Marksonland

* 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.

More than a decade ago, AP made two crucial decisions: to not create a destination site and to license its content to news portals. Either of these decisions on their own would have been damaging, but the combination of the two has been nearly deadly.

I couldn't agree with him more - and have in the past have stated that indeed AP.com is the answer. So this begs the question, why haven't they done this? Why don't they start a destination site?

The answer of course is their members. Each of their members is a news organization of some sort (newspaper, tv, radio, etc.) and each has its own presence online. The members don't want the AP publishing stories on AP.com - the members want AP stores read on member sites. Their brands mean something to them and they're not ready to punt on them in favor of a different brand. This leaves the AP stuck.

This of course is not an uncommon scenario. Many times when existing businesses become investors/ owners of a new venture, at some point the business of the new venture and the business of the investor start to conflict. What is good for a new business is not always good for the investor. And as you add more strategic investors, the problem compounds.

We certainly saw this at Topix. We are a local news aggregator who was purchased by local newspaper companies. To the degree the new owners promoted our brand on their properties they viewed it as having the potential of cannibalizing their audience. So getting the full support of the owners was at times difficult.

With Topix, it didn't matter to us as much financially though. We had sold our interest. We knew the deal we were making and who we were making it with. Alot of strategic investment, however, is not M&A but rather just what it says it is: investment. And whenever a strategic investor owns a piece of your company, potential competitive issues come up.

Is your product competing with their business? Can you do a deal with one of their competitors? Who's products/ services can you purchase? Who can you sell your company to? Who can you hire? And the list goes on and on....

This is not to say strategic investments can not be done right. They most certainly can. My first start-up took in strategic investment from 2 big companies that were competitors and we sold to a third that competed with both. We had structured the initial investment in a way that made the eventual sale work for everyone.

Managing strategic investors can be challenging. It's best done up front before problems arise. Otherwise you end up stuck in the middle - and that's not a good place to be. Just ask the AP.

After watching this video, my first reaction was this guy is brilliant. 9 billion bands are interviewed 9 billion times every day and no one pays attention to any of them. But this interview was everywhere. Pretty much everyone with an internet connection is now clued to the fact that Billy Bob Thorton has a band. Awareness PR homerun.

But was it? There's an old saying that you measure publicity by the pound - or there's no such thing as bad press. Alot of people - especially online - seem to subscribe to that. They promote their company or their product not through the product itself, but through their personal association with it.

The theory seems to be that the more outrageous you act, the more attention you can get for yourself and, as a result, get more attention to your company and your product. Billy Bob acts like an ass and now everybody knows he's got a band. But do they remember the bands name? I didn't. Do they buy their music or go see their show? Again, I didn't. But it did succeed in making Billy Bob more famous.

My guess is that's the effect this type of marketing has on most people who employ it. It achieves a level of renown for the person, but not the product. Now, if your product and your personality are inextricably tied, then perhaps its a good strategy. But that's not most folks.

So I guess my verdict on Billy Bob is: good news for him, bad news for his band.

1: to utter successive chirping noises; 2 a: to talk in a chattering fashion b: giggle

That kind of perfectly sums up twitter- 140 character chirps uttered in a chattering fashion. The name is non-obvious, wonderfully descriptive, familiar, yet unencumbered. And let's face it, its fun to say (twitter, tweets, tweeting, etc.). Big home run.

Next, they come up with the service description of "real-time search". As I've said before, I actually don't think search is what they do, but that doesn't matter. They now own the term real-time search. And it's a great term.

From a perception standpoint, owning anything search is great. Search is just that good of a business. But most of the search modifiers proved to be ownership-less - or Google got them by default. Local search, shopping search, people search, image search, etc. all have been tried by lots of people but have amounted to nothing. YouTube got video search - and $1.6 billion later, Google got YouTube. Owning a search term is a good thing.

Real time search as a category seems to have legs. Is it valuable from a monetary perspective? TBD. From a perception perspective: oh yeah, it's valuable. And Twitter owns it. And on the web you have to own your category or you die.

Which brings me to my point: why the f$#@ did they start talking about Twitter being a "discovery engine." This term is perhaps the tritest term in the short history of the web. So many people have tried to apply some dime-store marketing to their particular site or service and called their engine a "discovery engine" or a "find engine" or "explore engine". It's a cheap, transparent way to draft off of the great business of search, but it always fails. There is no meaning behind these terms.

But real-time search? Ah. Now, that means something. Let me search what's happening right now. Cool. In theory anyway. So, how about instead of Twitter being a discovery engine, they talk about it being a....wait for it.....real time search engine. That would actually mean something - and capitalize on the term they already own. Sounds like a winner to me - and beats the shit out of discovery engine.

So note to Twitter: you're naming and branding is awesome. Keep it up. And never, ever utter the phrase discovery engine again. We'll pretend it didn't happen.

_________

Disclaimer: I work for a company named Blekko - which I helped name. You should keep that in mind as you read any naming advice I give. :)

As everyone knows, newspapers are a dying breed. The internet killed them. Not because of the ubiquity of news outlets though - although competition for the user is fierce. News is everywhere. It's just you can't make any money with it.

Pretty regularly a reporter or columnist or analyst will come out with an article/ report claiming the fate of the newspaper industry hinges on a paywall. Of course this is all nonsense. Newspaper circulation revenue is always dwarfed by ad revenue. If newspapers converted every online user today to a subscription model, the newspaper industry would be still dying. It's not enough. The ad model for that underwrote what we know as the modern newspaper is broken and it ain't ever getting fixed.

Ok, so what's that have to do with March madness? Well, as goes the newspaper industry, so goes the TV industry. Viewership is dying. Advertisers realize that buying an expensive ad on TV carries no reliably measurable ROI. Other alternatives do - and so the dollars will migrate.

Of course,TV ad revenue is what pays for expensive content like the NCAA tournament - and the NBA, NFL, MLB, Olympics, etc. When the ad revenue goes away, television networks will find themselves in the same spot as newspapers: trying to figure out a way to underwrite the expensive content they distribute. And like newspapers, if they try to rely on circulation revenue (PPV, webcast, etc.), it won't come close to what they make today.

So tomorrow when you're watching the games, and marveling at the high production value and listening to the many overpriced analysts give their thoughts on the minutiae, make sure you enjoy it. My guess is it ain't gonna last.

The two meme's that seem to be most prevalent about Twitter these days are (1) how is it going to make money; and (2) is it a Google killer? The former is pretty obvious given right now Twitter is not currently monetized while the latter a bit more complicated. Lots of smart people view Twitter as a threat to Google because it in "real time search." I'm not so sure.

Perhaps I'm one of those people that doesn't entirely "get" Twitter. With that, I do from time to time tweet (mostly as an extension of Facebook through the Twitter app) and I try to follow both friends and industry people. My main issue with Twitter as a reader is that it quickly becomes overkill - too many posts moving too quickly down my screen.

Aha, you say, see a killer search app would cure this - Twitter is search. Maybe. I kind of view Twitter as dead simple blog platform for the masses (hence the adoption of it by the masses). Blog platforms like the one for this blog (Movable Type) can be complicated - especially for the mainstream folks who don't know/ want to learn html commands.

Folks like Six Apart and Blogger tried to cure this by creating easy to use blog platforms like Vox and, well, Blogger. But they never hit the mainstream like twitter. It turns out that not just the platform is hard - blogging itself is hard. It's long form. You need to come up with ideas and then write mini-essays on them. No one likes to write essays. Its time consuming and takes lots of editing. And if you want anyone to read them you need to do this at least daily. Not so easy.

Twitter does away with all that. Text messaging 140 characters or less is something most of us do every day outside Twitter and its generally not held to standards on spelling, grammar or even content. "I'm going to the store" is a fine tweet, but a bad blog post. But it is real time expression - and now there is a platform for it: the blog platform for the masses. From geo cities to Movable Type to live journal/ vox/ blogger to this. Everyone now has their presence online and can express themselves.

But is this search? When blogging reached its hay day (3 years ago?), we quickly found out that search was the entirely wrong mechanism to consume blogs. That's why companies like feedster and technorati (and products like google blog search) never really took off. Consuming a blog was more of a social thing, not a search thing. Whether it was through recommendations, shared links, the blogroll, trackbacks, commentary or an aggregator - most of us determined which blogs to consume via social mechanisms, not searching for content.

So back to Twitter: is twitter search going to be really that much different than blog search? Its hard for me to see the differences. Unless of we re-define "search" to mean something beyond user generated queries against an index of documents. I think twitter will be consumed like blogs - socially through word of mouth and links - and yes, Entertainment Weekly. And that ain't search.

My main pet peeve with the old espn.com was that it had a video player (with sound!) that started playing automatically when opened the page. At least that is no more. But the new site is pretty much entirely a rich media experience. The main story box: video. The headline box on the upper right: 50% or more of the stories are video stories. Even the Bill Simmons' contributions are more often than not a pod cast, not a column. At times its actually hard to find stuff to actually read there.

Of course all of that is well and good if you like to consume your sports news through video. I do not. In fact, I pretty much avoid most video offerings on the net. I prefer the quiet and personal, text experience of a web site. Flash apps, video, audio all tend to turn me away. Now, with that, there are times that I will actively seek videos. In those instances, like everyone else, I go to the sites dedicated to video (YouTube or Hulu) and search for them. Other than that, I'm reading, not watching.

I bring this up because of the news today from Yahoo that they are going to start monetizing their search results with rich media ads. Videos as part of search results? Hmmmm...I'm skeptical.

Search is a lean forward experience. You're looking for something and you want to find it fast. You're not there to lean back and consume a video in the midst of it. Honestly, I can't personally ever imagine clicking on a video as a search result (outside a video search, obviously). Oy.

Now I know why they're (espn.com, yahoo, etc.) doing this: advertisers love rich media ads. The cpm's they carry are MUCH higher than those associated with standard display ads. Fair enough. But as a user, I hope this trend doesn't continue. I prefer my web to be text based.