Yesterday, when I was looking at our stats from Google Analytics, I noticed that Hulu send out a bunch of clicks to us. At first, it seemed odd. After all, in a given day, we’ll generate 100,000 to 200,000 streams off our total online distribution network, and not even YouTube (who accounts for 50% of our 50,000,000 all-time streams) will pop up in the top referrers. Yet Hulu, who doesn’t generate all that many streams, appeared in the Top 10?. What gives?
WatchMojo.com has so many partnerships, and I am bound to so many NDA’s, that every time I come close to writing about something a partner is doing, my lawyers rush in and toss my laptop out the window. But, something tells me the following won’t cause any issues. I hope. Hold on, phone’s ringing…
Ok, I’m back: was only the wife.
Anyway, Hulu is doing something very interesting as YouTube becomes the #2 leading search destination: it is tapping into partner’s RSS feeds (I can only assume) so that if someone searches for something a partner (like WatchMojo.com) hasn’t yet uploaded to Hulu’s servers, then it sends out the user to said partner’s site.
Huh? Come again?
Basically, search for How to tie a tie on Hulu. As you will see from this image below,
Whereas the Howdini search result will take you to an internal page on Hulu, the WatchMojo.com result clearly takes you outside, hence the “Watch at WATCHMOJO” display.
Now, since I have an NDA in place, I can see a few reasons why Hulu needs to do this… I can only presume that if this happens enough, then the overlords at Hulu will email us to say “hey, maybe you should upload this clip”.
But I also think that this positions Hulu as a “search” destination as well as a “viewing” destination, which in the long term help Hulu serve its purpose as a hedge against Google/YouTube.
This makes Hulu a very interesting proposition to media companies that have hitherto sat on the sidelines in the Hulu/YouTube war.
Hold on… phone’s ringing, think it’s the wife again.
Oh-oh, my lawyer’s on the line… gotta go.
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WatchMojo NewsletterAmazon is building a new HQ, reports KIRO TV (via Business Insider) and is targeting LEED-Silver green-building certification. What, on earth, is LEED certification? I had no clue, and couldn’t help but not fall asleep reading the Wikipedia entry, so I did a search in trying to find a video, and lo and behold, as is usually the case, I stumbled across one of our own videos on LEED, which was part of a three-part series on the whole green theme:
LinkedIn is a product that I initially disliked. But over time, I have made a 180-degree and think it is one of the more astute and useful ones around. I like to think the product has changed (improved) over time, as well. Regardless, I am sure Reid Hoffman deserves a lot of credit for that. Here are his rules for investing, I suggest entrepreneurs re-read these a few times. The funniest part of the article is when he adds “I’m not investing, though”.
1. How will you reach a massive audience?
In real estate the wisdom says “location, location, location.” In consumer Internet, think “distribution, distribution, distribution.” Thousands of products launch every month on hundreds of thousands of new Web pages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook’s University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.
2. What is your unique value proposition?
The Internet space is crowded. A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user. Many entrepreneurs create incremental improvements on existing products. This can be big – Google revolutionized search when AOL and Yahoo! were presumed to have it locked up – but more often, the pitch sounds like, “It’s a dating site, but for senior citizens…” I want to see innovation that is categorically distinct from existing propositions. Digg lets users decide which headlines are newsworthy. Last.fm tracks music listening with an iTunes plugin and buffer great music discovery. Flickr enables users to share and tag photos in new ways.
3. Will your business be capital efficient?
This may be the most important of the three. Even if you have a mass audience and unique value prop, a business fails without cash flow. An initial round of financing is important, but how reliable is later financing? Will investors see the right elements in the next stage? Your product must scale intelligently – this is why I like software. A well-coded site can adapt to mass demand without its capital expenditures scaling out of control. A product like TypePad can grow to 10 million users without half the growing pains of a service like WebVan, the Web 1.0 startup that attempted to deliver groceries to users’ doorsteps. Try reaching Facebook scale with a service like that.
With these three elements in place – mass audience, unique value, stable funding – a startup has time to discover where it can make money. Few business plans ever pan out like their owners intend. PayPal started as a plan to beam payments between Palm Pilots. Google raised funds with a vision to capitalize on enterprise search and ended up in advertising. The formula is to build an audience with a great product – then secure enough funding to figure out how to make it pay.
read more here. Mind you, a reader is quick to ask: “How do Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, FunnyOrDie, Ning, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati satisfy rule 3″? Hmm… good point, the man’s got a point.
The Spotrunner saga remains allegations, for now, but this does raise two main points:
1- Investors are suffering from such Google envy if they really think that everything in the burgeoning advertising ecosystem can be reduced to an algorithm-driven marketplace. That will never happen with TV.
2- There needs to be a market for founders to slowly cash out shares… though if what WPP alleges is true, I don’t think the Spotrunners founders should have benefited from. I mean, revenues of $10M on $111M of funding? Come on.
