GRPN
In-depth analysis and expert insight into the daily deal collective buying juggernaut.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…
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%,…
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…
Google Updates Google’s Q4 earnings disappointed investors—they had higher ad clicks and lower costs per click (for the first time in a while). It’s hard to understand exactly what happened here, but John Ebbert at Ad Exchanger has an interesting theory: Google may be funneling traffic to PPC advertisers whose cookies can be used by…
Is Online Advertising Just Good for Direct Response?
Seth Godin notes that easily-analyzed, numbers-driven direct response ads are the dominant form of online ads, which has some negative side effects. But a Vizu survey indicates that advertisers will spend more online dollars on branding than direct response in the coming year.
What gives? First, there’s sampling: Vizu…
Gowalla Update: Talent Acquisitions and Fiduciary Responsibility
Last week’s Gowalla acquisition illustrated another weird facet of talent acquisitions: the potential conflict that arises when a talent acquisition gives founders a good job, and investors a low payout. A Gowalla investor chimes in to say that, basically, he’s not upset enough to do…
How Search Engines Decide Whom to Trust
Bill Slawski does the usual patent deep-dive, evaluating how Google decides which writers to trust. As Google moves from domain trust to author trust, this will hurt the dwindling number of online media companies that rely on cheap, mass-produced content. (One surprising side effect: this will make…
It’s a little bit surprising that basically every mainstream critique of Groupon over the last few months was completely wrong.
Groupon was blasted for having an unsustainable, commoditized business. Their #3 competitor justlaid off most of its staff and engineered a quick sale to Gilt Groupe. Investors called Groupon’s accounting shaky because they highlighted…
Google Rolls Out Panda 2.5
SearchMetrics has the usual victim list. At this point, the results are pretty random. Google is probably identifying sitewide factors based on what predicts user behavior across all sites. Now that the obvious spammers have been hit, the traits Google identifies will be more superficially unrelated.
In other Google news,…
Digital Due Diligence Weekly