MetaMuse

Deep Powder at Crystal Mountain

On Friday after Thanksgiving I had THE best day of skiing at Crystal Mountain I've ever had. I don't normally frequent Crystal because I've just not had good days there before. I know it's a good mountain, with great terrain, and the High Campbell chair takes you to some killer steeps, but I just haven't had good luck there before. Well we hit some incredible powder -- they had had 24" of fresh in the past 24 hours, and something like 50" that week. Went with Justin, Tom and Doug and we were hitting thigh deep powder all day! The evidence is in the pictures (courtesy of Justin), which shows me busting thru (above right), and Tom to the left.

Six Biggest New Ideas in Chat?

Nick at TechCrunch took a break from Thanksgiving to post his Six Biggest New Ideas in Chat, which mentioned Others Online. He kinda doesn't explain Others Online all *that* well, but I'm quite positive I'm just being nit-picky. An interesting post, if you like that sorta thing.

Interesting StumbleUpon Info

I've taken a couple looks at StumbleUpon in the past and concluded that it's basically validation that:

• there are a lot of bored people on the Web,
• people really do download/use toolbars voluntarily,
• "Stumbling onto" new sites is merely a novelty to address that boredom, not something of value from a "search" perspsective.

A recent TechCrunch article invites some interesting discussion that validates this. Yes, SU really does drive pageviews to sites which (presumably) don't get a lot of pageviews already, relatively speaking. But apparently the traffic is not real valuable to the publishers. Several of the commenters speak of significantly reduced levels of conversion for those SU "stumblers", and the fact that they simply stumble to the page then leave the site again.

Certainly users wouldn't just skim from site to site if those sites were very relevant to their objective. I suspect the value of SU, and their objective, is just that -- to surf from start page to start page. Like Web channel surfing. Apparently 1.5M people are doing it!

I'm not dissing SU, mind you. I just find the behavior of its users very interesting.

Stats on Major Web Properties

I took the data from Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 conference presentation (see previous post) and figured out eCPM and (on a monthly basis) revenue, pageviews and time spent per user. Really really interesting stuff.

		--- Per User Month ----
Property	eCPM	Revenue	PVs	Hours
Google	$ 10.70	$     1.02	95.6	0.8
Yahoo	$   2.34	$     0.72	307.4	5.5
Microsoft	$   1.73	$     0.27	156.8	3.1
Time Warner	$   0.90	$     0.14	149.7	5.0
MySpace	$   0.18	$     0.11	626.5	3.4
eBay	$   0.20	$     0.03	138.9	1.4

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0

Some interesting takeaways from Mary Meeker's presentation at the Web 2.0 conference:

• Growth in online advertising, from $7B in 2001 to $16B in 2006, has been almost entirely driven by search advertising (keyword-based ad buys), which has seen an 88% CAGR.
• 32% of north americans have residential broadband.
• Internet ad spend will only increase. Internet ad spend per household is still only $217, compared to $980 for newspapers, $576 for direct mail and $980 for telemarketing.
• Google sees 31% of US online ad revenue; Yahoo sees 27%.
• Google makes roughly $12.28 in annual ad revenue from each US user. Yahoo $8.65, Microsoft $3.25, Time Warner $1.62, MySpace $1.32 and eBay $.33.

Interesting Stats on Bloggers

I've been spending a little time looking at the blogosphere as a market, through reports such as Pew's July 2006 Bloggers Report and all kinds of fragmented (but corroborative) other sites.

The big takeaway for me is this: people blog to be heard, and to share with anyone who cares -- but it AIN'T happening. Even if they post frequently, many blogs are nothing but a needle in the haystack. They are not reaching the people they want to, which IMHO is a big reason 50% of blogs are abandoned after 3 months.

According to Pew, 48% of bloggers do so for an audience (32% blog *mostly* for an audience). The majority of bloggers cite an interest expressing their creativity in sharing stories, practical knowledge and experiences.

Question: How do bloggers get people to come to their blog? Answer: Leave comments on others' blogs and hope people click on your hyperlink, or simply ask for (or somehow earn) a link from others' blogs.  (There are other ways of course, but contribution and linking is the most obvious and controllable.)

Well get this ... only 5% of bloggers leave comments on ANY other blogs, even though 87% of blogs allow comments. And as for the existance of links, only 2.7% of blogs have 3 or more links to it from other blogs. That is so meager, and of course because no one links to your blog, there's no way in hell any of the search engines are going to rank your content high and point users to your blog.

But online users WANT to see all these invisible blogs!  For every 1 person on the Internet that keeps a blog, there are 5 people reading blogs, which (ok, roughly) implies that the demand for blog content exceeds the supply by 5x.

There's a big market opportunity here! People are blogging to be heard, but most of them aren't even a smal blip on the radar. Readers are out there demanding the personal stories, opinions, knowledge and experiences, but can't find the content because of search engine indexing algorithms. So there is a ton of interesting content out there that isn't reaching the people who are looking for it.

State of the Blogosphere

I never fail to check out David Sifry's State of the Blogosphere reports, and his October 2006 report was no exception. Some key takeaways:

• Today the blogosphere is roughly doubling in size every 230 days. Technorati is now tracking more than 57M blogs.
• About 100K new blogs are created every day.
• New posts per day has leveled off this year -- still about 1.3M posts per day. So wait, the blogosphere has doubled in the past 230 days but the number of daily posts has remained level?
• I love this one -- only 2.7% of all blogs have 3 or more distinct blogs which link to it over the past 6 months. 

Virility Model

While this isn't ground-breaking and more just common sense, I like how this Web 2.0 Virility Model post lays it out in a very clear understandable way. Distribution is obviously critical, so clearly any way to easily distribute  is going to be beneficial.

UPDATE (12/26/06): The above link wasn't working for me, so I thought I'd quickly summarize the model. Think in terms of an X and Y axis, each crossing in the middle. The X axis represents source of content -- the left side is 3rd party generated content and the right is user-generated content. The Y axis represents distributability of content, or how it's shared -- the top is "embeddable" content and the bottom is "retrieved" content.

The optimal place on the model is the upper right quadrant. User-generated content is more viril because the user is more vested in its creation and promotion. Embedded content means any user can re-use or repurpose the content within their own sites, without having to link to it.