The Sad Side of the Web

By Mark Evans in Media 4 Comments

The Web is an amazing tool for all kinds of different reasons. But it can also be extremely addictive and, frankly, unhealthy.

I’m not sure about you but I ‘m downright troubled by a survey done by JWT that suggests a majority of U.S. adults feel they cannot go for a week without going online, and one in three are giving up friends and sex for the Web. “People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line,” said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT.

The only word to describe this situation is: sad. To think people would be willing to give up some of the real pleasures in life to surf the Web suggests something is terribly wrong. The need to be connected has got completely out of hand. Just look at the growing number of people incessantly checking their Blackberrys, even when socializing.

There’s no doubt something has to give as people spend more time online. For me, it’s television. Gone are the days of channel surfing. For others, however, the Web has taken over their lives, which means people are living digitally rather than socially. Bad.

More: TechDirt contends that while people are spending less time face-to-face, they are interacting with people more by doing it online. Not sure this is something we should be too thrilled about.

Why Advertisers Are Afraid of the Web

By Mark Evans in Advertising/Marketing No Comments

Despite all the excitement about how fast the online advertising market is growing, it’s still a drop in the bucket – 5% – of the total advertising pie.

According to a McKinsey survey, it turns out that among 410 marketing executives who advertising online, 52% said there are “insufficient metrics to measure impact”, while 41% said there weren’t enough in-house capabilities, 33% said they had difficult convincing senior management. 24% said they are a limited reach of digital tools, while 18% said there are insufficient capabilities at ad agencies.

Scott Karp does a fine job ripping apart these arguments. In typical fashion, he provides this succinct summary:

“The reality is that the attitudes expressed in the McKinsey report are all a smoke screen, intended to protect vested interests and organizations adapted to static media models, which went unchanged for decades, and not the dynamic innovation of the web. But they can’t deny that the future of advertising and marketing is online. that traditional advertisers are looking for more accountability but more “comfortable,” more “familiar.” Just ask media companies how uncomfortable the transition to digital can be.”

Karp hits the nail on the head. You’ve got a huge industry with billions of dollars to spend on advertising. Not surprisingly, they will spend on what they know – traditional advertising – as opposed to taking a “risk” and allocating more of their budgets online. Even an aggressive online advertisers such as P&G, which spends close to $100-milliononline, still has the vast majority of its ad budget in traditional media.

It won’t be until the next generation of media buying executives appear on the scene that you will start to see seismic changes in the ad industry. These people will be Web savvy and not afraid to put some serious dollars online. Until then, most companies will dabble with the Web until they and their media buyers are sure the Web is ready for them.

What Does TechCrunch40 Say About Web 2.0?

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 1 Comment

You’d think with all the excitement and extensive coverage (most of it enthusiastic and positive) that the TechCrunch40 conference (aka The Mike and Jason Show) was everything people thought it would be. You had 800 people – some of them standing during sessions – happy to pay $2,500 to hear about the hottest new start-ups while rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers within Silicon Valley.

From the outside looking in, I wonder what TechCrunch40 says about the Web 2.0 landscape or, to be more exact, the Web 2.0 economy. Given the buzz about the conference and strong attendance, it suggests there’s still plenty of optimism, enthusiasm and bullishness. This stands in contrasts to the broader economic landscape in which the U.S. economy is starting to struggle, the housing market is abysmal, and the private equity market has seen some rough patches.

It could because Silicon Valley is an eternally optimistic ecosystem where technology and innovation are apparently able to ride about the fray. There’s still acquisitions being done (e.g. Yahoo-Zimbra, Yahoo-Blue Lithium), new venture capital firms being created, and start-ups are being funded (Zillow raises another $37-million). Why should there be anything to worry about?

While not trying to a party-pooper, things just seem a little too buoyant. It feels like everyone is partying like its 1999 – the only things missing are a rash of not-ready-for-prime-time IPOs and schwag-filled launch parties with open bars. A conference that sells 800 tickets at $2,500 a pop (and could have easily sold more) could be seen as a sign of a frothy environment – or Arrington and Calacanis’ golden marketing touch.

In the wake of the euphoria surrounding the TechCrunch40, it is somewhat ironic that four months ago Arrington talked about how Silicon Valley could use a downturn.

“I left Silicon Valley at the peak of the insanity last time around, and I was pleasantly surprised when I returned in 2005 to see so much goodwill and community surrounding innovation. Now, it’s just like the old days again, and Silicon Valley is no longer any fun. In fact, it’s turned downright nasty. It may be time for some of us to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory. We can focus, once again, on the technology. And the burgers and beer.”

I wonder how Arrington feels about things today. Probably pretty happy given he and Calacanis probably made a mint from the conference.

More: A few days ago, Fred Wilson had a post, “Tough Times Ahead for the Web?” in which he suggested the “probability of tough times ahead has gone up in the past year. And it seems to be creeping into our collective consciousness (or at least mine).” How to Split An Atom provides an overview on the TechCrunch40 conference, suggesting it would have been nice to see “more garage projects” on stage as opposed to companies that had already been funded and well covered.

PlanetEye’s My City Gets Some Review Love

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 No Comments

My City-2
Over the past month, we (PlanetEye) have been working on our our Facebook application, My City, that gives people an easy way to share their favourite local spots with your friends, and discover their local favourites as well.

It was really exciting to get a review from AppRate, one of the leading Facebook application review sites. The review is extensive but the highlight – at least for us – is the opening line: “My City is a good application that, with some work, could be great”.

My City has been steadily gaining momentum, and we’ve been making constant improvements based on feedback from users. A pleasant surprise has been adoption outside North America. Among the largest overseas communities are Sydney, London, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Stockholm.

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The NYT Concedes Defeat

By Mark Evans in Media 5 Comments

Timesselect
It took awhile but the NYT finally got it that charging consumers to access certain parts of its online content isn’t economically viable.

Two questions: what took it so long to come to the realization, and how did the NYT think it was going to be any different from any other newspaper the (WSJ excepted) that has tried to implement a walled garden of any kind.

Sure, the NYT is a high-quality paper but when there’s so much free content on the Web getting people to pay for a subscription is like trying to make a cat take a bath. So good for the NYT for accepting the fact that maybe it can sell advertising beside some of its featured columnists and archives.

Truth be told, TimesSelect was an pretty interesting experiment that attracted about 227,000 subscribers and $10-million in annual revenue. But the growth clearly wasn’t there to justify the status quo. The silver lining is the NYT’s online business is popular – it attracts 13 million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, while Comscore ranked the NYT’s digital operations, which also include About.com, as the 11th most-visited in July with 42.7-million subscribers.

So let’s do some back of the napkin math on what the end of TimesSelect could mean economically for NYT. Let’s assume, about 20% of the NYT’s content was behind the walled garden. Now that it’s free, the NYT could add another 2.6 million unique visitors. Let’s assume, the average online NYT reader consumes a healthy 20 pages/month. This would give us 52 million more page views a month.

If you can generate $20/CPM per Web page from these additional page views, that’s $1-million of revenue per month or about $12-million a year. (Note: I completely expect that Henry Blodget is crunching the numbers as we speak, and will produce a detailed spreadsheet soon).

If you look at the numbers, the NYT’s decision makes sense. Too bad it decided to bang its head against the subscription wall for so long. Although some will portray this move as yet another sign of doom and gloom for the newspaper industry’s future, I think it could serve as a major wake-up call that the way newspaper operate really has to change – and I mean more than launching a few blogs.

Update: TechDirt said the NYT should be congratulated for making the right decision while questioning why it took so long. There’s renewed speculation about when the WSJ will drop its subscription model, while Paris Lemon thinks ESPN should get rid of its fee-based ESPN Insider service.

The New and Improved Flock?

By Mark Evans in Browsers 2 Comments

Flock
Just out of curiosity, I checked out the list of companies slated to appear at the TechCrunch40 conference (aka The New Demo) this week.

There are some pretty intriguing names (e.g. PowerSet, mEGO), a bunch I’ve never heard about, and one name familiar to many people: Flock.

Yup, the “social” Web browser that burst onto the scene into late-2005 with an highly-anticipated alpha that was nowhere close to being ready. The browser was savaged, forcing the company to lick its wounds and head back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, the rest of the tech world learned about the perils of coming out of the gate too soon, particularly with a product with an ambitious feature set.

In the past two years, Flock has kept a low profile. Meanwhile, Firefox has grabbed more than 10% of the browser market, IE7 has been released, Opera continues to rumble along, particularly in the wireless market, while Google bought a stake in Maxthon, a popular browser in China.

I assume Flock, which unveiled a new version of its browser (0.9.1) last week, has continued to carry on. Given the TechCrunch40 conference has only invited companies that have a new product or service to unveil, it will be interesting to see what Flock has to offer – does an upgrade count? Maybe, Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis wanted to give Flock another shot at redemption – called it Launch 2.0.

For more, check out CenterNetworks interview with Flock CEO Shawn Hardin a few months ago.

Update: Flock ended up unveiling a private beta of its latest upgrade – version 1.0. You ask why Flock was chosen to present given it was supposed to be new services and products. Then again, Deep Jive Interests (via Allen Stern) notes the selection criteria was pretty flexible given MC Hammer was invited to present and be an expert. It turns out Mike Arrington is one of the investors in Hammer’s DanceJam’s start-up.

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