In light of the news that Yelp is closing in on an additional $50M in financing, presumably in an effort to get to IPO, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the consumer review landscape.
Here is a slide that I presented at a recent RateItAll Board meeting
RateItAll's traffic numbers are pulled from our own logs.
Here are my brief comments on each property:
Yelp: The monster of our space. Brand recognition that goes beyond early adopters. Massive amounts of quality content in a number of markets. Awesome SEO, strong mobile presence. With the rumored Elevation round, Yelp will have raised $81M in funding. Now taking on Gowalla and Foursquare.
TripAdvisor: The top travel review site. Owned by Expedia.
Flixster: The top movie review site. Flixster recently purchased Rotten Tomatoes, and is very strong on Facebook and MySpace. $7M in funding.
I'm authoring a new blog with my friend and location expert Chad Catacchio - the blog is called Location Meme, and it will be our best effort to track and analyze what happens as location is increasingly added to the social media mix.
With devices and browsers getting better at detecting and communicating location, and more people choosing to live in public, we are on the cusp of big some big changes in how web meets world.
Here is our first post:
Hello World! There’s a new data point emerging in social media that promises to change the way that web meets world. Location.
“Simply put, location changes everything. This one
input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs.
Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where
we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.”
LocationMeme will be our best effort at tracking and analyzing the
companies, trends, data, devices, and entrepreneurs that are shaping
our location aware future.
Ready or not, the web is becoming location aware. Thanks for joining us as we explore this emerging space.
If this sounds interesting to you, please come over and take a peek at LocationMeme.
I will still be posting here from time to time - Long Live Sexy Widget!
RWW points us to news that Yahoo will be shutting downMyBlogLog, the innovative analytics / community widget that burst, unfunded, onto the early adopter scene in late 2006.
MyBlogLog was the first service to really bring the concept of distributed, cross domain services to mainstream bloggers. The list of companies they influenced is long and important - you can see elements of MBL in JS-Kit / Echo, Disqus, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, The Facebook Fan Box Widget, and many more.
Many of us that followed MyBlogLog closely were disappointed that they chose to take a quick exit, selling out to Yahoo in early 2007. Though, who can blame them?
"MyBlogLog is the most interesting widget I ever used. I realized then
that widgets were more than just showing content…. but introducing new
functionality. My blog had become a (lightweight) social network.
"Tried to invest, had a signed agreement, but before we could
execute, they sold to Yahoo. I don’t think they realized the potential
of what MyBlogLog could become."
And here is a collection of quotes from SexyWidget about MyBlogLog from over the years:
On the innovation of not just building another social network (2006):
"At a time when it seems that everyone is looking to build a
destination social network, MyBlogLog has found an intriguing angle –
cobbling together all of the mini communities that exist in the
blogosphere through the distributed provision of some basic social
networking tools. There’s a lot of blogs out there that could benefit from some enhanced community. This is a big, useful idea."
On MBL providing value to both readers and publishers (2006):
"MyBlogLog is already providing clear value to both blog publishers and
blog readers. Publishers benefit from enhanced community on their blog
because properly executed, online community can complement content as a
way to pull folks back to your site. Blog readers benefit, because the
MyBlogLog service recognizes their presence and is a step towards
putting them at a more equal footing with the blog owner."
On the value of swimming against the current (2006):
"When I think of the hundreds of destination site social networks (many
of them funded) vying for visitors attention, and a look at the tiny
handful of businesses trying to enhance community functionality for the
millions of blogs out there, I see a big disconnect. If I were
investing in these sorts of opportunities, I’d be a lot more interested
in hearing about MyBlogLog’s plans that some “MySpace of ______” site."
"My sense is that MyBlogLog is on to something big. If you play this
concept out a bit, and you imagine a scenario where MyBlogLog is
capturing traffic and user data from thousands of a high traffic blogs,
there are all kinds of revenue models and services that could emerge.
They could facilitate introductions between people and blogs, blogs and
blogs, and people and people. They could capture statistical
benchmarks and best practice data for various segments of blogs. They
could develop a blogosphere wide reputation management system. The
possibilities are almost limitless."
"The promise of cross domain features with a single login is one of the
most compelling aspects of the new generation of cross platform, cross
domain web services. MyBlogLog is a “presence” feature – one that
could be considered a spinoff of the popular “who’s online” feature on
social networks. It works anywhere, and if you’re logged in to this
feature on one domain with a MyBlogLog widget, you’re logged into all
of them."
On MBL's massive backlink machine, and the missed destination site opportunity (2008)
"I was doing a little research on Yahoo Site Explorer on a widget
provider that is claiming some pretty big traction (more on this
later). In the process, I did a reality check of backlinks againstMyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is showing up as having more than 3.5M backlinks. Gulp. If these guys would build out a destination site with some landing
pages that people actually search for (as opposed to MyBlogLog profile
pages), they could turn a fire hose of organic search traffic on."
MyBlogLog lived fast and died young, but it certainly left its mark.
Here is a full list of my posts covering MyBlogLog:
I'm a long time competitor and admirer of Yelp. They've done so many things right where others have failed, and have moved the consumer review space forward more than any other company besides Amazon.
Here are my quick thoughts on the rumored Google acquisition of Yelp.
- As an entrepreneur, I'm sorry to see Yelp sell out. As a competitor
to Yelp, I'm thrilled. If past acquisitions are any indication, it
won't be long before the visionaries leave, and Yelp becomes a
feature and not the vibrant community with a cult following that it is today.
See Epinions.
- Google could have used a brute force / thuggish approach to bring the
acquisition price down like MySpace did with Photobucket a few years
back. MySpace broke PhotoBucket's widgets during negotiations as a
show of force - Google certainly could have quietly made Yelp content
slide down a bit in the organic search rankings. I'm happy they didn't
go this route.
- This is a decisive signal that Google is indeed looking to be more of
a destination, and not just a middleman. I find this scary.
- GigaOM's theory that this is somehow an admission by Yelp that they
have somehow been circumnavigated by lightweight mobile services like
Twitter + Foursquare is offbase IMHO. Yelp has a million downloads of
their mobile app. Most people don't have enough friends online creating content for a friend only approach to be a viable, mainstream competitor to a service like Yelp.
- If this sale does go through, it is certainly an admission by
Yelp's leadership that getting to IPO was likely to be difficult.
Gravity was against them. And by gravity, I mean Google - continuing
to own search and 97% of all website referrals, flooding local
merchants with their own stickers, dropping huge plastic pins all over
cities, and increasingly looking to be a destination. I'd also heard
rumors that Yelp was having a tough time getting profitable - big,
direct salesforces aren't cheap. The economics of this model will work
better across the combined local inventory of Google and Yelp. Again,
I truly believe that Google could have destroyed Yelp, could have
broken their backs by cutting off their search referral oxygen, and
then picked up the pieces at firesale prices. That they chose not do
this reinforces my belief that Big G really does prefer to see itself
as a guardian of the web, and not a destroyer.
- Some questions: will Yelp content be integrated into Google's local
pages or will the property be left alone? How will this affect Yelp's
already dominant organic search rankings? How will Yelp's outspoken
community react to the new overlords? Will Google be able to retain
Jeremy, Russ, Nish, and the rest of the Yelp team, or will they bounce
to new startups in two years?
Update: OK, this post is looking a little more timely with the Google / Yelp rumors. See discussion on TechCrunch, GigaOM, the New York Times, and RWW.
I was remarking to a co-worker yesterday how nice Google's local business pages are looking.
Check out this example page for a restaurant in my neighborhood in San Francisco, Luna Park. It's pulling in a whole bunch of reviews from various sites, it's now parsing ratings by different criteria, there are tons of images, there are maps and Google street view, and plenty of structured data like hours and payment information.
It's a very nice effort, that draws heavily from content aggregated around the Web, as well as Google's own properties.
And if you are a content publisher that currently gets traffic from organic Google traffic, it's a damn frightening turn of events.
The Luna Park page above is a destination page.
Sure, you can click off to check out the original source of some of the review and image content, but you don't really have to. Pretty much all the information you could ever need is right on that page. And if this page were in play in Google's organic search results, it would certainly rank near the top.
And that's the thing, for a brief period a few weeks ago, I was seeing some of these pages in the organic SERPS.
Was this a foreshadowing of the future, or a glitch?
Google's product pages are starting to look like destination pages as well - here's one for an 8GB iPod.
I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to Google, but it would appear that they are starting to build out destination pages for every thing - business, product, person, etc. - in the world.
The question is not, "What does Google's move towards being a destination mean for Yelp?" The question is, "What does this mean for the Web?"
Google has become a dominant company by being the most powerful online middleman in history, sitting between the searcher and the destination website. It appears that they may be starting to wonder what would happen if they became the destination.
Friends, we are entering the Golden Age of Scrobbling.
As far as I know, music service Last.FM
invented the term "scrobble" to describe the act of automatically
uploading the meta data (Track Title, Band, etc.) of the music you
listen to on your computer to Last.FM's servers. Why would you want to
do this? Probably one of two reasons - 1) As a musical diary which can
help you crank out self expression widgets that show the world how
awesome your musical taste is; or 2) more practically, to let Last.FM
use this information to recommend you music and people that are
compatible with you.
A whole little ecosystem has developed around the Last.FM scrobbler. Music services like BandsInTown let you drop in your Last.FM ID in order to keep you abreast of when your favorite bands are playing nearby, and services like HypeMachine let you push the music you listen to on HypeMachine over to Last.FM.
But Scrobbling doesn't have to be an implicit process running in the background. And it doesn't have to be music.
One of my favorite nightlife apps is LastCall - an app that helps you track your alcoholic intake and chart your blood alcohol level. It's a booze scrobbler if you will.
Brad Feld tweeted about a Fat Scrobbler (aka wifi enabled scale) this morning that uploads your weight over time to a server, so you can track your fitness.
Foursquare and Gowalla
are location scrobblers. It doesn't take a genius to predict that
other location based services will soon let you enter in your
Foursquare or Gowalla IDs to provide location based alerts /
recommendations on top of this scrobbled location data.
There are also calorie scrobblers and running scrobblers and web browsing scrobblers.
Obviously, the rise of smartphones is going to help the scrobbling
ecosystem greatly. The biggest weakness of the Last.FM scrobbler was
that it only scrobbles music you listen to on your computer, leaving
out what you listen to in the car, or on the go. Better phones, better apps, and
more bandwidth will help in this area.
My question is... what else can we scrobble? And when are we going to
have a scrobbling insert for my throat that tracks all the food and
drink that goes down there? I want a display, preferably overlaid on a
contact lens, that tells me the point of the day when my calories
consumed has surpassed my calories burned.
Mobile + Activity Sensors / Trackers + Scrobbling is going to make for some magical apps.
The
article was well written, compelling, and detailed a vision for the
production and search optimization of content on a scale that we hadn't
seen before. For me, the killer paragraph was this:
"Reese is a tall Texan who
serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who created the
idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s process. To
determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of
information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it
parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet
marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the
algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will
pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s
revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases
that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks
to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make
sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of
Google results. Finally, the algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts
spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,”
“Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”
This
isn't a PR puff piece. Any time a company starts talking about their
secret sauce, about the elements that make up their titling algorithm,
you slow down and take notice.
And then you ask the question "why?"
Why
would Demand Media document their playbook? Why would they risk
pissing off Google, the distribution arm of Demand Media? Why would
they risk giving potential competitors like AOL any more information
than what was publicly available?
Here's what I think happened.
In
order to make the Demand Media model work, you need a constant supply
of high quality inbound links. A steady supply of quality inbound
links drive Google crawlers deep into Demand Media properties' pages,
and reassure Google that these pages are worth indexing and ranking.
I think Demand Media made a conscious decision to trade a glimpse of its strategy for a barrage of inbound links. Any good linkdev person will tell you that PR can be a powerful source of inbound links, especially if you have a good story.
Up until this weekend, the plan was working beautifully. A quick search on Google Insights shows a spike in interest in the company right around the time of the Wired article.
However, the strategy may have worked TOO well. The big tech blogs such as TechCrunch and RWW
have not been content to post about how innovative the Demand Media
model is and leave it at that. Instead they have started worrying
about the rise of "Fast Food Content" and "Content Farms." VC Paul Kedrosky picked up the message and posted about how broken the tail of search was.
Search expert Danny Sullivan tweeted on the subject last night as well, saying (ominously):
"(I would) be more worried about content farms in google http://bit.ly/6dyezM if (I) didn't know public attention like getting now is a huge weed killer."
I
personally think that all the hand wringing about the generation of
cheap content explicitly created for tail search queries is overblown.
If Google is doing its job, this content will only rank of there is
nothing better out there.
But if I were Demand Media, I would
start getting a bit nervous about this second wave of press. Their
model won't work without Google's help, and the last thing Demand Media
needs is Google proactively moving to bury "fast food content."
Conventional wisdom tells us that the easier an action is, the more
people will do it. It's easier to write a blog than to publish a book,
so there are more bloggers than published authors. It's easier to tweet than to write a blog post, so there are now more tweets than blog posts per day. And of course, it's way easier to read than write, so there are far more lurkers than participants.
This helpful pyramid from Clara Shih
also reflects this behavior. In the typical online community, there
are more taggers / voters than commenters, and more commenters than
content producers. It's hard work to write a blog post or a review,
slightly less hard to comment on said post, and really not a big deal
to vote / like / or tag that review.
Current media darling Foursquare
is built around an action that is even simpler than commenting or
tagging - Checking in. On an iPhone, a Checkin is just a single tap of
the phone. If other patterns of UGC participation are any guide, a
community built around a single tap has a better chance of going
mainstream than a community built around a more in depth behavior like
writing an article.
But is there any value in the content created by a single tap of the
phone? On Foursquare, yes. My Checkin tells my friends where I am.
It tells the business that I am a customer. That Checkin gives the
(awesome) future me a historical list of the places I've been. And on
the aggregate, those Checkins tell Foursquare what places are hot at
any given time.
One little tap can carry a lot of data.
By now, if you're like me, you are probably thinking about how you can
let folks check in to your web service. And taking a quick look around
the social media landscape, there are plenty of Checkins to be found.
You can Checkin to a place: companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and the mysterious DoubleDutch are all over this.
You can Checkin to a piece of content on Facebook: try "liking" something in your newsfeed.
You can Checkin to a product: try clicking "I want this" on GDGT.
You can Checkin to a link: just click it.
And on and on.
Checkins are easy, fast, lightweight, and
most importantly, are a data point tied to a larger intention. For
Foursquare, a Checkin represents a person's connection with a local
business, their location, and probably an indication of a dollar
spent. For Facebook, a Checkin is a signal of the content preferences
of the "liker," a newsfeed story in its own right, and a gentle, hugely
important tap of encouragement for the content creator. For Google, a
Checkin is revenue, a signal of content quality, and on the aggregate,
a view of how the world surfs the web.
The dirty little secret
of User Generated Content has always been that a tiny percentage of the
population contributes most of the content.
Perhaps the proliferation of Checkin-like actions can begin to change this.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=223263a6-334e-4d14-847a-5b1d3be6384e)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3f08a385-009e-49a3-aed6-025c6f1fb5d9)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f10972a5-c27c-4004-90a6-c7112390ed71)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4eccb7e3-1c0e-4ef4-b554-23d219b6eb23)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a27d8491-c16d-4095-bbc6-a80afa6ed2fd)
