Marksonland

What this means is that when things don't go well, it's your fault. Didn't get that round of financing? Don't tell me the VC's are idiots or didn't "get it." You didn't pitch it right. Or you went to them too early. Or too late. VC's fund companies every day - they didn't fund your company. That's your fault. How are you going to fix it?

Same thing with customers/ users. Not getting any traction? That's your problem - not the PR firms fault, or the economy or the sales team. It's yours. You hired the PR firm - they screwed up because you let them. The sales guy didn't close because you allowed him not to. Great products with real customers are born every day - so far yours isn't one of them. That's your fault. How are you going to fix it?

The real trick is not to give the "it's my fault" attitude lip service, but to actually believe it and live it. Never let your guard down. No whispering to friends/ family that "if only so and so did this" or "if only that hadn't happened...." Always blame yourself. Its the only way your problems get solved.

Or if I did use a resume, I'd think about it like a pitch deck: who's my audience? what's the problem I am solving? Why am I uniquely situated to solve it? etc. And if I couldn't answer those questions, I probably shouldn't be applying for the job in the first place.

i was talking with a friend the other day who was thinking about joining an early stage start-up. He's a smart guy who has a good job with a big company but wants to get involved in an earlier stage venture.

Long story short, he found a company that looked like a good fit (product, financing, team, etc.), but he was hung up on some of the comp numbers. My advice to him: forget about the comp numbers (sure, negotiate but don't let it drive your decision) and think long, not short.

His goal is to move into the start-up world, get to know the VC's, other entrepreneurs, gain some early stage experience. Learn how to build a company. This gig does all those things. Sure maybe he could squeak out another .25% of stock, but is it worth it?

The company he's joining probably probably won't turn him into the next Larry or Sergey - most don't. But the experience he gets there will make an excellent slide in his personal pitch deck. It makes finding his next start-up gig even easier to find (as an employee or even a co-founder).

Any start-up investor will tell you one shot deals are hard to find. You got to play the numbers - invest in 10 and hope one hits. As founders and employees we should think the same way. Don't play for the one shot - build the personal pitch deck that's going to give you lots of swings at the plate.

It's an interesting strategy for the company. They lost the search wars. Their brand doesn't mean anything in the marketplace. But they have gobs of traffic. Users that continually come back to the site for a handful of core services.

So rather than spending money maintaining a bunch of services users don't primarily use Yahoo for, they outsource/ EOL them. Search? An ancillary service, not what draws users to the site - and very expensive to maintain. Outsource it to Microsoft. Cloud services? Some potential there, but it doesn't drive page views. Cut it. Shopping? Same. etc., etc.

Email, news and finance are what drive the page views, so those they keep. (Although for news and finance those are already pretty much outsourced to the AP, Reuters, AFP and the other syndicated content providers. Note to AP: given this direction it would be a good time to cut a new deal with Yahoo.)

From an innovation standpoint, this means Yahoo is done. Sure, they might make some incremental changes to the products they hold onto - but the days of Yahoo being a tech product leader are over. They are the online equivalent of a paper box manufacturer - they have an established product in an established industry and their job is to monetize it with the largest margins possible. Meet your numbers, don't take chances.

On one hand, given their rich history as tech leaders, its kind of sad to see. However, on the other hand, it takes some incredible self awareness for a product focus tech company to recognize their failures and focus on their strengths. If you would have told me 5 years ago, that by 2010 Yahoo would be a pure sales and marketing shop that sits on top of an IT group, I wouldn't have believed you. But that's where we are. Let's see if it works.

Really? Ok, so you like cookies. I get it. But you had to stop whatever you were doing (presumably eating said cookie) to tell me about it? You were that enthusiastic about a cookie? A child is head over heels giddy when they get a cookie and that's awesome.

But you’re an adult. You’ve had 1,000 cookies. Your enthusiasm must have waned. And here's the rub: I don't actually believe that offline that you are dancing around about your cookie. Sure, you’re mildly pleased no doubt, but you’re not shouting from the mountaintops about it. But online you carry on like you hit the lottery? Why the difference?

A person’s online presence is the broadcast of himself or herself, presumably one that is supposed to put them in a positive light. Why do people think acting like an enthusiastic 6 year old about an uneventful occurrence puts them in a positive light?

Tell you what: want the world to see you positively? Act like an adult. Say something funny, witty, creative, smart or just honest. Don't take some silly every day occurrence and post something that makes you sound like an 8 year old. That doesn’t make you look positive.

Some people theorize that Americans are being infantilized by the powers at be. This includes the government and employers. Take care of our creature comforts and we will pledge our loyalty. Perhaps the childlike online persona is really who we are - I sure hope not.

With that in mind, here's where I got my valley news over the past week:

1. Techcrunch. Not by design or even by habit, just found myself going there first for news. If I didn't check Techcrunch I didn't feel like I knew what was going on in the Valley.

2. Techmeme. My second stop in my news tour. While Techcrunch was my must read, I was fine with getting the rest of my valley news through techmeme.

3. Hacker news. The other tech aggregator in my tour. Techmeme was great for showing me the buzz in the tech world, while Hacker News let me crawl into some of the crevices of my industry. The stuff I read on Hacker News is more becuase it interests me and less to stay informed.

4. Drudgereport. A quick scan of drudge let me know what was happening in the world. It's amazing to me, his page has pretty much not changed for more than 10 years have gone by and it's still the most easily scan-able page that quickly informs me of the world news.

5. ESPN.com. I would go to the worldwide leader not for there articles - they don't have any anymore - but rather for scores.

And that was pretty much it. Notably absent from that list is the perennial time-suck Twitter. I only checked Twitter once or twice while I was away (and tweeted one uninspired tweet). I typically check Twitter a few times a day normally - but when I limited myself to only a short window for online news/ activity, it fell completely off the map. Facebook too fell by the wayside, although I usually check that less than I do twitter.

i don't know what this says about twitter, facebook or the blogs i typically read, but one thing is for sure: I didn't miss them.

In the offline newspaper world, advertising always kicked circulation's butt when it came to revenue. More readers meant more ad revenue. So it only makes sense that newspapers would price their product to maximize circulation. So wouldn't a free product maximize readers and therefore revenue? Turns out that offline, no.

There are free alternative weeklies and free local weekly/ dailies like this one all across the world. They all tend to be smaller circulation than the papers that charge money for circulation.

Offline there is a perceived qualitative aspect to things that cost consumers money. It's precisely because they are NOT given away that people assume there is value. So it makes sense that offline newspapers didn’t give away their product. It would have made it less valuable.

On the web, however, there is a cultural expectation of free. This has been created over the past 10 years. People don't devalue free content. On the contrary, they expect it and embrace it.

What people do devalue on the web is being paid to use something. When Microsoft (pre-bing) or Iwon.com pays people to search or a social news sites pay people to post stories or a community site pay people to contribute, people run for the hills. Paying them to use a product messages to users that the product itself has no value on its own. Just like free does to a product in the offline world

So maybe the line keeps moving. Offline free is bad. Online free is good. Online getting paid is bad. Who knows, maybe as info migrates to places like the mobile browser and elsewhere, paying users will be good.

Personally I hate consuming news on the mobile – too hard to read. In fact, you might have to pay me to do it! If the CPM's are there, it might make sense for a publisher to do just that. Maybe information doesn’t want to be free. Maybe its price is set by the medium in which it is distributed.

* The new engine reportedly will be called bing. Its working name internally at Microsoft used to be kumo. I like kumo better. Bing makes me think of the Sopranos. Rocky thought of Chandler Bing from friends. TechCrunch mentioned Bing Crosby. Both of those are probably more obvious than an indirect Soprano's reference, but neither occurred to me. Is a search engine that makes me think of a fictitious strip club a good thing or bad?

* Microsoft's strategy to grab market share includes a huge ($80M) marketing campaign. As a founder of a search start-up that won't have $80M to invest in marketing, I'm skeptical of that strategy.

Buying market-share online is tough to do. Most of the successful online properties don't seem to have emerged from an immense marketing campaign, but instead from a smart product strategy. This isn't to say that Microsoft doesn't have both. I just don't think that TV ads or billboards will get me to use something online. The product itself needs to tell me why I should use it.

* With Microsoft spending $80M on marketing alone, it puts start-ups that have raised much smaller amounts into perspective. Here at Blekko, we're still lean and mean on our small raise, despite what others might say...

* So why would Microsoft throw that kind of money at search? We know the answer to that one: it's simply THE best online business to be in. The rest pale in comparison.

* With that, chalk up a new question for demo's/ testing: if Microsoft and their massive team of engineers and $80M in marketing can't make a dent against Google, how could Blekko possibly compete? I actually think the question is a pretty bad one - because in my mind there's no way an established company with a massive marketing budget can compete. The only one's who stand a chance against a market leader like Google is a start-up.

Why can't Microsoft compete? Well, the usual answers apply: they're too big, too slow, the marketing budget is a crutch, etc. But at the end of the day, this is a HUGE problem for competitors:

Google has conducted internal tests in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine's search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they're not Google results.

With this type of problem you can't just make incremental adjustments to your exisitng product and throw a bunch of marketing dollars at it - you need a brand new approach. And big companies don't do well with new approaches. They require big bets, something only a small company can make because it has literally nothing to lose.

So I'm skeptical that users will score at the bing - but as I've set about every other attempt at search in the past, I'm rooting for them. Competitive search is not just good for Microsoft and Blekko, but most importantly, for users.

Against monetization:

- Ads ugly up the site. If you are in the media business (i.e. selling ads to eyes), the difficult part is usually audience accumulation. If you build it the advertisers will come. So why put something on your site that will detract users from coming? Ads usually take away value from a site - that's why advertisers have to pay for placement.

- There's zero cost to not having ads. Most sites have very little traffic on day 1 - ads don't make anyone any money without an audience. So, if there's no money to be made on day 1 anyway, and the ads are ugly, why have them at launch?

- Ads can be bad for brand. Most websites starting out show ads from a network. That means 2 things: 1) the website owner does not have final control over the ad content; and 2) the network probably wants their brand displayed on or near the ads. A bad ad can offend people and the "powered by" branding can cause confusion. Neither of those things is good for you.

On the other side of the coin, the argument goes:

- Ads mean money. This is why you are launching the site to begin with. To make money. To build a business. Some money is better than none. Simple as that.

- If not now, when? Ok, so if you defer monetization until you've reached a critical mass of audience, you need to be prepared to pick that point in time when you've reached that level. When will you know?

- The culture of moneitzation. When you start monetizing your site on day 1 it actually builds monetization into your company culture. you start thinking about it. You start trying to optimize it. You build it into your design and your product plan. It flows through your veins. Dont underestimate this - ad monetization is like anything else, a learned art. And you can only learn it through experience and trial and error. Leaving ads off your site on day 1 means you are deferring this experience to a later date.

At Topix, we started monetizing the site via Adsense on day 1. Optimizing CTR's and CPM's became a company wide obsession. We started out making enough money to buy pizza, then rent and finally paying ourselves salaries. When we had our first $500 day on adsense, an email was sent to all - and followed up with several reply-to -all "woots!". Everyone had their eyes focused on the business we were building - and that was hugely positive.

Bottom line, most times I would tell people to start monetizing on day 1. There may be some special circumstances that don't allow you to, but you should think long and hard about deferring this decision.

* This past Tuesday, Wolfram Alpha announces its structured data search product. On the same day, Google announced its new structured data product.

* July 28, 2008, so called Google killer Cuil launched its search engine. It claimed that their index of 120B documents was 3x that of any search engine. Three days before though, Google announced it knew of 1 trillion URL's.

* June 3, 2008, Wikia Search launched a feature that allows users to add and delete URL's to search results. July 16, 2008, Google announced that it is bucket testing similar features. The features went live a few months later.

* February 25, 2009, Cuil announced it is integrating longer snippets into its results. March 24, 2009, Google announced...you guessed it....longer snippets.

So what's going on here? Greg's reaction to this was that it was atypical of a market leader to be so reactive to "the competition" (if that's what you call companies that have a minuscule share of the market). He's right. Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop's store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?

I guess the fact that there are zero switching costs for search engines makes their paranoia run a bit higher than most.....

UPDATE: Matt Cutts has responded here. For clarification, my post was not discussing the features themselves, but the curious timing of their respective announcements. I'm still unsure why they waited six weeks to announce the trillion page news. As for the structured data post, well babies do come early from time to time I guess. As for Google's Wikia search product, point taken that it was first announced in November 28, 2007 (not July, 2008). Btw, Wikia Search was originally reported to be launching in December, 2007. Re: the longer snippet post, 1/2 of that announcement was indeed about related searches (the other 1/2 was to announce longer snippets though).

In March 2009, [Topix] edged out USA TODAY to become their #1 media property [of Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy] at 6.5M unique visitors (comScore)...Out of US newspaper sites, only the New York Times has more unique visitors.

News Site Unique Visitors (000)

NYTimes.com 10,942

Topix.com 6,495

USA Today Sites 5,960

WashingtonPost.com 5,829

LATimes.com 5,173

Source: comScore, Media Metrix, March 2009

That's pretty amazing that a 6 yer old site and brand can drive as much traffic to its site as one of the most recognized brands in national news. It's really a testament to Chris and the team and all the hard work they've put in.

Watch your back NY Times - I've got a feeling you're next.