The Equity Kicker

Folks - you won’t be hearing much from me for the next three weeks, but just like the Gubernator - I’ll be back.

Posted on May 30th, 2008 under Announcement. Comments: 1

John Hagel wrote a good post back in March on the future of advertising, web2.0 monetisation and the trend towards free (thanks to Bart for the pointer). He picks up on a lot of themes we have discussed here and the full post is well worth a read. This bit really stood out [...]

Posted on May 30th, 2008 under Advertising, Business models, Consumer Internet. Comments: 3

From eMarketer, via VentureBeat.
In summary still rising fast, but not quite as quickly as they had thought previously. $920m last year.

And Myspace is the premier destination, although Facebook is taking market share.

Note also that widgets only accounted for $15m last year, and will still be small this year.
Finally, as Venturebeat points out social networks [...]

Posted on May 29th, 2008 under Advertising, Facebook, MySpace, Social networks. Comments: 4

Esther Dyson penned an article for the Wall Street Journal in February. It is a great article, and you should read the whole thing if you are interested in this area, but there are two pieces in particular I wanted to pull out.
1) The current model of advertising is heading into a dangerous place:
This [...]

Posted on May 29th, 2008 under Advertising, VRM. Comments: 1

Facebook is open sourcing its application platform and calling it FBOpen. From Techcrunch:
Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications [...]

Posted on May 28th, 2008 under Facebook, Google, MySpace, Social networks. Comments: None

Wow!
That is a lot.
From an old article on VentureBeat:

Anywhere.fm
Deezer
Ezmo
Finetune
Flytunes
Freemusiczilla
Fuzz
The Hype Machine
iLike
Imeem
Jango
Lala
LastFM
Maestro
Media Master
Meemix
Melodeo
Mog
MP3tunes
Musana
MySpace
Mystrands
Orb
Pandora
Phling
Qbox.com
RadioBlogClub
Reverbnation
Seeqpod
SkreemR
Slacker
Songbeat
Songza
SpiralFrog
Streampad
Virb
We7
YouTube

Update - at least one of them has given up the ghost already. And they said goodbye in style. This was from Ezmo:
On March 14th 11:00 CET Ezmo was declared dead by Dr Alban.
-
The Ezmo team has decided to put their acquired [...]

Posted on May 27th, 2008 under Music. Comments: 1

Newspaper companies are often seen as soon-to-be-extinct relics of a bygone age, but at least two of them have read the tea leaves correctly, and are embracing the new order. I am thinking of the Guardian and the New York Times.
I’m writing this because of two bits of news I just read.
Firstly, the latest [...]

Posted on May 27th, 2008 under Content, chris anderson. Comments: None

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an interesting post yesterday on ReadWriteWeb entitled Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy. He applies network theory to data portability to show that all companies will be better off if they all allow data to be ported in and out. Essentially each social application will add value to the data [...]

Posted on May 23rd, 2008 under Business models, Consumer Internet, Facebook, Social networks. Comments: 5

For anyone that hasn’t heard, iPlayer is a runaway success. The latest stats can be found in this Guardian piece, but the headline is:
Traffic to the BBC’s broadband TV catchup service iPlayer continued to
rise during April, the broadcaster said today, with 21 million requests
for streamed and downloaded shows during the month.
It is being so [...]

Posted on May 22nd, 2008 under IPTV, PCTV, TV. Comments: 1