time now we have been “painting” icons for transit stops into our maps. While it was helpful to be able to see where to catch a train or bus, it left a lot of people wishing they could click on the icon to get more information about a specific station. Now that’s all changed! Depending on the data available for a given public transit system, Google Maps now shows the next departure times, what lines serve a specific station, and/or a link to the transit agency to get more detail. Try clicking on one of the little bus or tram icons on this map of Zurich, Switzerland, to see what we mean. You can also search for stations (for example “59th St - Columbus Circle Station, new york“).

What it means: very zeitgeist-y. Transit system information is becoming more and more important as people decide to leave their car at home to reduce their environmental footprint. If your site uses maps and driving directions (especially local search and directory sites), you should be thinking of embedding similar information. Start discussing with your local transit authorities.

(via MediaPost)

According to a new Hitwise report, 25% of the traffic coming to newspapers Web sites arrives from search engines.  This comes on the heels of a custom Nielsen//NetRatings study for the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) showing record traffic numbers of 59.5M unique visitors to these web sites in March.

Challenges:

1) Monetization is not happening as fast as that traffic growth.  “While online ad revenue has been growing, our share of that revenue is not in synch with our reach into the audience,” said Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new business development for the NAA.”

2) User fragmentation.  “Info from the Hitwise report revealed that news consumption is beginning to fragment, with the share of visits to the top 10 News and Media Web sites (which include newspapers like The New York Times) declining by almost 4%.”

Solution?

“According to Bennett, building awareness of that reach and making it easier for advertisers to buy bundles of local and national ads are key steps toward securing more ad revenue.”

What it means: as Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital said this week at the YPA Conference, the “walled garden” era is dead.  Search engine optimization is a key strategic element if you run a media operation.  Search engines are entry doors to web content and because of their extensive reach, you want to be found in them.  But SEO is not enough.  You need to have a specific syndication strategy to disseminate your content, your brand and, hopefully, your business model throughout the web.

Just received this news from my friend Ben Saren. His company, Citysquares.com, just raised its series A funding round from eCoast Angel Network. The amount was not disclosed. Up until now, the site was self-funded. The company will use this investment to expand its sales and marketing operations and improve the user experience on its website. CitySquares.com is a Boston-area hyperlocal web site.

Ben sent me this article providing more details about the deal and CitySquares itself:

Ben Saren founded Citysquares with partner Bob Leland with the intention of providing neighborhoods in the Boston area with a meeting place on the web — each designed around the qualities that make that neighborhood unique. In 2005 the pair launched sites for seven neighborhoods in Somerville and Cambridge; the company now covers 25 separate communities from South Boston to Allston/Brighton.

While Saren would not disclose specific traffic numbers for the various sites included in Citysquares, he said the following has been loyal, and the five-person company has experienced traffic growth climbing at what he describes as a better-than 45 degree angle over the past year. Forty percent of the site’s traffic is new, while 60 percent comes from repeat traffic, he added. Revenue, from businesses advertising on the sites, was under $1 million in 2006.

What it means: Congrats on the funding Ben! I am a strong believer in hyperlocal sites and content. It takes a lot of efforts to get them off the ground and it’s difficult to get to critical mass but, if you’re successful, you become deeply ingrained within your community.

Dave Sifry offers Technorati’s latest state of the blogosphere, one of the best way to size up the growth, the evolution and measure the importance of the blogosphere and other social media. Highlights:

Size of the blogosphere:

Technorati tracks over 70 million blogs (74.9M today), about 120,000 new ones are created worldwide every day.

Mainstream media vs. blogs:

“The number of blogs in the top 100 most popular sites has risen substantially. During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites. In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list”

Languages:

“Japanese retakes the top spot from our last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Additionally there was movement in the middle of the top 10 languages, highlighted by Italian overtaking Spanish for the number four spot.”

Tags:

“The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web (definition), and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati. Technorati is now tracking over 230 million posts using tags or categories, and the number of people who are using tags is growing.” This confirms the Pew Report on tagging we covered in January.

Summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day. Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%, English second at 33%, Chinese third at 8%, Italian fourth at 3%, Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories, 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags, 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

What it means: the blogosphere is now a brilliant and strong standalone ecosystem. I believe it has reached a scale which makes it a viable environment for new business opportunities. I also like the comment about tags as I strongly believe the future of Web information will leverage structured data.

I had missed that news last week:

The head of Forbes.com told an industry conference that online success has not come at the expense of the print product. Speaking at the OPA forum for the future, in London today, James Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com, told delegates that his site drew 16 million unique visitors per month.

“The success of Forbes.com has not come at the expense of our print product, in fact the two media platforms have been a great complement to each other… we’ve had all the magazine content on the site for ten years, from launch, during that time readership for the magazine has increased. “The strategy has paid off handsomely for us not only in terms of increasing readership for the print product but we have also seen tremendous uptake of folks reading our sites.”

Mr Spanfeller said that growth was based on the recognition of the Forbes brand rather than a specific single delivery platform. “The manner by which people find our content is less important than having a brand that stands out and that people recognise.” He added that Forbes was prepared for a platform agnostic publishing world where the focus was on providing business news on a local basis. He said Forbes had just launched a Polish version and further local language services with geographically specific content were planned. He added that Forbes was investing heavily in creating original video.(…)

(via Journalism.co.uk )

What it means: it’s common knowledge in the industry that Forbes has done a very good job with their online properties, building specific content for the Web and launching vertical sites like Forbes Autos . What’s interesting is that they say it hasn’t dented their offline revenues and that’s good news for an industry that has seen its share of problems recently. Premiere Magazine is shutting down its print edition in the US but will keep operating its web site. In the videogames industry, Computer Games Magazine, the second oldest pc-focused game magazine, has apparently been shut down by publisher TheGlobe.com. (Personal note: I’ve known Steve Bauman, the editor-in-chief, since my days at UbiSoft in the ’90s).

Coming back to Forbes, according to this New York Times article, “the Forbes site attracted almost $55 million in revenue in 2005, the most among business publications” The Times article also debates whether they have as much traffic as they claim, bringing back to the surface the whole third-party measurement issue. “Some competitors argue that Forbes.com’s popularity derives in part from racy, provocative or wealth-obsessed lifestyle features that have little to do with traditional business news — examples from this year include “The Hottest Billionaire Heiresses,” “Top Topless Beaches” and “America’s Drunkest Cities.” Those kinds of articles, unlikely to appear in Forbes magazine, may be a small fraction of those that Forbes.com posts each day, but they are often featured on mass-market Web portals.” I call that smart marketing. As long as you don’t over-extend and dilute too much your brand, there are a lot of things that can be done differently online. You want to capture those eyeballs.

Update1: InfoWorld kills print edition, will focus on online. Owen Thomas from the Business 2.0 blog says: “I’ve heard from IDG insiders that IDG is keeping other print titles on life support, on the theory that the print edition adds brand awareness and gravitas to the websites.”

Update2: Time Warner announces that Life Magazine will be shut down

VentureBeat has the news:

Citysearch, the division of IAC focuses on local reviews of restaurants and other services, has acquired the struggling local review start-up, Insider Pages.

The purchase (amount undisclosed) comes at a time of increasing competition in the race to deliver a compelling local search services. Citysearch’s parent, IAC, has already bolstered its local search offerings, namely with Ask City, a property that packages everything from local search to local maps, reviews, and ticket services.

However, more entrants have arrived to nip traffic away from Citysearch, an early player that has seen its traffic stagnate in recent months. There’s Yelp, Judysbook and Backfence, for starters. Earlier today, we mentioned new competitor Outside.in, another company going after the local community news and events area. (…)

Insider Pages has about 600,000 user reviews, and they’ll be integrated into the Citysearch’s offering, she said. It has 2.5 million monthly unique readers, she said, based on Comscore and internal tracking numbers.

She would not say whether the purchase price was more than $10 million invested in the company by Sequoia Capital, Softbank and Idealab. She said there were multiple bidders, but that Insider Pages preferred Citysearch because it is complementary. Insider Pages is popular among suburban parents and homeowners, she said, giving it strength in the home, garden, health and plumber review areas. Citysearch is stronger in bars, arts and entertainment. Citysearch will absorb Insider Page employees in its San Francisco office.

Rev2 says it was sold for “for an estimated sum of $13 million.”

What it means: I’m surprised it was not acquired by a directory company as it would have been a great jumpstart for any user review strategy (becoming more and more important in any local search site). From the article above, it sounds like the acquisition will be complimentary based on different content & users. I know the Citysearch demographics well (Yellow Pages Group used to be the Citysearch licensee in Canada) but I don’t know enough about InsiderPages’ users to really comment on the complementarity.

Via the Google Operating System blog

Google Maps shows real-time information about traffic for many US cities (like Kansas City, New York). To see this, switch to the map or hybrid mode and click on the new traffic tab. Google Maps will add a layer that colors the roads in green, yellow, red, or gray. The colors represent how fast the traffic is moving:

* Green: more than 50 miles per hour
* Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
* Red: less than 25 miles per hour
* Gray: no data available

Until now, this feature was available only in the mobile client of Google Maps.

Update: the official Google Blog mentions that it’s available for 30 major U.S. cities. No word on who’s providing the data.

What it means: this is cool. Google just added the fourth dimension to local search: time. Another “time” application would be to show businesses that are currently open, depending on the day of the week or the time of the day.