Posts by: Byrne Hobart
Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion. The most aggressive estimate is that Instagram has 13 employees, so this is likely a record. And, weirdly, Facebook bought just days after Instagram raised a round from some major investors.
Which is convenient, because it gives us a good way to benchmark the premium Facebook paid. Investors thought…
Automating the Herd Mentality
Investing social network Roboinvest now allows users to copy one another’s trades with a single click. They’ve prudently limited this to small dollar values, but it’s still a dangerous plan: market swings already tend to happen when investors overestimate the information content of others’ trades; letting them do this by default seems…
VCs as Lobbyists
One symptom of founders getting stronger relative to VCs is that VCs have been forced to expand their repertoire. YCombinator has an in-house designer, Sequoia has an in-house PR person, and of course many early-stage VCs are informal recruiters (in the sense that they find good employees for their hot startups, and…
A current YCombinator company founder who also participated in the summer 2009 session has compared and contrasted his experiences. The most sweeping change: valuations are far higher than they used to be: ” It’s weird to see entrepreneurs compare convertible note caps of 7, 8, 10 million dollars from this lens of low, medium and high….
The Daily Dot recently ran an interview with a Pinterest spammer, which they almost immediately retracted. The spammer’s technique is worth noting: he submitted pictures of products to Pinterest, and had them link to the product’s Amazon page with his affiliate account. Then he used bots to make his submissions appear marginally more popular, which would…
Facebook Updates Facebook now offers ads optimized for “Objectives” such as likes, installs, or ad clicks. That should bump up the low bids, raising the effective CPMs for their pages. It’s unclear how popular any of these options are, though. Zynga’s OMGPop purchase has raised their estimated Daily Average Users by about 25%,…
Contemporary cricitisms of Google revoles around the fact that they’re pursuing a monopoly. Google, of course, denies this—if they didn’t have to, PR departments wouldn’t be a cost center. But it’s clear that Google’s business will function better if they own as much data as possible about their users and users’ social connections. So, rather…
Which Sites Dominate Search Rankings?
SpyFu has some amazing stats on which sites most frequently show up in top Google rankings. The usual suspects are well-represented: Amazon owns product searches, Wikipedia owns proper nouns, and a smattering of other obvious sites own various common query categories. Interestingly, Amazon is trending upwards: whether this is due to…
Why do Car Comparison Sites Have So Much Pricing Power?
Digiday notes that car comparison sites are price setters, unlike nearly everyone else in the online ad world. This seems counterintuitive, especially since it doesn’t apply to sites one level downstream (e.g. eBay Motors) or one level upstream (like auto blogs).
Turntable.fm Signs Record Deals…
Google has announced or leaked a few moves this week. And they’re uniformly shifting traffic away from organic results, and towards pay-per-click ads, cost-per-action ads, or Google properties. The major moves:
The WSJ reports that Google is moving closer to semantic search rather than merely delivering a list of relevant sites. As Business Insider notes, that’s been Bing’s line…
Digital Due Diligence Weekly