I appreciate the bravado, but they are not 100% accurate in saying that Google does not appeal to the corporate market.
Here are some things we have written in the past about this issue, using our office as an example.
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WatchMojo NewsletterI have been trying to come up with a term for what the Blogger Mojo is. Blogger Mojo is not anything like popular and successful blog networks Weblogs Inc., Gawker Media, and the dozens and dozens of other blog networks out there.
I am also definitely NOT saying that vested journalism is what Blogger Mojo is. I will explain what vested journalism is. Also, please note that at least judging by Google’s search result for the term, the term does not seem to exist (compared with a result for Citizen Journalism, for example, which does boast plenty of results). If you are reading this and I am wrong please let me know. Read on after image.
What Blogger Mojo is - and why it was launched - was as a result of many macro level trends, combined with personal interest:
- Elitism
My maniacal writing ambitions (wrote first book in a month and second book in a week, might write my third one in a day) with other very talented people’s ability to write a hell of a lot on topics that they are passionate about, but who don’t have the contacts, last name, nepotistic relationship, fame, or pedigree that most big name publishers look for in writers (that’s not a critique of the industry… it’s an opinion bordering on observation of facts: Jenna Jameson, The Pope, Bill Clinton, OJ Simpson anyone?). Each one of those authors penning a book is ridiculous for different reasons. Yes, I said that about Jenna Jameson and OJ (come on, have a sense of humor).
- Digital media revolution: 25/5 Reality
People spend 25% of their time online, yet advertisers spend 5% of their budgets online. The first component is at the first level of the “business plan” more important than the second in the sense that because people spend so much time online, they will be prone to consume, collect, gather, store and publish information ourselves (this is where Web 2.0, as much as we hate the term, comes from really; incidentally collect, gather and store are antonyms of consume).
- Citizen Journalism
I figure those who are tired from elitism and embrace the digital media revolution and spend 25% of their time online will welcome Blogger Mojo as a platform to write, talk, share.
And when you add these, then one day, indeed, a business can develop around all of the content, community etc. and capitalize on the fact that only 5% of marketing dollars are spent online even though 25% of our time is spent on the Web.
- Niche Vertical Categories
I also realized that I had to balance out what I liked with niche opportunities and vertical categories that advertisers wanted to associate themselves with. In other words, it can be a small interest, but just because someone is passionate about fleas does not mean that Blogger Mojo is the place to house it under. Of course, never say never.
- Synergy
Yes, we all hate that word, but it’s the best one to explain the next variable. The first product we launched was a domain specific vertical search engine, and that is why I thought the blog would be a good idea. One of my programmers said “we should launch blogs that match our search categories.” It was genius, because my problem was re-engineering human beings who were accustomed to simply entering a query into a search box and pressing enter instead of entering a keyword and clicking on a category (or choosing from a drop down menu).
People question my desite to simultaneously launch a search company with vertical search applications and a video search function, a blog network, a producer of original video content as well as a few database driven applications all at once. I tell them it’s not like I am opening a flower store. Each one of these units/divisions taps into the same core and adds velocity to the overall trajectory of our umbrella company.
- Bridging the Gap between Professionals and Consumers
Having worked for 5 years in online publishing and 1 year in the search industry, I saw many shortcomings that I wanted to rectify and address. One of the database driven projects, StreetMojo.com addresses that. But, it only addresses half of the problem of the target market: media professionals. So I thought of an additional tool to help that audience with the blogs. This adds a considerable differentiation point to our network of blogs. It’s a rather transparent thing, it’s not something we have pushed yet but probably should: it’s the ability to offer media professionals the abillity to disseminate their content and information to the most relevant target audience, quickly and accurately. We are combining the citizen journalism of BloggerMojo.com by adding a touch of media professional journalism. A publisher can submit their press release and get it out to an audience ASAP. This is pretty revolutionary, as most PR agencies have to submit information on behalf of their clients amidst a wave of other press releases. Over time, you can become a wire service, offering a free platform for media professionals. And, the information does not reside solely on the blog in question, but the network at large.
I hate using the terms user generated content, but that’s essentially what it is. I fully expect many more services to launch, and of course, I am sure many exist already and some have scaled.
- Bottom Line:
Everything is related: we strive to tap into the digital media revolution’s 25/5 opportunity by:
- Offering end-users quality content across a wide array of categories in a wide number of formats, or channels.
- Offering marketers every single format of advertising: search, video, listings, display, integration.
Categories include automotive, business, health, film, music, travel, etc;
Channels include content in the following formats: text, video, reference top 10 lists and blogs.
Ah yes, the blogs. Enter Blogger Mojo.
Blogs: Vested Journalism?
Nowadays, we’re always striving to seek the answer to what the blogosphere will look like in a few years, how blogs will fit in social and business settings and mainly, we seem to be uncomfortable with the level of conflicts of interest and vested interests we find amongst blogs.
Of course, given that there are some 60 million blogs according to Technorati… you cannot fool your audience, you need to come up with a good product for the audience to come, and more importantly, to return.
As our own admission illustrates, in journalism in general and the blogosphere in particular, there always seems to be a vested interest. As Venture Capitalist John Doerr once said: “no conflict, no interest.”
If that is the case, then maybe blogging represents Vested Journalism.
Any comments?
One of my contacts at Google with whom we work on WatchMojo.com with read my article on will Google be the World’s First Trillion Dollar Company and asked: “you don’t own Google?”
Assuming he meant the stock and not the company outright, here’s my answer:
No. When the IPO took place, my then boss - who also an investor in the stock market and had more experience that I in investing - talked me out of it. I was planning on buying 100 shares at $100 and put it aside, thinking it would be the next MSFT, Dell, CSCO, YHOO, AOL etc…But in the end fear overtook greed (one of the few times, mind you) and then the stock just took off. When it fell back to $340 in March of this year, I considered to buy it but by then I just made a decision to invest more in Mojo Supreme than start buying stocks aggressively. My rationale was I won’t be able to retire with Google but starting and successfully building a company, I could.
There are definitely a lot of people asking if we are experiencing an environment like 1999. Clearly, there are far more differences than similarities. But it’s interesting to see a VC say he is getting tired of some of the similarities, because VCs are driving the madness. There, I said it.
Before you accuse me of being jealous, here is the obligatory disclaimer and disclosure: our company breaks even, is growing revenues and is privately funded, but we’ve had talks with VCs from Day 1, partially because my last company had a successful exit and we operate in high growth areas. As well, it might be partially because of the 10 readers this blog gets, 3 of them are VCs…
They might not willingly know it or be acutely aware of it: but VCs have a lot of blame to shoulder.
Few entrepreneurs seem to be interested in building a company that can actually become cash flow profitable, because once it does, a real entrepreneur will not want to sell out too quickly. And, by default, few VCs care to finance them.
Apparently, everyone seems to have regrets about not selling their paper wealth so everyone wants a quick exit / liquidity event this time around.
Tell someone that you want to build an empire with an audience, brand equity and positive cash flow to one day do an IPO and the VC will head out the door. Don’t blame Sarbanes Oxley.
I hate to accuse an entire subset of the population, but I do blame VCs first and foremost (and before you once again accuse me of sour grapes, please re-read the disclaimer above), who want to back a feature or application that can catch fire, spread like wildfire and get acquired very quickly. We’ve seen it with things like MyBlogLog, Del.ico.us. I respect all of the people involved in those projects but I’ll be the first not to pretend to be a visionary: I do not see a real business spawning from either. Del.ico.us could have really grown but for many reasons, they decided to cash out. And good for them. They’re now a part of Yahoo! who “lacks” direction even though every advertiser (remember those, the people who pay you?) wants to work with them. Worst off? Yahoo! also bought Flickr (not a business, a product) and did not think of combining the two which would have become YouTube (tagging, media sharing)…
Disclaimer 2: I own shares of Yahoo!
Of course, few people would have anticipated Google to rise into a $150B company… but in fact many attempted: GoTo.com had the Pay Per Click model down, and the search company I worked for in 2000 even attempted to develop a contextual ad network but we realized that Google’s spiders would be able to better crawl a page and more accurately serve ads, so we did not want to invest in an area where Google could overnight scale faster. Yet, Google is the front runner to become a trillion dollar market cap company, is it? Read that here.
The point is: seeing it (having the vision) is half the challenge, being able to (execution) is the other half.
The catch is doing both requires patience, and that is something that we seem to have less off than we did in 1999. Back then, at least some people pretended to be in it for the long haul…
Oh oh. This guy says that established companies are losing the talent war (they’re not, they have plenty of talented people), these guys aren’t happy with being rich, they want to be “super rich.”
I don’t like throwing out cliches, but what’s that saying? Bulls and bears make money but hogs get slaughtered.
The NYT and Venture Beat should not be giving any coverage to such nonsense. What’s worse is that all of the people giving the quotes seem to be successful… they’re now being plain greedy and envious!
The worst part of it all is that the first guy argues that large companies lose the talent war; the second guy is complaining about YouTube - who sold to a large, established company; i.e. the large company won the talent war there pals. So, did the startup guys lose talent all of a sudden when they accepted the term sheet and cashed out?
There is a shortage of people with tact, class and common sense. That has nothing to do with small or large, startup or mature.
The only variable I think that might clearly delineate between small/large or young/established is how much chaos (structured or unstructured) you can put up with… and even there, that’s pushing it.
Oh oh. This guy says that established companies are losing the talent war (they’re not, they have plenty of talented people), these guys aren’t happy with being rich, they want to be “super rich.”
I don’t like throwing out cliches, but what’s that saying? Bulls and bears make money but hogs get slaughtered.
The NYT and Venture Beat should not be giving any coverage to such nonsense. What’s worse is that all of the people giving the quotes seem to be successful… they’re now being plain greedy and envious!
The worst part of it all is that the first guy argues that large companies lose the talent war; the second guy is complaining about YouTube - who sold to a large, established company; i.e. the large company won the talent war there pals. So, did the startup guys lose talent all of a sudden when they accepted the term sheet and cashed out?
There is a shortage of people with tact, class and common sense. That has nothing to do with small or large, startup or mature.
The only variable I think that might clearly delineate between small/large or young/established is how much chaos (structured or unstructured) you can put up with… and even there, that’s pushing it.
A backlinking bonanza?
3 more bloggers add their 2 cents and chyme in on 1 Brewing Blog War: Arrington vs. Denton vs. Calacanis.
- Naik
- Scoble
- Dave Winer
And just like with old media, the mainstream masses fall for it.
Denton bigs up Calacanis. Arrington gets jealous of the other two (even though he is supposedly sitting on top of the mountain), so he bashes both (who are both competitors of his).
Naik, Scoble and Winer continune the cycle of madness / exercise in insanity.
Mark Cuban calls it blogpiming and calls everyone on it.
Random blogger tells Cuban not to throw stones if he lives in a brick house and asks why we can’t make the pie bigger instead of swiping at one another morsel’s (all necessary disclosures are in these two posts).
Indeed, old media does not act this way, you can’t backlink in print.
All right, I have a call at 3:30pm. Back to work.
Images courtesy of this site.
Our most recent column on social bookmarking here. All former article on social bookmarking.
Earlier this month, they announced a partnership letting Google sell ads in their papers. This week, a bunch of others struck a deal essentially letting Yahoo! do the same, but also work together in technology and search areas. The second part is better news than the first.
You know what? I don’t get these wealthy owners of newspaper companies. Here are these very wealthy people who view themselves atop the social elite, who feel a sense of malaise over the macro trends around them, but who basically further permeate their sense of irrelevence by acting gun-shy when they need to be bold. I do not want to paint all newspaper owners and executive with one brush, I am admittedly making a general comment on the industry’s state and not trying to say that there are no bold, out of the box thinking, risk taking people there… but what is wrong with these people?
Read this and I will tell you what I would do if I were them, from MarketWatch:
At this rate, Internet advertising spending should reach $16 billion for 2006, which would eclipse last year’s record of $12.5 billion, the IAB believes.
The IAB report, prepared in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC, is yet another troubling sign for newspapers, radios, television and other traditional media. While the amount of Internet ad spending has grown, an IAB spokeswoman said it’s not the result of businesses increasing their marketing budgets. Rather, the report signifies a broad reallocation of traditional media advertising spending to the Internet.The IAB report is certainly welcome news for investors in Google Inc., the leading Internet search engine, No. 2 search engine Yahoo Inc., which have traditionally garnered a majority of all Internet advertising spending.But it also bodes well for second-tier Net advertising companies such as Aquantive Inc., ValueClick Inc. or 24/7 Real Media Inc., which are also benefiting from the increases, which have seen their share of the Internet advertising rise this year.The latest sign of the newspaper dilemma came last month, when Gannett Co. Inc., publisher of USA Today and scores of other newspapers, reported that its third-quarter advertising revenue was flat at $1.28 billion, but would have been down 1.2% if the company had owned the same group of newspapers 12 months ago.
Amazon.com bought Alexa ages ago. Because of Alexa’s methodology, it is notoriously unrepresentative of a website’s actual traffic. Om Malik talks about this a bit today, raising some good points, main one being “how can we take Amazon’s foray into outsourced IT services seriously” when it cannot maintain Alexa to be available all the time?
He also warns entrepreneurs not to rely too much on Alexa in sales pitches, which is an understatement. But, if you want to laugh, I was talking to a VC earlier this year, and hearing of how much we were growing, they were concerned why it was not reflecting on Alexa (at the time anyway). I could not help but chuckle, the cynic/pessimist in me figured it was their way of politely saying they were not interested, but they have maintained interest ever since… but the fact that they did seem to throw out Alexa this and Alexa that explained to me a lot of things about the misses in their portfolio. I won’t name them, they read this site, I like them and all, and yes, they know they are.
Finally, I still think Google should open up the Analytics stats to the public, overnight, it would be a hit. Read more on that here.
