Seth Goldstein has a post about values he has set for himself. They are a bit personal, and might not overlap 100% with others’, but I found that they do with mine (save #11). (Thanks, Tahir.)
Monthly Archives: Sep 2006
Viral Marketing and Syphilis
Christine Herron has an amusing and thoughtful post on David Hornik‘s opinions on viral marketing. In many cases, metaphors work in only a few points, but we grant license for their use liberally. In Hornik’s case, the list is nice and long.
MySpace $15b in Three Years??
We have been hearing lots of number being thrown around lately. First, the rumors of a $750m Viacom offer, and then a $1b figure from Yahoo!, both for Facebook. Now, I get a headline from Reuters that an analyst at RBC Capital saying MySpace can be worth $15 billion in three years. At the risk of adding to the hype in the blogland echo chamber, I thought it is worth a link.
UPDATE: PaidContent.org explains the analyst Jordan Rohan’s methodology in arriving at the valuation. The primary comp was Google at the same stage.
Signs and Soccer
I have been meaning to blog about this article since having read Freakonomics, probably the best non-fiction I read this year. The article deals with the curious phenomenon of why elite soccer players tend to have birthdays concentrated in the first three months of the year. Worth a read.
Nokia’s Music Moves
Rafat Ali writes about the first major music move by Nokia. I find it exciting, because unlike Sony Ericsson, they seem to be paying much more attention to the content side.
I have contended for a while that there may be close to 100 million iPods sold, but this year alone, multiples of that will be sold in mp3 capable mobile handsets just this year. iPod resembles a platform, but the true digital music revolution will take place over mobiles. It looks like this may be the beginning.
Open Facebook
OpenBC Becoming Xing
Joe reports that openBC is changing its name to Xing. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. At SelectMinds, we were working with Accenture when they went through their name change from Andersen Consulting. That change provided an opportunity to speculate on the value of a name, since Accenture had paid Arthur Andersen (I think) about $1b to continue using the name Andersen Consulting for a year.
There will be implicit costs for openBC through this name change. Obviously they think that it’s worth it.
Start-up Pitch Tips
Online Advertising Concentration
The IAB came out with 2006 First Six Months numbers on online advertising. One interesting phenomenon that endures is the concentration of advertising revenue at the top. The Pareto Principle does not apply to this case (in that it is even more concentrated than the 80/20 cliche. The top 25 advertisers (NB: NOT the top 25%, but the top 25) pull in a whopping 84% of all online ad revenues. Reminds one of the Turkish TV advertising figures…
The Anti-Brand
Auren posted about a crazy business idea:
Let’s create a new cigarette brand.
…
We’ll call our brand of cigarettes "Death".The slogan will be "smoking WILL kill you."We’d be very up front with our customers — we will probably kill you and we don’t think you should buy our product.
"Death" might encourage people not to take up smoking or to quit.
Truth in advertising might actually work.
It’s interesting to think about However, I think the current economics of cigarette advertising would not allow this to happen. Even if you called your cigarettes "Death", you are tightly restricted on how you can advertise them. The one bad effect of cigarette advertising regulation is that it enforces the oligapolistic structure of the industry today. It would be extremely difficult to create awareness of a new cigarette brand.
Cem Sertoglu 