I'm Ryan Spoon. I live in San Francisco and have spent my career on the web. I founded beRecruited.com (acquired in 2007) and spent 2003-2007 at eBay (internet marketing, social media & leading Kijiji.com). I am now at Widgetbox.com and running InGameNow on the side with a collection of friends.
Another blog post about book excerpts (and a couple more to come) as I’ve had time to read more than just my Blackberry and computer screen (currently enjoying vacation in Chatham, Massachusetts). I am breezing through Christina Binkley’s “Winner Take All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman and the Race to own Las Vegas” (link on Amazon here)
It’s fascinating. Part of the fascination for me is around Las Vegas - but the (surprisingly) more interesting aspect is the business savvy, curiosity and ambition of tycoons Steve Wynn and Kirk Kerkorian.
Amidst the flashiness of what Wynn and Kerkorian were building, Harrahs built an equally successful business on a very different consumer and experience. There are other great excerpts - but the below is really striking as you consider, for instance, the big-spenders that Wynn chased with his $2,000,000,000 Bellagio… which is no longer the glitziest casino on the strip. It also shows the very mathematical and methodical approach that Harrah’s takes to customer research and market (and they are the best in the world at it) - which stands in sharp contract to Wynn’s very instinct-driven approach (which he has proven quite adept at himself):
“Morgan and Boushy identified a small group of customers who produced most of Harrah’s profilts. It turned out that they weren’t the flashy high-rollers. They were low-rollers - average Americans who spent between $100 - $499 on a gambling trip. These people made up only about 30 percent of gamblers, but they gambled so frequently that they accounted for 80% of Harrrah’s revenue and nearly 100% of it’s profits.
Harrah’s decided to make these highly profitable customers its core audience, calling them “avid experienced players” or AEPs. “I felt like I’d discovered the Rosetta Stone of casinos,” Morgan said several years later.”
While sitting in the 110 degree Las Vegas sun yesterday (en route to the worst sunburn of my life), I read Jeffrey Zygmont’s “The VC Way: Investment Secrets from the Wizards of Venture Capital” (availabone on Amazon here). There isn’t a ton of literature written about venture capital, and Zygmont’s 2001 book is neither a best-seller or a masterpiece (#113,459 on Amazon)… but it does offer an good overview of venture and a perspective from just after the .com bust.
In a chapter written about the role of founders within fast-growing, venture backed companies, Zygmont wrote about Yahoo and Jerry Yang. This was written in 2001 and is eerily relevant and insightful considering today’s circumstances, Yahoo’s struggles and Jerry’s changed reputation:
The reality runs contrary to the pervasive cultural myth that sees a boy-wonder techno-genius hopping a freight train to Silicon Valley with nothing but an idea in his head and a dream in his heart, turning them both into a commercial empire and managing at the same time to somehow woo Julia Roberts. the reality is a lot closer to the disposition of the two fabled founder of Yahoo, grunge-kids David Filo and Jerry Yang - who, as a version of the legend goes, were living in a trailer when they worked up the Yahoo Internet search engine as a hobby in 1994 while studying for their doctorate degrees at Stanford. They never quite ran the company. Yahoo incorporated in April 95 behind funding from Sequoia, led by VC Michael Moritz, who still sits on Yahoo’s board of directors. Within a year, Tim Koogle was on board as president and chief executive officer. He became chairman in 1999. Jeffrey Mallett joined at about the same time as an executive assigned to take Yahoo around teh world. He is now president and chief operating officer. Other members of the management team arrived as early, including Anil Singh, senior VP in charge of sales and marketing, and Timothy Brady, senior VP of network services. Farzad Nazem, who joined in 1996, is Yahoo’s current computer whiz, serving as chief technology officer. Today cofounder Jerry Yang is a corporate director. His partner David Filo is officially described by the company as a “key technologist.” Bot are said to b “currently on a leave of absence from Stanford’s electrical engineering Ph.D. program. Together Yang and Filo are listed at the top of Yahoo’s Web-published roster of corporate officers. Their title: Chief Yahoo. It’s very cute, but have to wonder what they really do.
“You can count on one hand the number of CEOs who have scaled from raw start-up to a multi-billion dollar enterprise,” observes Greylock’s Kaiser. “You think of Michael Dell, or Tom Stemberg at Staples, or Scott McNealy at Sun, or Larry Ellison at Oracle. Or Gates for that matter, But they’re the exceptions, no matter how loudly they’re celebrated.
– page 76-77
I haven’t blogged much in the last week - but I have good reason: we’ve been hard at work on InGameNow… and, just in time for tomorrow’s NBA Draft, we officially launched today!
InGameNow: Twitter for Sports
As I have discussed before, InGameNow was launched and funded out of sfEntrepreneurs - an organization of ten local entrepreneurs with varied skillsets. After a couple months of intensive work in each of our ’spare’ time, we have launched a product that we are very excited about. The concept of InGameNow arrived from the team’s two shared passions:
1. We are all avid sports fans
2. We are all avid Twitter users
But we collectively were disappointed about the lack of a sports presence on Twitter - and personally, I am a believer that Twitter is effective for open, spontaneous discussions but struggles as a medium to follow structured events.
The end result is InGameNow.com which can best be described as Twitter for sports. With InGameNow, sports fans can interact around teams, players and games… most exciting, users can now receive real-time updates and scores via Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger and Email (customizable by frequency and content) - so even if you can’t attend or view your team’s next game, you’ll be able to stay up-to-date and engage with fellow enthusiasts:
For mobile users, you can either us Google Talk, browse directly on InGameNow.com (optimized for the iPhone) or schedule email alerts:
A new sports community called InGameNow, from the creators of the recently acquired beRecruited, adopts the Twitter method of disseminating user-generated information on sports news reporting and commentary. In addition, these Twitter-like updates are filtered based on votes, so the best updates can bubble to the top. In true sports community nature, users on InGameNow earn points for site participation, and can work their way up the rankings in order to become trusted users…
If you’re a sports fan, I encourage you to check out InGameNow. We aim to have an active night of posting for tomorrow’s NBA Draft. And (as always) I welcome feedback either on the blog or directly via email!
Google entered the public web analytics game yesterday by expanding Google Trends beyond search queries and into web traffic. Just a couple years ago, we had two options for web data:
- Comscore provided detailed analytics for the web’s top sites
- Alexa (inaccurately) estimated traffic based on their tool bar users / usage
Now, we have three major players offering analytics for the tail of websites: Quantcast, Compete and Google Trends. Quantcast is, at this point, the only player that enables publishers to add tags to their site (or media: flash, network, etc) that effectively share their stats and make them public. This gives Quantcast full information about the site and its visitors (the same way that Google Analytics collects their data); they then share a portion of that information publicly and, for quantified publishers, that data should be trusted: pageviews, uniques, visits, etc. The beauty of what Quantcast has built is that publishers are incented to ‘quantify’ their sites because it provides a trusted 3rd party representation of their traffic - and for the tail of websites, that’s an important differentiator because Comscore only measures the web’s top sites.
Meanwhile, Compete collects their data from a panel of users and releases monthly stats (for quantified publishers, Quantcast releases daily updates). Below, you’ll see just how different Quantcast and Compete are for PerezHilton.com (who is now quantified). Quantcast shows 9 million monthly uniques and 1.4 million daily uniques - Compete shows about 1.4 million monthly uniques. Big difference:
According to the data (3m uniques vs. 1m) and all of my anecdotal Silicon Valley conversations, Quantcast seems to be the preferred analytics provider over Compete…. but the real wildcard is clearly Google. The Google Trends launch garnered huge buzz yesterday - but it’s yet to be seen how big of a step Google is actually taking. You’ll notice below that Google Trends shows 600k daily uniques for PerezHilton.com - which falls between Quantcast and Compete… which leads to me to ask the obvious question:
Will Google open up Google Analytics publicly on an opt-in basis? Quantcast has pushed Compete aside by gathering real data provided directly by the website owner. Google already has a massive footprint in Analytics - by providing an option to “make your data public”, they can create a consumer-facing analytics service and extend the reach of AdWords / AdSense by matching demographics and allowing direct ad-buying.
The integration is easy and leverages Analytics massive user base. More importantly, it delivers accurate data and makes Google Trends relevant - because, as it currently stands, the data is good just that: trends.
It is also clear that Google has some work to be done. Below is the Trends chart for Techmeme and apparently my blog is Techmeme’s 3rd most overlapped (”also visited”) website. I wish that were true… but I doubt it!
Tonight, I am moved to write about how *not* to craft compelling paid search campaigns:
There are so many things wrong with this ad that it’s tough to figure out where to start… but we can start with the ad “title” - which is perhaps the most critical component. It’s the first thing a user sees and it’s typically the largest, boldest font. In this case, the word “widget” is neither relevant to the rest of the ad nor particularly differentiated. The title should showcase the brand, describe the product and/or have a call to action. A generic, bland word like “widget” does not incent me to click through.
Likewise, the ad body should have a call to action and, in the few alloted characters, give an overview of what to expect after the jump. Asking a user to “download” something is rather aggressive - particular when it has no mention of the aforementioned “widget”. Similarly, the text has no relevancy within itself: the words widget, download, desktop, and shortcut are used… but there is no relationship to pizza or Pizza Hut. Huh?
My favorite part of the ad is how carelessly Pizza Hut uses each of the characters (typically a very precious piece of ad). 16 characters are dedicated to spelling out www.pizzahut.com within the ad body - even though that exact same tagline is shown directly beneath it. Meanwhile, they have chosen to only utilize six characters in the title to spell out “widget”.
I am guessing that it would also be a reach to assume that Pizza Hut is tracking the ad, the clickthroughs and the conversions (to an order or .com registration)…
This week the Widget World Expo took place in New York and Fred Wilson gave a supposedly terrific speech titled “Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We’re Doing”. I really wish that I had been able to attend the conference - but the schedule didn’t allow for it. Fred’s deck in embedded below and Silicon Valley Insider gives the following recap:
To Fred, the “problem with widgets” stems back to the original separation between content and the first widgets — ads. Google was smart to put its own contextual ad widgets (AdSense) in the sidebar of its searches, being clear to its users that its content (search results) were pure and separated from their ads (paid results).
However, as widgets started to be used to display other web content — Fred notes that his first widget was Flickr’s photostream widget, back in 2005 — they became “relegated to the sidebar and increasingly seen as ad units and increasingly ignored.”
But they shouldn’t be ignored, Fred argued. They should be integrated into the flow and experience of the page. Developers, he said, need to put more focus on widget user experience.
This ties into a question that I get multiple times a day: what makes a great widget? The answer ties directly into Fred’s point that “developers need to put more focus on widget user experience”.
1. Give Users a Reason to Come Back
A widget will fail if it doesn’t give users a reason to engage and a compelling reason to return. When designing a widget, ask the following questions: “What’s the value proposition for a user? What’s their motivation to embed the widget?” You’ll find that the answers are closely aligned: dynamically changing, interesting content prevents staleness and adds value to a webpage in a way that a static banner cannot. There are countless ways to do this: sales rankings, RSS updates, community activities, etc.
2. Make it Customizable
Being “relegated” to the sidebar isn’t a bad thing… it’s consistent, highly trafficked real estate. But the publisher should (at least) be able to control the widget’s size and color / theme. There are no standard widget units (or IAB sizes) and it’s important to remember that your widget is a guest on other peoples’ websites; consequently, you should make it as simple as possible for the publisher to create, grab and embed. Customizations can go much further: Jib Jab’s Starring You widgets are great examples of full personalization.
3. Market Softly and Carefully
I agree with Fred that widgets are “increasingly [being] seen as ad units and increasingly ignored.” I don’t associate that, however, with placement locations (his belief) - in fact, we at Widgetbox have data showing that in-widget engagement is less a factor of location and more a factor of widget design. I believe the reason is that a lot of widgets are closer to ‘portable advertisements’ than branded widgets. The marketing and branding on a widget should be done gently - if it’s too aggressive, publishers are turned off and unlikely to dedicate their valuable real estate to (what is essentially) unpaid ad units.
Here is an example of a highly successful widget that follows the above rules (400,000 installs and millions of views each month). The BabyTicker widget tracks the development of a baby inside the widgetized womb:
1. Engagement: users embed the widget to share progress with family and friends; meanwhile, viewers check back regularly to monitor the baby’s growth. Proof that users find the BabyTicker compelling and useful: some of their most active embed locations are on start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle, PageFlakes, etc.
2. Customization: you can set the size, the mother’s name, the number of babies and the due date. The widget reflects those changes and grows accordingly.
3. Branding: There is prominent, but intrusive, branding beneath the widget for Babystrology.com.
I found the first post particularly thought provoking:
I’ve posted every day for almost five years. Its a routine and a habit that’s hard to break
But today, I’ve got nothing to say that’s blog worthy
I’ve twittered six or seven times and posted three times on tumblr
I think its time to acknowledge that long form blogging every day may be coming to an end
I certainly agree that blogs are changing and the distributed, social content landscape has made ’short form’ discussion easier and more effective. That said, I think everything serves a different purpose: long form blogging is the table at which the conversations occur, introductions are made and meals are enjoyed. Fred might not have considered the above post “blog worthy” - but he still found value in posting it and 29 readers found it engaging enough to comment. Those comments were likely shared via Twitter, FriendFeed and email…
To me, the most important evolution of social content is that we are now empowered to produce and consume in a variety of formats and platforms… and I find that choice and distribution open me to new relationships and new content. Proof enough is that much of my richest dialog is still through email. Email continues to be a great source of recommended reading and intense discussion. If email is closed discussion, blogging is one-to-many discussion and services like Disqus, Twitter and FriendFeed are opening those discussions further.
Tonight, the Boston Celtics have an opportunity to win the 2007-2008 NBA Championship against the Los Angeles Lakers. The game will likely draw huge ratings and put an exclamation point on a terrific, renaissance season for the NBA.
But not all news is good for commissioner David Stern. After the first game of the NBA Finals (and a spectacular game at that - pitting Paul Pierce against Kobe Bryant), the Tim Donaghy scandal worsened. Donaghy, who has now been under investigation by the FBI for over a year, claimed that the other referees fixed NBA games… citing a critical elimination Game 6 between the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings (the Lakers won that game, then won Game 7 and went on to win the championship).
AdAge released a poll this week that was conducted before the Donaghy scandal - and it reveals a huge brand problem for David Stern that surely is worsened by Donaghy’s claims: 41% of NBA fans say the league alters games and 26% say the Lakers-Celtics finals a setup. Wow.
Those are troubling numbers… but they are also conflict the success the NBA has seen over the past year (viewership, ticket sales, etc). And the NBA isn’t the only league with problems:
- The NFL’s integrity has been questioned with the Spygate scandal and the league has had a long-running problem with players and the legal trouble
- Major League Baseball’s massive steroid problems were aired publicly and have ruined the era’s best hitter (Barry Bonds) and best pitcher (Roger Clemens)
- The NHL has neither problem, but playoff games draw lower ratings that ESPN’s rerun of past Word Series of Poker events
So does any of this really matter? Ultimately the health of the league is (mostly) predicated on talent and competition. The Donaghy scandal hasn’t deterred viewers for basketball. Too many Michael Vicks and Pacman Jones haven’t made the NFL any less popular. And steroids likely contributed to baseball’s resurgence. The only sport lacking a major scandal is the only sport struggling to stay afloat.
For the NBA, one thing is apparent: the players drive the league. Despite Donaghy (and whatever other external events occur) - fans want to see great athletics and great athletes. As long as Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce, Lebron James and other stars continue to play, people will continue to watch.
Today, while listening to my favorite radio show (The Thundering Herd), I noticed that ESPN started pushing ads directly into the programs. I pay $40 a year for Insider ‘privileges’ which, among other things, gives me access to on-demand ESPN radio shows that were commercial free.
But today, the Thundering Herd (Colin Cowherd’s radio program that I listen to throughout the day) had one or two ads running between segments… this was new and, frankly, this pissed me off. But as I got angry and questioned why / how ESPN could ask me for a premium subscription AND introduce advertising on top of that - I realized that it all comes down to content. Sure: I might be upset, but I won’t cancel my Insider subscription because the content is simply too good. I can still access the programming on-demand (in addition to other features) - and I value the content enough that - while I might willing to complain about advertising - I am not willing to cancel my subscription.
In summary:
At the end of the day, if the content is good enough and unique enough, a business model exists.
