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An analysis of the ‘freemium’ business model – what are the free customers worth?

On his LongTail blog Chris Anderson has picked the nuggets out of an article in this months HBR which asks ‘what is a free customer worth?’ (the full article is only available to HBR subscribers).

One surprising conclusion is the prevalence of businesses which in effect offer a freemium business model – i.e. they [...]

November 5th, 2008 | Category: Advertising, Business models, Consumer Internet | 3 comments

Does Disney think it’s customers are stupid?

Techdirt this morning has a story about Disney using anonymous quotes from IMDB in ads for it’s movies: Disney has now been caught trying out a new tactic: using quotes from anonymous internet commenters on IMDB. These “commenters” could be, for example, Disney employees, but go under usernames like “Theedge-4″ and “Mjavfc1.”

Maybe I [...]

October 8th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Video | 8 comments

Time for something new in online advertising

My buddy Paul Fisher of Advent published some research last week showing that venture capital investments into ad technology are over $580m so far this year.  Moreover Europe counted for 45% of the total in this sector, which is a lot when you consider that we only account for around 20% of venture investment [...]

September 29th, 2008 | Category: Advertising, Consumer Internet, VRM, Widgets | 17 comments

The challenges of acquiring social media businesses

Acquiring social media companies is a tricky business as shown by yesterday’s rumour that Ebay is putting StumbleUpon up for sale – over the last twelve months traffic has declinced by 70% as measured by unique visitors and 19% as measured by page views, and it is likely they will get less than the [...]

September 19th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Exits | Leave a comment

Awesome presentation from Tara Hunt on building social capital

| View | Upload your own

I particularly like the lists on pages 125-6 – “10 commandments of receiving feedback” and pages 175-6 “10 things you can do to create amazing customer experiences”.

Thanks to Nnamdi for the pointer – you come up with a lot of great stuff!

Update: Just pre-ordered Tara’s [...]

July 16th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Networking, Social networks, Social software | 8 comments

The beginning of the end for eBay?

The NewYorkTimes today has an article entitled Buy.com Deal with eBay Angers Sellers which covers a couple of interesting things.

Firstly:

Consumers appear to be tiring of online auctions, and rivals like Amazon.com are attracting  more shoppers with fixed-price listings, while eBay has been struggling for growth.

This came as a bit of a [...]

July 14th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Social networks | 28 comments

The year of the mobile???

The furore surrounding the iPhone 3G launch and the iPhone App Store is astounding – check out this screen grab from Techmeme:

I’m thinking again about mobile socnets and mobile search at the moment and it looks like Apple has succeeded in giving the sector another big [...]

July 11th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Mobile | 2 comments

Social networks as entertainment

There has been a lot of chat in the blogosphere recently about Facebook overtaking Myspace, then on the value of international traffic compared with US domestic traffic – both on Techcrunch and GigaOM, and finally asking if the implication of Facebook over-taking Myspace is that network effects for social networks have been overstated (this [...]

June 24th, 2008 | Category: Consumer Internet, Facebook, MySpace, Social networks, Virtual Worlds | 6 comments

If your service is free someone somewhere had better be making money

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 for [...]

May 30th, 2008 | Category: Advertising, Business models, Consumer Internet | 6 comments

Data portability, privacy and personal data stores

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 making [...]

May 23rd, 2008 | Category: Business models, Consumer Internet, Facebook, Social networks | 11 comments
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