Interviews
Four Questions with Nasser Manesh, Frucall CTO
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | April 9, 2008 | Share This
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Nasser Manesh is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and CTO of Frucall, a mobile comparison-shopping site. Manesh also writes a blog at Unixica, where he comments on startup news. Searchviews asked him for his insights on mobile development and advertising. Here’s what he had to say.
Searchviews: On your blog Unixica, you recently referenced an article about the decline of mobile development. As CTO of Frucall, a mobile shopping search engine, what do you think about this report that discourages developing products just for mobile, and how has it changed the way you approach your business?
Nasser Manesh: Mobile applications have caused a lot of hype over the past decade and a lot of companies were built around making mobile applications mainstream. Unfortunately most of these companies are not around any more, and the others, for the most part, have shifted their focus in order to be able to survive. For a number of years now industry analysts have been predicting the mobile application space to be the next revolution, similar to what happened when the PC was introduced to the market and when the Web was put to mainstream, commercial use.
But this revolution has not happened in the US market, and that’s what this report is talking about. Personally I agree with most of the writer, Michael Mace, has written. He has had very high positions within Palm and PalmSource, front runners of the mobile application space, and what he says comes from first-hand experience. There are a number of reasons for where we are today, mostly inter-related, and I think US mobile carriers are at the heart of these issues.
Carriers have tried to prevent what made the Web successful from happening in the mobile space: An open and free paradigm of delivering content and applications. Access to the handset is highly guarded and the carrier wants to have a share – usually the lion’s share – of whatever a content or application owner wants to deliver to a handset.
Mobile data plans have been a source of revenue to carriers rather than a means to an end, i.e., monetizing content and applications. As a result, consumers have been reluctant to adopt and use data plans. Those who have been more curious to pay have not found enough useful applications that would justify the cost, because mobile carriers have failed to create the right ecosystem to attract third-party application developers.
All of this has resulted in a psychology of “it’s just a phone” in the US consumer market. There is a reason for hearing the term “cell phone” from the average US consumer while average European or Asian users carry “mobile devices.” What we did at Frucall was to leverage this psychology. Instead of building a fancy mobile application, we built a voice application, which users can call to get information. In the back-end, Frucall is all web API calls and integration with Internet retail services, but to the caller it’s just a phone call. People in the US are used to touch-tone applications, as pretty much all banks and large organizations operate with touch-tone services. So why not use the same for a mobile application to make it familiar? Later, we added text (SMS) services and finally mobile web. We avoided downloadable mobile applications. You can see the reasons clearly verbalized by Elia in Mace’s article. The economics of supporting a vast number of devices for such a small percentage of users simply does not make sense for a startup.
SV: You’ve also noted on your blog that monetization is very difficult in mobile. How do you think the mobile space needs to change to spur more advertising dollars and opportunities for monetization?
NM: I have to admit I’m not a big fan of advertising on mobile phones. The mobile user experience is very different from the PC – there’s less screen space and the device is constantly with the user, making the nature of mobile advertising more intrusive. Add to that the fact that the mobile device “knows” more about the user – the incoming and outgoing calls, the location of the user, and other things we usually consider private. Just how companies like Yahoo! and Google analyze the content of your hosted email to show you relevant ads on the side bar, a mobile application can analyze these more private pieces of information to serve a more targeted ad. Location-aware advertising is on the radar of many companies. Think of Tom Cruise walking in the mall in “Minority Report” and how the voices were trying to sell him things. It will become real much sooner than we think, thanks to the mobile phones we carry with us.
There are a few companies though, such as AdMob, that have adopted the same ad-brokerage model used on the Web and are serving ads for mobile web pages. Unfortunately, iPhone aside, the user experience for mobile web browsing is unpleasant and usually slow, so users keep it to the absolute minimum.
I think one aspect that is less explored is tying mobile into the web. A lot of applications have natural mobile extensions and components. We do not have to port the whole application to the mobile device just because we can; we should study the usage and see which parts of the application can be “mobilized” to add value to the end user. Obviously one monetization strategy is to charge more for those mobile components, the other is to collect data from such components that would help serving more targeted ads later on when the user is browsing the web on a PC.
For example, in the case of Frucall as a mobile comparison shopping, if the user calls Frucall to search for a Nike shoe, next time they visit the Frucall web site we can show them a sports-related ad, or an ad from Nike or a competing brand. Companies are doing a lot for behavioral targeting these days. I would like to think of the mobile components of applications as extensions that can collect more behavioral data related to a certain application. All of that, of course, is still limited by the way carriers are controlling the applications.
SV: With the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone and increasing ubiquity of more sophisticated handheld devices for US consumers, how should companies be approaching the mobile market in the United States now?
This is a tough question and what I say here is my personal view, but I think the iPhone is going to have a big impact and at this point it might make sense for some companies to only focus on the iPhone and forget about the other platforms. This is not because of Apple being behind iPhone, but because of the user experience which has made it easy – for the first time – for users to use applications on a phone. Statistics, for example, show that Google searches are 50 times more prevalent on iPhones than other phones. That’s because there is less friction in using search on an iPhone. I am not particularly a fan of Apple’s model of controlling application distribution, bit still it’s much better than the traditional carrier model, and the fact that AT&T has agreed to Apple’s way of application distribution is a huge leap forward. There are some limitations within the iPhone SDK but I’m sure they will be resolved over time. It’s Unix underneath, after all, so capabilities such as multiprocessing are built in. It’ll just take some time.
There are two other platforms currently showing traction or at least hype – Google Android and LiMo. Personally, I expected more from Android. Creating the Open Handset Alliance was a very good move by Google and the promise of an open source mobile operating system is a good - and only a company with high levels of influence such as Google can pull it off. But in retrospect it looks like they were not ready for the prime time. Things are moving very slowly.
LiMo, on the other hand, is backed by a number of phone manufacturers and has actual handsets. The problem there is that LiMo supporters don’t come from an application software background – they are phone manufacturers. So LiMo seems to lack the developer ecosystem to add value to it. Look at how many people are trying to do things around Android, even though there is no phone out there. That’s what Google can do. Limo is ahead of Android in terms of availability, but the development support is practically non-existent, which in the long run can kill it.
Note that most of the things I’m covering is consumer-oriented. There’s a whole different mobile market out there for enterprise users, and Blackberry has done a great job there. Apple is aggressively targeting that market through their integration projects with Microsoft and Cisco and there will be application opportunities there, but as usual, enterprise sales in general is much tougher so I think small companies and startups have a smaller chance of making money in that market.
SV: Your company, Frucall, has a social network element, with users able to create profiles and connect to friends, as well as presence on Facebook via an application that allows users to share product lists with their friends. What were your considerations in creating your Facebook app? Do you think it’s more valuable for new companies to build in social network capabilities or for them to leverage existing user bases on highly-trafficked sites?
NM: I certainly think social networks are a viable marketing strategy. Obviously one has to find the right angle and come up with something that fits naturally within both their application and a social network’s expected behavior, otherwise it will fail. But if there are aspects in an application where sharing make sense, leveraging the social networks will reduce both the user acquisition cost and time. In older days the ACPU (Average Cost Per User) which is an indication of how much money one should set aside to get users, was in $10-$20 range. A good, useful web application with clear messaging and meaningful value can expect less than that, maybe in $3-$7 range. But that’s still too high – getting a million users will cost you a few million dollars. So what do you do? You make your application viral, to let users bring in new users without you spending. Now, you can either build the viral elements inside your application, or you can leverage the tools and the platform that inherently exists within a social network and just create the right hooks between your application and that platform. It’s still easier said than done though. It’s been very hard to predict how users react to these viral mini applications added to their social network such as the ones on Facebook. Most of the ones that are very viral are not adding value (depending on how you define value); they are just for fun. The problem with the “fun” applications is that they become viral quickly, but they also die down and disappear quickly. So there is no recipe out there for tapping into a social network to do the marketing, but it’s definitely one of those things that should be on the task list of a good marketing manager to look into how they can design their marketing strategy to take advantage of social media.
5 Questions with Tony Pierce, LA Times Blog Editor
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 25, 2008 | Share This
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Tony Pierce oversees the nearly three dozen blogs at the Los Angeles Times. Before working at the LAT, Pierce edited LAist, a blog that covers local L.A. culture and events. He has also worked at Buzznet and the E! channel, and he runs a popular personal blog from which he’s created two books, aka blooks.
Searchviews asked Pierce to share his insights on blogging and media convergence: what it takes to successfully integrate blogs in a news organization, how best to leverage social media sites to meet page view goals, and where video and mobile fit at the LA Times. Here’s what he had to say.
Searchviews: The traditional journalism world has misunderstood or been suspicious of blogs in the past. While many journalists have come around to blogging and other forms of social media (like Twitter and Facebook) in the last couple of years, relatively few newspapers have demonstrated that they really understand where these media fit in their business or how best to utilize them. What role do blogs play at the LA Times, both when it comes to using them as a tool and platform for journalism, and also when it comes to bringing more readers (and ad revenue) to the LA Times site? How do you hope to evolve blogging at the LAT? And what role do you play in teaching old-school journalists about new-school tools, like blogs?
Tony Pierce: Blogs play an extremely important role at the LA Times. Part of the responsibilities and goals of a news organization is to inform, enlighten, and enrich its readers in a timely manner. Not only can blogs do that, but at the Times we accomplish that daily. Be it liveblogging the NCAA tournament, hosting live video chats after Presidential debates, or getting deeper into stories than the actual newspaper has the physical room to do - blogging is the perfect complement to what most people have come to expect from traditional newspapers. For example, one of our newest blogs, L.A. Now, posts about a dozen or so blog entries a day. Only online could you have a post at 9 am talking about a local story in print, a comment or ten from the readers in that post, a rebuttal from a columnist in that same blog by noon, and a column in the paper the following day because of that exchange. Journalism, the market as a conversation, and the dialogue between writers and readers is changing very quickly, and the Times has woken up and is taking a leadership role in that change.
Will taking that leadership role attract more readers and revenue? Probably. Who knows. The more important thing is that as long as the Times continues to adjust for the inevitable, it will remain one of the centerpoints of conversations about current events related to LA and the rest of the world.
I hope to continue to be a part of blogging at the LAT as it evolves with journalism, and as journalism evolves with blogging. This evolution isn’t always an easy task. However, blogging has survived the original demonization of its critics, while at the same time the mainstream media has found ways to incorporate digital journalism into its offerings. Likewise, I have found myself being asked by a variety of veteran journalists at the Times for more and more help in regard to learning about the intricacies of blogging, its subtleties, and how it can be used best at the Times. So this belief of “traditional journalism” being suspicious of blogging is about to die off, along with the Mark Cubans and those who believe that the Earth is flat.
In many ways, blogging is simply a means with which to convey ideas, a delivery method, and a new tool for writers to express themselves. Nothing at all to fear, unless for some reason you have something you are afraid might get exposed.
SV: Tony, part of your job at the LA Times is launching new blogs; for example, you recently brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on board and he’s done some interesting stuff with video and written about everything from jazz to politics. What new blogs are you planning now, and what ideas make for viable blogs? In other words, what should newspapers or other media companies consider when they’re planning new blogs and hiring bloggers?
TP: We are planning a wide spectrum of new blogs that I am not at liberty to reveal at this time, but they will leap from and be based within every section of the paper that you could imagine - from the front page to the back page.
Kareem has been quite a blessing. I don’t think anyone anywhere has a Hall of Famer writing for them, from their heart, every day, about sensitive and interesting topics. And as you said, he does it with video, audio, and the written word. His Rolodex is endless, so one day you might see him doing an interview with will.i.am and the next day he’s exchanging emails with Senator Barack Obama. The day after the Super Bowl, Kareem reminisced about hanging with the Manning brothers, and the day after the Grammys, there was a picture of him with Herbie Hancock. Last week he was on the Colbert Report, and when the Lakers return you will see him inches away from the court with the Lake Show. And he writes about all of it. He is a totally fascinating man with an amazing and unreal life, and we are so lucky to have him writing about it daily.
When newspapers are planning new blogs they should consider what jewels they have in their backyards. It might not be ESPN’s Collegiate Athlete of the Century, like Kareem, but odds are they have more than a few precious gems on their radar. My advice is to reach out to those people and let them do what we’re doing with #33: let them write about whatever they want, using whatever format they feel most comfortable with. Not everyone wants to write about what made them famous, not everyone wants to type away at a keyboard. Most people are complicated. So let them tell you a wide-ranging assortment of things in a variety of ways. The blogging medium is dynamic and limitless, so don’t let your own boundaries limit your bloggers. Let them go, let them experiment, encourage them, and be there when they need you.
SV: Your past projects have included a really popular personal blog, a stint at buzznet.com, and a position as editor-in-chief at LAist, which is part of the Gothamist network of city blogs. At LAist, you were particularly savvy at and strategic about using Digg to break page view records each month. How are you using social media tools like Digg at the LAT now? How do you approach building an audience and traffic differently at the LAT as opposed to at your previous gigs?
TP: I’m not saying that Digg wasn’t part of our later success at LAist, but we doubled and tripled our readership before we ever got a following on Digg. In fact, at Buzznet I helped attract over 13 million pageviews in 8 months without even one click from Digg. There are 120 million blogs out there, countless websites, and more than a few newspapers, search engines, and email addresses. Simultaneously, there are people out there who want to see what you’ve got.
Social media tools like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, MySpace, and del.icio.us are all fine for certain stories - very few of which we write about at the Times. I love Digg, I am on it several times a day, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully in the slightest, but in many ways it’s lowest common denominator, college freshman lulz. I love Digg because in my heart, that’s who I am. But that’s not what the LA Times is, and that’s not even what the majority of what LAist is or was.
In order to get people to link to you, you simply have to find out what blogs, web pages, or media outlets are interested in your story and you have to tell them that your story exists. That might mean sending an email to an editor, or linking to a blog in one of your stories, or calling someone, or building a relationship with a so-called competitor. Eventually, when you see something being written, you will know exactly who you are going to tell. Likewise when people link you, you should write down who they were and what they linked you for. That way, when something else comes down the line, you can let them know that you have something new for them.
In November of last year, Andy Malcolm and Don Frederick were getting about a quarter million hits on their political blog Top of the Ticket. Last month, they got something like 1.6 million because they got in the practice of emailing the right political blogs about their posts. Yes, sometimes they’d get snotty emails back saying the blogs weren’t interested in such and such, but for the most part, bloggers are grateful when you make their jobs easier for them - especially if you have done your homework and have fed them a story that fits in with what they blog about. By the way, Top of the Ticket has been on Digg a few times, but I don’t think they were on it at all last month.
SV: The LAT very recently introduced video to the site. How long before we see a video-only blog from the paper? How about seeing more video on the other blogs?
TP: The Times is very dedicated to all sorts of multimedia in our blogs, and video is one of the most spectacular aspects of that. [LAT Multimedia Director] Barbara Morrow and her team have remodeled a portion of the 2nd floor that now looks like a TV station with online video editing bays, camera packages, and stuff I hadn’t seen since my days at the E! channel.
People will be pleasantly surprised when some of these video packages start finding their way onto the website, because the production values are so good that they will say, “Wait, this is the LA Times?” The concepts of what we are going to cover with video are things that you wouldn’t even be able to predict, but I have seen the future and you will love it and you will say, “Why didn’t someone do this earlier!”
That said, I doubt you will see video-only blogging for several reasons. First, Google is your friend and Google has a very hard time knowing what’s in your video unless you have some text around it. And second, we have a staff of some of the best writers in town - the writing complements the video, and the video complements the writing.
Meanwhile, we have had lots of video in our blogs that many have enjoyed: video of some pilgrims from Costa Mesa on the Hajj; when Dan Neil covered the Detroit Auto Show he took lots and lots of video, and when yours truly went to South by Southwest, we were one of the first outlets that had video evidence of Lou Reed singing with Moby.
You will definitely see more video in lots of other LA Times blogs; stay tuned.
SV: The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that the cell phone is the one tool most Americans would have the hardest time giving up. How should newspapers respond to this increased dependence on mobile technology? What is the LAT doing about it?
TP: The LA Times is currently in the process of upgrading its mobile site in a way that anyone with a Blackberry, iPhone, or mobile device will appreciate. I can’t imagine having to go without my iPhone, and I scorn PEW for even floating that possibility out there. How dare they!
5 Questions for Matt Creamer
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | December 3, 2007 | Share This
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Four months ago, Matt Creamer, Editor at Large for Advertising Age, approached Reprise Media with a predicament. Despite his renown as a journalist, Matt was not appearing prominently in search results for his own name. A search for “matt creamer” in Google presented numerous unrelated listings, including articles from Gay New Zealand, Wicomico Politics, and Diversity Liason Officers, among others. Because of his position as a journalist, Matt felt his professional reputation was being compromised by these alternate listings.
To help Matt occupy the top search results for his name, Reprise Media created a blog (Mattcreamer.com) that would archive his online published work and serve as the pivot for an extended Search Engine & Social Media Optimization campaign. By coordinating the keyword optimization and cross-linking between 13 different social media properties, we quickly drove Mattcreamer.com to the #1 position in Google for his name. Our network of web properties furthermore gave Matt control over 60%, and a presence in over 85%, of Google’s first three results pages. By the end of our 3 month engagement, we helped Matt rank within the top 10 results for 62% of our target keyword list and successfully pushed all irrelevant results out of the top ten.
Today Matt’s story about the process of being “SEOed” came out in Advertising Age, in “Optimize Me: A Reporter’s Journey into the World of SEO and SEM“. Searchviews interviewed Matt for his take on how SEO and SMM are shaping online media, and for that matter, how the project has changed his perspective on “good old fashioned news”…
SV: Matt, we just completed a 3 month Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Marketing (SMM) project for your story in AdAge. How has your perception of online marketing changed after being “optimized” for search engines and social media?
MC: In talking about digital marketing, it’s easy to get wowed by slick Flash productions, multilayer storytelling, amusing virals, fun games–all the generally cool stuff that’s being done on behalf of brands online. But it’s equally easy to overlook about the crucial, knotty question of how to distribute this stuff so that it actually reaches a critical mass of consumers, which is kind of the idea of marketing, after all. Immersing myself in search really rammed the second point home because it forced me to think about my own work and how it’s being consumed–or not being consumed–and the impact it has on my own personal brand. Producing compelling content is only part of the answer; the rest is figuring out how to get it to people, and understanding the logic and language of the search engines is obviously a huge part of that.
SV: Over the past few months, many web publishers seem to have put a renewed/increased focus on advertising - Microsoft recently announced its intention to become more ad-focused, AOL is re-branding itself as an ad agency, and Facebook is honing an ad platform that target users by profile. How will advertisers need to change their approach to avoid overwhelming online consumers?
MC: The untapped promise of the Internet as a marketing medium is as a place where brands provide true utility to consumers. The Nike+ website is a well-worn example of this. It doesn’t jam a repurposed TV ad down people’s throats. Instead it given them the tools to build and sustain communities around running. There’s real value there and it allows the brand to forge deep, meaningful relationships with its audience. Unfortunately, too many marketers are missing this and they’re merely using the Internet as yet another place to slap ads. The upside is that these ads, at least when compared to TV, are more measurable. Still, I get kind of depressed when I hear people talk of the Internet as a some great ad medium. And I get really depressed when I think that every new web venture that comes along is resting its business model entirely on the promise of advertising, especially when so few of these ventures have the potential to achieve any real scale, which, for all the talk of long tails, is what big-budget marketers are seeking. Those who rely on advertising dollars should be especially wary of an economic downturn. Ad budgets are often the first thing to get cut during tough times.
SV: There are some who believe that Facebook, and social networking in general, is just a fad. Would you agree?
MC: As a cultural phenomenon, I think social networking is more than a fad. So in some form or fashion it’ll always be around. I think the risk to Facebook and MySpace is that the open network idea Google’s pushing will really take off, rendering the walled-garden notions of a network obsolete. This is just anecdotal, but I’m noticing my own Facebook use tailing off. Part of the problem is it doesn’t integrate with the other web services I use, which tend to be Google’s products and include its e-mail program, its RSS reader, its documents program, maps and so forth. I’m increasingly living out of a Google ecosystem that Facebook doesn’t integrate with. So I’m not sure how long I’ll be bothered to keep up with it. And as far as MySpace goes, don’t even get me started. To me, it’s just unusable: pointless, ugly and spamnmy.
SV: You’ve mentioned before that you think social media has created too many “inboxes” - between twittering, blogging, Facebook, Myspace, e-mail, instant messaging, etc, it’s nearly impossible for the average consumer to keep track of daily communications. What company do you think is best poised to take advantage of this fragmentation, or to help alleviate it?
MC: This doesn’t directly answer your question, but my cell phone–a Blackberry Pearl–is a fantastic aggregator of those inboxes you mentioned. Not only do I get my corporate e-mail account and my Gmail, but I get SMS, Twitter, Facebook and just about everything else in one place. It’s where I go when I need a high-level look at the communications chaos around me. Sometimes I’ll even use my cellphone while sitting in front of my computer at work. Otherwise, if you held a gun to my head and made me commit to a current web player, I’d probably bet on Google because…because it’s Google. They get organization and simplification and information streamlining in a way that no other company does.
SV: During our engagement, we helped you start a blog (mattcreamer.com). How has blogging changed your perspective about the future of journalism and online publishing?
MC: I don’t know if it did, but only because blogs have been with us for a while and their role as symbols of the Great Leveling that’s happened in the media world is well-known. I do enjoy maintaining the blog and reading dozens of other blogs on a daily basis, but I view all of that as complementary to a more mainstream, traditional notion of journalism. But then again who knows if the business model that serves that traditional notion of journalism will hold up. Maybe one day we’ll all just be reading Searchviews…..
SES Chicago Interview with Lee Odden
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | December 7, 2006 | Share This
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From Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog, proof that Reprise Media was at Search Engine Strategies:
Related Articles
SES Chicago: “Ads in a Quality Score World”
SES Chicago: “B2B Tactics”
SES Chicago: “Local Search Tactics”
From Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog, proof that Reprise Media was at Search Engine Strategies:
Related Articles
- SES Chicago: “Ads in a Quality Score World”
- SES Chicago: “B2B Tactics”
- SES Chicago: “Local Search Tactics”
Five Questions for Snap.com
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | October 16, 2006 | Share This
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We recently had the chance to catch up with Tom McGovern, CEO of Snap.com. Snap is like search for the right-brained, featuring visual search results next to the traditional listed text. Snap’s visual display data, aka “fast browsing”, helps users find what they’re looking for with greater accuracy than text-only pages. Check out their site to find out more about “why snap is better.”
Snap has gotten a lot of press thanks to a hefty round of VC funding in 2005 — including a feature in Time Magazine’s “50 Coolest Websites of 2006″. But, regardless of rave reviews, Snap is a tiny engine in a very competitive market. To differentiate themselves beyond visual results, Snap has also adopted an advertiser-friendly paid search model, incorporated behavioral data into search results, taken extra pains to perfect site usability, and launched a huge user-generated/viral marketing campaign.
Tom McGovern filled us in on the details…
RM: Google, Yahoo and MSN account for over 94% of all search volume in the US. How does Snap plan to carve a niche for itself in such a competitive market?
TM: Snap competes on the basis of a differentiated product – both for users as well as advertisers. For users, Snap offers a totally different search experience: fast visual results and a user interface that is very easy to use. This appeals to a segment of the market which is not satisfied with the status quo and wants a richer, more visually oriented experience. We also offer a radically different advertiser experience with risk-free Cost-Per-Action (CPA) pricing model combined with a very powerful advertising environment. For advertisers who appreciate the pay-for-performance philosophy, we offer a great alternative.
RM: One of Snap’s key features is its behavioral ranking algorithm and customized search through User Contributed Ratings. Such a degree of functionality requires extensive data collection and user profiling. In the past year, Google, Yahoo and MSN have each been involved in a number of court cases that requested access to their user data. Google, most notably, has denied all requests to date, citing the privacy rights of their users. As a search engine that will presumably hold large amounts of user information, do you have a policy on data sharing, or for addressing privacy concerns?
TM: First, I think they would have to lock me up before I turned over our users’ data to the Government. Second, with respect to inadvertent leaks I want to make it clear that we too highly regard our users’ privacy and have measures and processes to protect from that occurring. All of the user click-stream data is managed in a secure environment with all the individually identifiable data removed - meaning there are no names or personally specific data attached to the behavioral data we use. The data is then processed to aggregate the information and distilled which allows us to separate the web ham from the web spam and used in our ranking algorithms. As a result of this processing, there would be no way for this data to be useful to outside sources.
RM: Snap offers advertisers a less traditional, but perhaps more forward-thinking, ‘cost-per-action’ payment model. Could you tell us a little more about how placement works, your incentives for adopting this model, and how it compares to more traditional pricing?
TM: Our Cost-Per-Action model allows advertisers to pay only for the desired action (for example, an action could be a sale, a lead, a subscription, a download, etc.) they select. If you’re a mortgage broker, for example, you may want to generate a qualified lead and are willing to pay $X for that lead. For a magazine, it might be a subscription. In each case, the advertiser determines what the desired action is; to pay either a fixed amount of a variable percentage; and what the landing page/creative will be. There are many advantages to this approach for advertisers:
- You don’t have to pay for what you don’t get. No matter how many impressions you get, or how many clicks you get, with Snap you only pay if you receive the desired outcome;
- Our CPA pricing model greatly reduces the click fraud currently associated with traditional CPC advertising; and
- our visual display of search results creates a very powerful selling environment for advertisers as well because each of their landing pages is viewed irrespective of whether a user takes an action. This means that we reward advertisers who develop persuasive landing pages.
RM: Speaking of advertising, you ran a user-generated promo campaign awhile back in which you appealed to the general public for viral marketing ideas. Did you implement any of the ideas, and if so, were they successful?
TM: Our “Other way to Launch Contest” was both fun and successful. During the contest, there was quite a bit of dialog amongst the Blogosphere about the contest and Snap. More than 1100 blogs linked to us and more than 30,000 people visited our blog alone. As you can imagine, we received a wide range of ideas from the grand to the granular. We were really, really impressed with how much time and effort entrants put into their ideas. We used variations of several of the submitted ideas. For example, one entrant developed a very comprehensive plan on how to embrace the MySpace community, as it’s a burgeoning group of search users. So in the last month we actually hired him to implement his plan and launched a Snap profile on MySpace.
RM: You have a pretty cool shopping beta set up with Smarter.com. Are you planning any more beta search tools with any of your other sponsors (Snap/SimplyHired job search perhaps)? If not, what plans do you have for the future?
TM: We are always open to new and interesting Search Mashups so to speak. We do have a number of enhancements to the current Snap product in the works and are very excited about releasing them in the near future. One of which is our new Firefox2 search plug-in which also works with Flock (a Firefox variant that we really like). We think the user community (and social networks) add a great deal of value to any one persons search experience and will be working with some of these services and communities in the future to enhance the Snap search experience.
Thanks for having me…
5 Questions with Joe Chin, CEO of Guidester
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 19, 2006 | Share This
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If you’ve ever gone into a store to buy a “small digital camera” and come out with the $799 “8mpx D50 Outfit DX-format 3.8x optical zoom LSI processor system”… then Joe Chin is your new best friend. His company, Guidester, provides online retailers with tools that help customers decide what to buy. You may have seen one of Guidester’s survey tools, like this one at Circuit City. After asking a series of questions about what you want to buy, Guidester narrows down the available products that meet your criteria. Though currently only available for consumer electronics, the year-old company is hoping to expand to over 200 product categories. We got the chance to catch up with Joe and quiz him about the What, Why and Where of Guidester - and exactly How he came up with such a helpful product.
1. Guidester is the 2005 re-brand of an older company (Decidia) that sold web-based decision tools to e-tailers. What major changes did you make in the transition from Decidia to Guidester, and what motivated the change?
The most notable change was to our business model. Whereas we once charged retailers for our decision tools – tools which are proven to increase sales, decrease returns and improve customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention – we now provide Guidesters to our retail partners (Circuit City, CompUSA, Buy.com, etc.) at no charge.We also added a unique advantage for product manufacturers (Olympus, H-P, Casio, etc.) which enables them to have their products prominently displayed to consumers during and at the completion of searches. Our “sponsored match” model makes it possible for manufacturers to ensure their products are displayed at the top of results lists instead of just randomly appearing somewhere in the list. Essentially our model is analogous to paid search placement in search engines.
We also improved and increased the number of the tools themselves. Guidesters are more powerful than ever and cover more products than we previously did.
In regard to the motivation behind the change, there were really two reasons. One, we felt the paid search model was more flexible and scalable than our old enterprise model. And two, we saw the success Google and Yahoo! were having with paid search, and realized it quite naturally applied to our business. Since we moved to the new model our business has grown considerably and we’re tracking a vastly improved growth and revenue trajectory. However, throughout the change, we never deviated from our original mission which is to help consumers make better buying decisions.
2. Guidester’s advantage is its ability to translate complex technical differences into understandable language for the consumer. In other words, you help people differentiate between items with complex, but similar, attributes. This might explain why Guidester’s applications are focused exclusively on consumer electronics. Do you think Guidester’s technology can be applied to other markets, and if so, what might they be?
Guidester tools do indeed help people better understand how to choose and purchase complex products with confusing features like digital cameras and home theater systems, but they’re also remarkably effective in managing categories where the products aren’t complicated but rather there’s just innumerable options to choose from. We have identified somewhere on the order of 200 product/service categories ranging from the most technologically challenging right through to the most basic, and our plan is to move into more and more categories over the course of the next two to three years. In the near future you’ll see Guidesters for insurance, mutual funds and cell phones, but also for vacations, apparel, baby products – even tires and motor oil.
3. As the PPC ad market gets more and more fragmented, it becomes harder for marketers to justify using fringe products. Google, Yahoo! and MSN succeed because their products are so similar, and can be tracked and tagged collectively. How easy is it for advertisers to use the data feeds they’re providing for other shopping programs with the Guidester tool?
Allowing advertisers to integrate Guidester into their existing processes is essential to the success of our company. Having said that however, there is a basic difference between an advertising buy from Google or Yahoo!, where traffic is acquired, and one from Guidester, where customers are influenced at the point of purchase and the traffic is organic. Because of this fundamental difference, integration of the Guidester network into the Google, Yahoo! and MSN data feeds is important and needs to be thought through very carefully. We are working to make that a reality as quickly as possible. And we do already offer powerful tracking tools so advertisers can monitor the success of their campaigns on their own, in real-time, and across the entire Guidester network.
But we don’t see ourselves as a fringe product, we see ourselves as an important addition to e-commerce sites. In fact, we believe that e-tailers that don’t offer decision tools (of course ideally ours) will be abandoned for those which do. Moving forward, consumers will demand this kind of functionality and service and will naturally gravitate towards sites which offer it.
4. You work directly with most of your advertiser clients, rather than encouraging them to work through a search marketing company. Is there a benefit to working with clients directly, and do you think you’ll keep this model for the long term?
We actually have an equitable mix of both direct-to-client relationships and SEM-to-client relationships (for example, our relationship with Olympus would be classified as the former and our relationship with H-P as the latter). We appreciate the value an experienced search engine marketing company brings to the equation in managing a PPC campaign, and welcome inquiries from agencies that realize the advantages of Guidester tools and feel confident recommending us to their clients. We also of course reach out to, and, field and address inbound calls from the ad departments of product manufacturers.
5. Guidester is a B2B company starting up in the middle of a P2P boom — where accessibility, consumer-generated media, widgets, and user-friendly applications rule the market. Will Guidester one day follow suit, and give users access to data to reconfigure & share the system?
Great question – and the answer is a definitive yes. Harnessing the insight of the consumer population has and always will be directly in line with our business vision. Our goal is to be the market leader in helping consumers make more informed and satisfying purchase decisions using the best technology, information and expertise available. That’s been our core mission from the very beginning.
5 Questions with Michael J. Roberts, President of Velocityscape (and Proprietor of GoogSpy)
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Written By Reprise Media | August 18, 2006 | Share This
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One of the first rules of a good SEM campaign is, “find out what the other guy’s bidding on.” That once-tedious ordeal - involving a lot of guess-and-check - was made much simpler last April with the launch of GoogSpy, an indispensable tool for collecting competitive intelligence. This week we chat with Velocityscape president (and GoogSpy guru) Mike Roberts about an upcoming launch that promises to make the site even more essential to SEMs.
1. How has response been from the SEM and marketing community?
The response has been incredible. GoogSpy was just this little idea I had bouncing around the back of my head to solve a problem that, at as an entrepreneur, I encountered when I first opened my Adwords account. The idea stayed there for a couple years until it occurred to me that building the site would be a pretty good way to show off the power of our flagship product Web Scraper Plus+. We actually included the extraction templates that we used to create GoogSpy as a sample in Web Scraper for at least a year prior to building the site. In fact, we still do.
GoogSpy took all of four days to create. It was 100% experimental.
We issued a couple of press releases, and a few days later we were in the Wall Street Journal! I wish I could say that I was expecting that response.
We never expected to have the opportunity to build it for “real.”
We watched as the traffic leveled out, and we listened to our customers.
The biggest wants were more raw data and keyword statistics. The new site
has nearly 20 times more data, and the coolest statistics imaginable. I’m a math geek at heart, so I really like the statistics. This time, we put 8 months into it.
2. When GoogSpy first launched, there was a lot of sentiment on the blogs about enjoying GoogSpy “while it lasts,” as though a cease & desist letter from Google was imminent…and yet here you are, over a year later. What response, if any, have you gotten from Google? If not, do you expect a response?
Um, no comment. No, seriously, we ARE still here. We provide an important service to Google’s clients, and I think they respect that. Initially, we had AdSense on GoogSpy which captured a live glimpse at the difference between ads on the search site and the content network. Google didn’t like that which, frankly, I can respect. I doubt GoogSpy visitors were
interested in buying the product or service being advertised.
3. You mentioned that GoogSpy is ramping up to a huge new release in the next few weeks, when it’ll offer more features, more results - and a name change. Can you talk a bit about what regular GoogSpy users can expect to see when it all goes down?
In the new release (called SpyFu, by the way), we will offer nearly 20 times more raw data, and a ton of new features including price and spending estimates. Much of SpyFu will still be 100% free. The free interface will
be similar to GoogSpy, but better and more extensive. That said, some new
features like pricing will only be available to paid subscribers.
4. Let’s talk about the subscription-based features. How widely do you expect them to be adopted, particularly among industry pros? Does charging for the service complicate your relationship with Google?
We have spent a lot of time talking with professional SEM guys, and I hope that what we have come up with will truly fulfill their wildest fantasies.
Clearly, I am really proud of what we have done. I just can’t wait for the launch. I mean, with SpyFu, I know with a reasonable degree of accuracy how much each of my competitors spends on ads each month. It makes me want to buy a hairless cat and a monocle to go with my villainous cackle. It is awesome.
By the way, in addition to the subscription service, we are also offering full data subscriptions and branded interfaces targeted towards mid to large
firms. We actually already have people signed up for that.
5. You’ve talked about unleashing some GoogSpy-style science on other top engines. How about it? Are we going to see an MSNSpy or a YaFu!?
Absolutely! In fact, that’s part of the reason for the name change. Of course, there’s only so much you can put into a single release. Once we are up and running, there are a lot of improvements that we can roll in through a normal beta process. What we have with SpyFu is an extremely solid foundation. We have some more cool stuff in the pipeline.
5 Questions with Mike Fridgen, VP Marketing & Product at Farecast
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Written By Reprise Media | August 16, 2006 | Share This
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We didn’t plan it this way, but this week it’s shaping up to be a 5Q’s bonanza ’round here. Today’s installment is a chat with Mike Fridgen of Farecast, a site that makes predictions about airline fares based on past trends and advises you whether to buy immediately or hold out for a markdown. Right now it’s in beta, serving the Seattle and Boston markets (we made sure to ask when we’re likely to see adoption nationwide).
1. We’ve certainly been burned by waiting a day or two too long to book a flight, only to have the cost go up by an obscene amount. How often and how much do ticket prices typically fluctuate? Does it differ by destination? What interesting or surprising trends have you found in cost patterns over the past three years?
Farecast has found that there are many factors that play into airline ticket price fluctuations. And in fact, our predictive technology looks at over a hundred price attributes when forecasting if fares are rising or dropping for a specific trip. But to keep things simple, here’s a look at how a few intuitive conditions impact price:
How far in advance you buy. If you are searching outside of 21 days to departure, prices tend to stay within a predictable range. Inside of 21 days to departure, prices become much more volatile, while generally trending up. This is where you are going to get the big price increases that frustrate travelers.
Where you are traveling. Generally, short-haul business markets (i.e., Seattle to San Francisco) tend to be more stable than trans-continental markets (i.e., Seattle to New York).
Trip type - business, leisure, or holiday trips. Another interesting finding is that we don’t generally see much of a difference in the pricing patterns for typical leisure and business trips (i.e., with and without a Saturday night stay). This also holds true for holiday trips. Although business and holiday trips are generally more expensive, airlines change the prices of these different trip types in the same way.
2. Some have questioned whether it’s possible to predict future airline fares with much accuracy, but with a number of former airline people on staff, Farecast has credible expertise to help quiet such doubts. Still, is Farecast right more often than it’s wrong? Either way, is that ratio improving?
We do have a pretty unique mix of skill sets here at Farecast. Our founder, Oren Etzioni is a serial entrepreneur, recognized internet search expert and Professor at the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington. He helped to recruit a team of PhDs that, over three years, have developed a complex set of algorithms that predict if fares are rising or dropping. As you mentioned, we also have folks with airline and online travel experience with companies such as Alaska Airlines, Expedia, Yahoo Travel and Priceline.
To your question on how often Farecast is right. When looking across all airfare predictions in all markets, Farecast has on average around a 75% accuracy level. (By the way, you will see our historical accuracy for a specific airfare prediction displayed on the website in the form of a confidence percentage.) And, yes, the percentage of the time we are right continues to improve.
3. What’s your long-term vision for Farecast? Stand alone or part of a larger biz? Ad-supported, or subscription based? We know some analysts are predicting that travel start-ups will get swallowed up by bigger players.
Right now, we are all about empowering people with better information to make more confident and smarter airfare purchase decisions. With our current website experience, we are answering questions such as: should I buy now or wait for this specific trip? We also provide trip planning tools that help answer questions like: where and when should you travel? Over time, we will look at new markets, other travel categories, new predictive innovations, etc.
My hope would be to partner with larger brands and build our consumer brand at the same time. Sure, we will be ad-supported and plan to generate revenue from supplier referral fees as well. We also have unique opportunities with our predictive technology (more details to come).
4. There’s language on the Farecast website explicitly stating that you’re “pro-airline.” Are you getting flack from the airlines, or are most of them playing nice?
Farecast is “pro-airline.” We know and want more people to realize, the best place to book airline tickets is at the airlines’ websites. When people book direct they avoid booking fees, get free bonus miles, and are guaranteed the lowest fares. In addition, airline websites offer email reminders about great services like web check-in.
Now of course, many people like to see all the options in one site, and that’s where we come in. Farecast.com shows you all the flight options for your specific trip and an easy interface to find the right flight and click through to the airline website for booking. Early on, we made the decision to offer a search vs. agency-like shopping experience because we believed it was the right thing to do for customers.
I would say on the whole that airlines are reacting quite positively to Farecast. In fact, we have content agreements in place with multiple airlines that give us access to their lowest fares.
5. If we slip you a $20, can you get New York listed any faster? (No, seriously… what are the most requested cities, and what’s your timeframe for adding new destinations?)
Our stated timeline for getting out to the rest of the country is by the end of the year. By far our number one request from users has been to add cities. So, we created an “add my city” link in the header and I posted about how we decided which cities to add on the Farecast blog. Looking at our analytics, the top five cities visiting Farecast (excluding Seattle and Boston) in the month of July were New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. You can bet that airports surrounding these cities and their major destinations are at the top of our list.
Mike Fridgen is currently the VP Marketing & Product at Farecast and is a strategic advisor to TripHub. In addition to having held executive positions with multiple venture backed travel start-up companies, Mike has spent time at Expedia, NLG, and Alaska Airlines in various roles. He also covers emerging travel companies in his travelstartups blog.
5 Questions with Aaron Barnett, Director of Information Science for RealAge.com
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Written By Reprise Media | August 14, 2006 | Share This
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We recently had a chance to chat with Aaron Barnett of RealAge.com - you might know them from their only-slightly-scary test of the same name. We talked about how the site’s Smart Search feature is similar to a puppy (and yet so much more), taking the dread RealAge test, and yes, even thyroid concerns.
1. RealAge clearly takes pride in the fact that its health information is vetted by individuals before going into its database. How specialized are the people who review the articles, e.g. Would a piece about kidney diseases always get looked over by someone with a background in nephrology before being ok’d for the search results?
Although we don’t have nephrologists on staff, we do have a top-notch team of MDs and PhDs from a variety of science and medical fields on our Scientific Advisory Board. These are the experts who joined heads to develop the criteria that all materials OK’d for inclusion in Smart Search must meet.
Once these criteria were established, our research team went through extensive training to learn how to put them into practice. This evaluation process, combined with the intuitive technology behind our Smart Search engine, makes sure pages including misinformation, link farms, and redundant material all get weeded out. And, since we don’t include commercially-driven sources in the review process, users also get to avoid the growing number of website advertorials and well-disguised commercials.
If questions or issues come up during their review – on a specific topic such as kidney disease, for instance – our researchers can turn to the RealAge Scientific Advisory Board for their guidance and expert opinion.
2. RealAge VP of corporate communications Jennifer Perciballi has said that “Once people trust the results they have a tendency to click ads more frequently.” Has RealAge found a user’s trust in the results to be as important as the relevance of the ads in determining how often the ads are clicked on, and if so how is a user’s trust measured?
It’s no secret that if users like and trust content, they are more receptive to the ads within it. And since we operate on an advertising-based business model much like Google, Yahoo!, WebMD, and many other Web sites and print magazines, it’s important that our users place confidence in us and the information we provide.
One way we try to build trust is by making the line between advertising and editorial content very clear. In fact, we recently received the highest rating of “Excellent” from Consumer Reports in the category of advertising and sponsorships for our identification of paid information.
Another way we develop user confidence is by building the tools and information people need to protect their health and live life to the youngest.
The Web is chockfull of health resources – some good, some not-so-good, many full of misinformation – users say that they aren’t finding the really useful information. In fact, I just read a study by JupiterResearch that said although nearly 75% of Web users search for health information online, most of them report being disappointed with what they find. Only 16% claim they find the information they’re seeking.
That’s why we’re so thrilled that the revenue we’ve generated from ad placements is helping us provide our users with the smartest, most efficient way to find health information online.
3. Smart Search uses the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ buttons to gauge how useful and relevant a given result is believed to be by a given searcher, but results that are bad for one search (results for “separation anxiety” when the user is interested in general anxiety, for instance) might be good for another (a later search specifically for “separation anxiety”). Do the thumbs ratings affect results for all searches by a particular user, or do they weight results more on a search-by-search basis?
Actually, it’s a combination of the two. Yes, query terms do carry weight in Smart Search, but keep in mind that much of what a user likes about an article is not clearly related to his query. That’s why Smart Search focuses more on what a user likes about his results overall than what the particular health topic or category is.
The intuitive power of our search tool really comes alive after analyzing feedback across a broad range of searches.
For example, a person with Graves disease who’s searching for fitness information may prefer resources that mention thyroid concerns even though he may never have searched using the specific term “thyroid.” However, Smart Search knows his search history. It knows he prefers articles that include thyroid-related issues, so it presents his results accordingly.
Smart Search also tracks how our users are ranking resources overall. This lets people see which specific articles and information people like the most – information many Web users are apparently craving. The JupiterResearch study I mentioned before also found that almost half the people who seek health information online want to know which sites other people thought were useful.
4. One of the features of the personalized Smart Search on RealAge.com is the ability to recognize whether a user likes or dislikes the “language patterns” found in articles. Could you further explain exactly what’s meant by a “language pattern” and how Smart Search determines how a user feels about it?
Sure, but first I want to talk a little about how language patterns are just one of the features that Smart Search considers.
Smart Search uses an intuitive algorithm to analyze several features on every page a user rates. Doing so helps it identify the kinds of articles the user will like in future searches. Each time a user gives a thumbs up or thumbs down rating, it’s added to a body of evidence on his or her preferences.
So by “language” we mean the way in which information is presented on a Web page.
And, the more a user searches, the smarter Smart Search becomes about that user’s preferences. Basically, the ratings teach the engine to be smarter about users’ likes and dislikes, and to arrange the results accordingly.
It’s kind of like training a puppy. As it grows, it learns to avoid doing what will lead to hearing reprimands like, “Bad dog!” in favor of actions that lead to being praised with, “Good dog!”
5. RealAge is known for the RealAge test, which makes predictions about a person’s health based on their self-reported current habits. Was there a time when you took the test and it produced a surprising (or even alarming) result?
For me, taking the RealAge test - answering questions about my health, history and behaviors - drew attention to things I didn’t realize would affect my health and wellness.
I know I don’t exercise enough and could certainly eat better, but what I didn’t expect from the test was how it inspired self-reflection beyond my physical health and into my emotional and social well being as well. The simple act of answering questions about how many close friends I have and what sort of regular social activities I do made me wonder, am I keeping myself healthy socially? I learned that by developing my network of family and friends I could make my RealAge up to 3.5 years younger.
Friday Links: Rocky Road for Tech
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Written By Reprise Media | August 4, 2006 | Share This
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It’s been a rough week for some major tech firms. Microsoft trumpeted their Spaces relaunch, only to run into several kinks almost immediately. Yahoo’s social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, has been in a slide since April (via TechCrunch). And Apple says they might have to “restate” four years worth of earnings due to stock-option grant snafus; Norway might even ban iTunes, says Techdirt. It’s a regular road of trials, as we head to the links:
“Uh, what country do you think this is?” It seemed more like the kind of move the Chinese authorities might make. Tuesday, blogger Josh Wolf was held in contempt and jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury or hand over video footage he took at a protest rally last year. The feds said they wanted to see whether the video showed any crimes being committed - one person suffered a fractured skull at the rally - but Wolf claimed journalistic privilege, saying he had a right to protect his sources. This ignited a conflagration online, as bloggers and others struggled to define exactly who a journalist is, and what protections they should receive under the law; news.com rounds up some choice quotes.
Banned in the USA Wikiped-I-A A stunt earlier this week by TV satirist Stephen Colbert resulted in temporary chaos over at Wikipedia… coincidentally, Colbert has been dis-invited from editing the site while his identity is being verified (thanks, Newsvine). Well, who needs a Wikipedia for everyone when you’ve got your own? Head over to the decidedly less-factual-than-entertaining Wikiality, the Colbertized wiki-community where the elephant population has tripled over the last six months (via Digg).
Did I say Bill Gates? I meant Vill Vates. An interview with Bill Gates…it’s the stuff that could make a writing career. Only problem: how do you get the guy to sit down with you for a couple of hours? Well, who says he has to? Why not just say you met him on a plane, make up some stuff he might have said, and no one will be the wiser? A Norwegian journalist followed that plan to a ‘T’ - except for the part about nobody catching on. Says the AP, the bogus interview was printed in a Norwegian magazine (Mann) and a Swedish tabloid (Aftonbladet) before Gates’ personal assistant caught wind of it. The magazine will print a retraction, but the paper is standing by their man, saying they have no reason to doubt a reporter whose previous interviews include Tom Cruise and Oprah. On a personal note, we believe we’ve set a SearchViews record with two entirely separate mentions of Norway in the same post.