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Latest Comments8 Comments
BBC Buys Lonely Planet: Implications for Media Sector
I'd say that that LP.com should be able to earn $3-4 per average monthly unique through online premium display ads alone or $13-17 million per year... and maybe another .1 - .2 for an adsense program, not including online/digital content syndication/licensing.... or a 4x revenue multiple at most... damn near bargain in todays marketplace.
Interactive Q&A: Katie Jacobs Stanton, Product Manager of Google Finance
I agree with Eli regarding the competitive set for individual companies it seems to run the gamut in a general sector… any more focus on more tight competitive set would be handy.
Regarding charts…
ah yes, now I see that little thing that allows you to expand the timeframe, that great!
A unique flag that designates historic earnings announcement dates differently than other news items would be helpful.
The intraday detail in the charts seems to be lost after 5 days, is that just too much info to store? Particularly for some options pricing needs it would be handy to be able to go back and look at the equity price at the exact time and date the option traded which could be greater than five days ago?
Also on the charts the scale seems off for the volume information, making it pretty meaningless. (on a side note there seems to be a bug on the volume field in the summary box that shows two decimal places, seems to only occur on low volume scenarios.)
Regarding Options… when in doubt I typically type go to cboe.com, just because it feels like the most definitive of sources, although not as slick of a presentation… I am always afraid that other sources will leave out certain available expiration months like Y! sometimes does.
Other stuff that would be great to see:
Conference call transcripts (like seeking alpha provides!) and a list of future events section, ie for upcoming conferences, earnings, etc
I also like the idea of having a profile that is a little more friendly (plain English) than the ones provided… I noticed that there are sometimes links to Wikipedia that serve this purpose well, but 1. it’s buried at the bottom and 2. is not always there even when a Wikipedia entry exists.
Also a gripe about the more resources section on individual stock quote pages… there doesn’t seem to be any uniformity or logic around the more resources section… an options link appears on stocks that don’t offer options, sometimes there is a Wikipedia link, other times not, sometimes there is a Google discussions link other times not. Things like the Events (AOL Finance), research reports (Y! Finance) , Major Holders (MSN Finance), analysts estimates etc I’d all just expect to be a part of the main content offering.
Interactive Q&A: Katie Jacobs Stanton, Product Manager of Google Finance
Google-DoubleClick Deal Makes aQuantive More Attractive
Agree with your point regarding DFP publishers. Regarding ad agencies ... I really don't see why agencies are so scared of Google. Hell running, monitoring and reporting on a Google buy is much more complicated than say buying a page in People magazine... you think advertisers want to deal w/ all that mess? Thats why the big advertiser hire agencies in teh first place. The more media venhicles focus on ROI and stats and metrics etc, the more value an agency brings as their partner to sort though it all. Yes buyers want to spread money around to a lot of different sites, both because it broadens their reach and also because it gives them some leverage against the sellers to have alternatives... but on the flip side trying to manage a 100 site buy manually is nearly impossible without a system to help streamline. Hence the value of Doubleclick in the first place. So there is a huge convenience factor as well... would you dare send out RFPs to tens of thousands of websites? no Way! there is a ton of value in having someone aggregate all the best into a single ad sales contact, technology, reporting source. This is the value, that along w/ tying search query values into the DART ad call, that Google hopes to unlock.
Could you elaborate any more on your comments regarding Tacoda and social networking play? I don't think they care the slightest about Tacoda, but think the model they could pursue will be similar in that they look to move low valued inventory to a higher valued use (for all types of willing publishers) by looking up users recent Google search query keywords and matching those to users they see on the DFP network (for those publishers that opt into the program of course) and then serving them a display ad from the same folks that bought the search key word... as an expanded "display" option for those currently Google search advertisers... now they just need the online banner equivalent of a spot runner.
DoubleClick Acquisition: Google Heads Microsoft Off At the Pass
What you essentially have in Doubleclick now is already a very large ad network, although no buyer can currently buy the Doublelick ad network directly, its a bunch of big web sites all opertaing separately and independently but on a common back end platform... Doubleclick's DFP clients certainly don't consider themsleves a part of any Doubleclck network. But that's certainly not to say that they wouldn't consider it if it helped them bring in more money. I don't think its too much of a stretch to see doublclick go back into the ad network type business, thats how they started afterall... and they'd already made a step in that general direction by starting their ad marketplace, knowing that, like you said, ad serving is a commodity business, they wanted to find a way to get a small slice of the media money that was exchanging hands right in front of their faces every day... motif and klipmart were similar endeavors.
bottom line is that 1. there is potential value to be created for both parties by bringing together Google search query data to display ad calls from DFPs exiting client base, and 2. trying to get in on a piece of the media spend has been the holy grail of all of these 3rd party software solution providers since their inception, this is not a new concept. Go talk to PointRoll, eyeblaster et al... it aint much fun to sit back and take in tiny software licensing fees as you watch the businesses that you help run make that much and more in a single ad buy.
DoubleClick Acquisition: Google Heads Microsoft Off At the Pass
Google obviously needs to continue to grow at a tremendous clip hitting quarterly milestones for wall street. And if you look at how online ad revenue is expected to be spent in the forseeable future we find the biggest chunk in search followed by display and classifieds… and there is only so much more Google can do to affect the tug a war match underway for that big chunk of pie ear-marked for search spending. So the next logical place to look is the next biggest piece of the pie… ie display ad spend. If you drill down into that display ad spending you’ll find enormous chunks that are spent via buys on one of a handful of ad networks like advertising.com, valueclick, burst, real media, in addition to the big media content creators sites. So if you’re Google wanting to play in that display space very quickly and in a big way the fastest way is to buy an existing ad network. Traditional network like advertising.com, tribal, valueclick are all big, but arguably have lower quality inventory provided from a mix of thousands of very small mom and pop sites plus the sub-prime inventory from the larger publishers (stuff those publishers can’t sell using their in house sales force). Doubleclick, on the other hand is not a true ad network per se, it’s a technology solution/tool that they sell as a service to advertisers and publishers to help make running their ad business easier/more streamlined… the same way a company buys Microsoft office or SAP to run their business. They’re not currently active in the market trying to get advertisers to spend on the ‘network’ any more than Microsoft is trying to dream up math problems that can be solved by excel.
What I can see Google doing is going to Doubleclicks premium Fortune 500 clientele and saying this. “Listen I know that you only sell 50% of your banner and video inventory, join our partner program and let us have a look at your incoming ad calls and if doubleclick has a low value or no value match against it based on what you’ve already sold, let us see if we can find a higher valued match with a search query the user may have performed on Google recently… if we can, we can get $x for it and we will share x with you.” The value proposition to the advertiser is the same high relevance that they enjoy from the search query matches tied together with the premium content quality of the doubleclick customer base.
This is already sort of what folks like Tacoda and Revenue Science are doing, although they obviously don’t have the Google search behemoth to tie to.
Voila the next thing you know you have a massive ad network of quality content sites that you’re skimming sales revenue from.
About the publisher flight risks… yeah some may get spooked about giving more money to Google, but remember a few points… First many of these publishers happily contribute significantly to the Google or Yahoo coffers already through participation in adsense or overture programs as a part of their internal inventory yield management initiatives. These services ultimately help the publisher make more money everyday and offers something they can’t do themselves, so publishers have shown that they’ll happily let Google get paid as long as it helps them get paid too. Also, Doubleclick has been in the business quite a while and is one of the most respected and established vendors in the market, with the most publisher customers, with unsurpassed up time (reliability) and a large talent pool of operations folks well versed in running their system, etc. This along with the fact that Doubleclick recently bought out one of their key smaller and more nimble competitors (FALK) means that if you’re in the market for ad serving solutions, there aren’t that many other strong competitors in market to offer an end to end solution for publishers, so just saying no thanks to Doubleclick and hopping to another solution is no light or easy decision.
Looks like Google really wants to be in the display ad network business and this is the biggest and quickest bang they could make and got some cdn and data center assets to boot.
Two Tips to Predicting Google's Future
1st party would be site serving ads themselves, 2nd party would be via the use of an ad serving system like Doubleclick, 3rd party would vendors like DFA and atlas where advertisers put their own ad tags into systems like doubleclick to keep their own set of numbers re ad counts and click through. There are a few fourth party systems out there that look at attributes in an ad call (or of the user generating the call) and decide where it can best be monetized and then pass along that call to the most profitable recipient, known as 4th party ad serving. All very much a business that Google could easily play in...
Viacom vs. GooTube: Who Needs Whom More?
At the moment I can't see why Viacom really NEEDS YouTube either. As a possible next generation virtual MSO, YouTube certainly deserves some consideration, but with the dozens of new video aggregators emerging these days and new services being offered by existing MSOs, it’s way too early to anoint any winners. And if you believe as MTV does, that content is king, then allowing a service to use their content will help to make them win… and if you YouTube isn’t offering favorable terms, why help them win?
Now I’ve heard some say that Google has already won… well I don’t believe it. They kick ass in search and make a huge amount of money by making very focused matches between advertisers and their desired audiences via search, which advertisers will pay royally for, but that certainly doesn’t make them the all in one destination for video entertainment