It's Rishi

Lookery, an ad network for Facebook and other social networks with developer platforms, announced that, as part of their effort to rapidly grow their inventory, they are offering guaranteed minimum of 12.5 cents CPM for the next three months for an exclusive on the application’s traffic. 12.5 cents CPM at first glance seems awfully low but one must consider the alternatives.

Ad rates, in this case we’re talking in terms of CPM, generally correlate directly with context. Stronger context means a more focused audience. Targeted ads for this audience brings in high rates. For Facebook apps that have pages with real context, it’s likely that they can and should do much better than 12.5 cents. Depending on the content genre, it may take a bit more legwork on the part of the developers to find the right advertisers who will pay, but if the volume is there, it shouldn’t be too hard. However, for apps that have no real context (the majority of apps), 12.5 cents CPM may be about as good as they can get. Facebook itself sells its “flyer” ad space (the left column under the nav links) for not much more than this. In fact, I recently paid about 20-25 cents CPM for an ad and that was when I instructed Facebook to serve my ad only to a very precise demographic (matching only ~40k users out of the 50M+ Facebook userbase). Without such targeting, I would have gotten away with paying much less.

From my own experiences, I’ve found SocialMedia to be quite lucrative. SocialMedia advertisers, primarily developers who are buying installs for their own applications, pay 15 cents and upwards for a click. When SocialMedia first launched, when we published their ads prominently at the top of our canvas pages, we saw eCPM as high as $2 or so. Now it’s less, but still is above 50 cents eCPM. My hunch though is that applications which serve massive page views, particularly a large number of page views per user session, will see decreasing eCPM from SocialMedia. There’s only so many ads that each user is going to click in a session, no matter how many page views in length. Again, this is just a hunch though.

So, if you are one of the application developers that has a massively popular application which offers no meaningful context, then Lookery’s offer is probably pretty attractive. And this type of developer is exactly who Lookery wants in order to achieve their goal of adding a billion page views of inventory a month for the next few months.

PRN (Paul, Rishi, Nick) just launched a new Facebook app called My Apple Life. It allows users to share the Apple products that they have and want on their Facebook profile. Also, users can find others that have the same products that they do and engage in discussions like “What’s the best waterproof case for my iPod Nano?” Check it out…

Seeqpod is a music search engine that crawls the web and finds music files. I have used it a few times recently and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Many of the songs that I was looking for were found. Full DRM-free mp3s. Where does Seeqpod find these files? From what’s often called “open directories”. Open directories are typically user directories on web servers that have inadvertently been made public. They often aren’t publicly available for long since once they are found, they are leeched like crazy by users, which drives up bandwidth usage on the user account (which eventually leads to the account being suspended).

Savvy users have been finding open directories for years. With the right search parameters, Google is a great tool for finding such open directories. However, Seeqpod is an ideal tool for this. Not only is it laser focused on finding music, it mashes up relevant discography data and can even stream the search results so you can listen before you download.

The problem is that Seeqpod is essentially a Napster for the Web. Whereas the real Napster searched people’s own local computers for music, Seeqpod searches the Web for music that people have uploaded to servers. While there may be some legitimate content that Seeqpod is crawling, I think it will be very difficult for the Company to defent itself against a new lawsuit from Warner Music which claims that Seeqpod directly contributes to copyright infringement by helping people locate pirated content.

As usual, I think the record labels are picking the wrong battles and need to focus their resources on figuring out how they can add value, and build closer relationships, with music listeners. The recent developments at Last.FM makes me hopeful that the record labels are in fact seeing the light.

I have to admit that I was excited to go to MacWorld today. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was expecting to see, but I do know that I was not expecting to be so incredibly underwhelmed. Few booths stimulated my interest. Even Apple’s own floor was pretty pathetic. Apple focused on two products: MacBook Air and iTunes rentals playable on the updated AppleTV. Of course there were the obligatory iPods and iPhones available for showgoers to play with, but I was shocked that Apple didn’t even bother to have any of their other computer products available. It’s possible that I missed it but I didn’t even see any of the new Apple Pro models. I guess it’s Apple’s way of telling owners of their existing products that they are no longer a part of the family unless they upgrade to the new latest-and-greatest.

As for the new products, here’s my take:

MacBook Air – When I saw it in person, I couldn’t help but marvel at the tremendous achievement in packaging that it represents. It’s amazingly thin and light. However, you do make compromises on connectivity and performance (opting for the ultra-expensive SSD option mitigates much of the performance sacrifice but it’s an option that few can afford for now). Since Apple already makes amongst the most svelte laptops on the market, I don’t think the Air is going to expand Apple’s market share. Instead, most sales will come from jetsetters and the tech-savviest who would otherwise be using a MB or MBP.

Time Capsule – No RAID, no care. It’s as simple as that for me. I want to backup and be all but certain that the data will be there if I need it. If the Time Capsule’s HD fails, you’re SOL. That’s not what I consider reliable storage. Come on Apple, give me an Internet-based backup onto storage in a robust datacenter. Until this happens, I’ll stick with Mozy.

iTunes Movie Rentals – I’m impressed. The prices are reasonable and selection strong. Will this finally convert the NetFlix/BlockBuster userbase into believers? I’m not sure. Will this sell more Apple TV’s? I think so.

iPhone updates – The addition of location via tower triangulation turns iPhone GMaps into a truly killer app. I am really looking forward to February to see what Apple is going to unlock to developers when the SDK launches.

Lowest moment at the show: Four people earnestly shooting photos of an unremarkable MacBook Air decoration that hung from the ceiling. What were they all using to snap the photos? iPhones! I couldn’t help but feel nauseous.

Finally, I’d love for someone to do a study of Apple’s market share in San Francisco. At every coffee shop I have been to in the city, at least 50% of the laptops in use are MacBooks. In fact, after leaving MacWorld today, Nick, Paul & I were doing some brainstorming at a coffee shop out near my place in the richmond and in between thoughts, I noticed that about 75% of the laptops in the shop were Macs. Of course, my observation is biased since I’m only considering people who live in SF and compute at coffee shops. For the most part, this is the college-age to young professional age. So right there, Apple’s market share is going to be higher than their overall market average.

The answer: 50% of all Internet users! Hitwise released a report comparing the traffic of the four leading map products: MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft’s Live Local. What didn’t surprise me is that Google Maps is the only one of product of the four that has gained significant year-over-year traffic. The others are flat to down slightly. However, even at GMaps’s brisk growth rate, it still won’t likely catch MapQuest for atleast 18 months.

I don’t know a single person that uses MapQuest. Even after a recent redesign, MapQuest is still a poor, uncompetitive offering. The only times I use MapQuest is when it is integrated into a third-party website (most often store locators). Even in such cases, I often copy+paste the address into GMaps. MapQuest is that horrible and I am shocked to learn that half of Internet users still choose it. Above all, this news serves as a great wake-up call that even a compelling product from a market leader still can take years to cross the chasm.

After the 2007 US automobile sales figure were tallied last week, it was confirmed that Toyota supplanted Ford for the #2 position. So, the new Big 3 automakers in the US are: GM, Toyota, and then Ford. Ford’s US sales continued its double-digit declines with a 12% fall to 2.5M units. A big chunk of the sales decline came as a result of Ford killing off the venerable Taurus model that was essentially sold only to fleet operators (i.e. rental companies, corporate fleets, etc.). Moves such as this by Ford were part of its larger plan to cut fleet sales in 2007 with the intention of improving resale value. Toyota was up 2% to 2.7M units. Meanwhile, GM’s sales were down 6% to 3.8M units. Although it would seem that GM has a comfortable lead over Toyota, industry experts are already speculating that it may not be long before Toyota takes over GM to become the #1 US automaker. My question: Is Toyota’s race to be #1 the cause of the company’s recent reliability issues? Many have speculated that the unusually high number of recalls reported in the new Tundra were a direct result of Toyota rushing to bring the truck to market.

Back in July 2006, I wrote a post titled Predicting the Future With Google Trends in which I described how Google Trends, which measures the relative search volume of keywords on Google, could have been used to reveal the relative popularity of real-world phenomena, such as who will win American Idol.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up 30-day trailing data for both the republic and democratic presidential candidates and compared it to the actual Iowa Caucus results yesterday.

Is it just me or was Google Trends a remarkably accurate predictor of yesterday’s result! I tried specifying trend data for only Iowa however it seems as if there isn’t quite enough data to draw any meaningful conclusion.

Among other features, IMDB allows users to rate movies. What I’ve noticed for the past several months is that nearly every movie inevitably starts out with a massive number of 10 ratings.

How do you explain the following?

At first glance this rating breakdown exhibits a common phenomenon in user ratings: many users rate the extremes. In this case that would be 1 and 10. However, if you look at most rating breakdowns on IMDB, there is no such polarity. Only a heavy bias of 10 ratings.

Another theory might be that the people who are first to see a movie and rate it online are generally those who are most enthusiastic about the movie. Thus, it is natural that the ratings of their users would be irrationally high.

Yet another theory is, of course, that those involved with marketing the movie are gaming the ratings. IMDB is massively popular site (almost 20M uniques per month according to Compete.com) and many movie-goers use the site’s movie ratings to decide which to see. Moreover, even if a movie studio didn’t intend to game ratings, they are almost forced to simply to keep pace with other movies that do have people gaming its ratings. Anyways, this is just a theory. No proof.

More to come…

Have you ever been browsing a merchant website and a popup appeared asking you for feedback? Or have you received an email following a purchase asking you to fill out a survey about your experience? I do almost weekly.

Having needed to collect feedback in the past, I understand both how hard it is to get people to fill out surveys and how valuable direct user feedback is to improving the user experience. Thus, I’m more likely to fill out a survey than most.

Today, I got an email from BestBuy asking me for feedback on my in-store pickup experience. I clicked thru the link and was awarded with the following:

A whopping 40 questions each needing an overly granular 1-10 rating. When I saw this survey, I immediately lost motivation.

This brings me to my three rules for effective online surveying. I’m not a marketing veteran but I have conducted a few online surveys in my day. Also note that I’m not suggesting that these rules are going to boggle your mind. However, since most surveys I am presented with don’t adhere to these rules, I think they’re worth reiterating.

Keep it short – Seriously, this is so obvious but it shocks me how few surveys are truly concise. Some surveys are honest saying up front that it will take 15 minutes to complete. Others are less scrupulous and say it will take 5 when it really will take 15. Either way, keep the survey to 5 minutes or under and hope that your users can complete it in 2-3 minutes.

Start and end with the easy questions – If a user is stumped by your first question, they’ll abandon. An easy question will get them in a groove and help their brain recall more details about their experience. Conversely, by the end of the survey – particularly if the survey is longish – the user’s attention is waning. They’re nearing the end of the mental commitment they originally made to your survey.

Keep the answer choices simple and meaningful – Why do 1-10 when 1-5 will suffice? Mix up the answer choices as well. It will make taking the survey a little less monotonous and keep the user’s attention. Qualify the answer choices with text descriptions to make numerical ratings more comparable between users. e.g. “5 – I will definitely visit X.com next time I am shopping for a computer product. 1 – Even if X.com had the lowest price, I would buy elsewhere” . Keeping your survey short will make adding text descriptions not such a time consuming step.

It was rumored back in August that Facebook would be adding friend lists to the site. Many speculated about how exactly friend lists would work and how exactly it might spell the death of the Top Friends app by Slide. Today, four months later, the feature has launched. Were the predictions true? Here are some thoughts:

1) For now, friend lists are private and cannot be made public. Moreover, lists cannot be accessed by the API. Thus no RIP for Top Friends just yet. It’s possible users may be given the option to make lists public and API’s may be able to access lists in the future. For now, though, it would seem that Levchin and Co are okay – heck it wouldn’t surprise me if Slide and RockYou used their leverage to influence Facebook’s decision on this issue.

2) Some other posts have implied that Facebook provides a news feed specifically for each list. That’s false. You cannot currently see a news feed for a specific friend list. You are able to see a list of most updated profiles and status updates for friends of each list though.

3) Anyone suggesting that this feature is a LinkedIn killer needs to do some deeper thinking. I’m not saying that Facebook doesn’t already provide much of the value (keeping track of contacts, people browsing/hunting, etc.) that LinkedIn does, but these private friend lists don’t add much incremental value in making Facebook a professional tool. Facebook already provides enough tools to search through your friends if you need to pinpoint a certain friend or a friend matching a certain (network, interest, etc.)

4) So what does this do? Adds more, finer edges to the social graph. My best bet is that these lists will be exposed via the API such that both Facebook and third-party app developers as well as advertisers (again more edges on the social graphs means more ways to discover behavioral and interest patterns between persons in the social graph) wil be able to take advantage.

5) Why did friend lists take so long to launch? It was four months ago that the API tool dropped a hint as to this functionality. Four months is an eternity in Facebook time. Unless I’m missing something, this feature – in it’s current state – would not have taken that long to develop. Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than meets the eye here. We’ll find out soon enough…